‘So, he was your grandfather?’ said Archie, after the tale had been told, the moon had passed behind clouds, and he had been suitably impressed. ‘Your real, blood grandfather?’
‘Great-grandfather.’
‘Well, that is something. Do you know: I remember it from school – I do – History of the Colonies, Mr Juggs. Bald, bug-eyed, nasty old duffer – Mr Juggs, I mean, not your grandfather. Got the message through, though, even if it took a ruler to the back of your hand… You know, you still hear people in the regiments calling each other Pandies, you know, if the bloke’s a bit of a rebel… I never thought where it came from… Pande was the rebel, didn’t like the English, shot the first bullet of the Mutiny. I remember it now, clear as a bell. And that was your grandfather!’
‘Great-grandfather.’
‘Well, well. That’s something, isn’t it?’ said Archie, placing his hands behind his head and lying back to look at the stars. ‘To have a bit of history in your blood like that. Motivates you, I’d imagine. I’m a Jones, you see. ’Slike a “Smith”. We’re nobody… My father used to say: “We’re the chaff, boy, we’re the chaff.” Not that I’ve ever been much bothered, mind. Proud all the same, you know. Good honest English stock. But in your family you had a hero!’
Samad puffed up with pride. ‘Yes, Archibald, that is exactly the word. Naturally, you will get these petty English academics trying to discredit him, because they cannot bear to give an Indian his due. But he was a hero and every act I have undertaken in this war has been in the shadow of his example.’
‘That’s true, you know,’ said Archie thoughtfully. ‘They don’t speak well about Indians back home; they certainly wouldn’t like it if you said an Indian was a hero… everybody would look at you a bit funny.’
Suddenly Samad grabbed his hand. It was hot, almost fevered, Archie thought. He’d never had another man grab his hand; his first instinct was to move or punch him or something, but then he reconsidered because Indians were emotional, weren’t they? All that spicy food and that.
‘Please. Do me this one, great favour, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home – if you, if we, get back to our respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your judgement. If you are told “they are all this” or “they do this” or “their opinions are these”, withhold your judgement until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call “India” goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.’
Samad released his hand and rummaged in his pocket, dabbing his finger into a repository of white dust he kept in there, slipping it discreetly into his mouth. He leant against the wall and drew his fingertips along the stone. It was a tiny missionary church, converted into a hospital and then abandoned after two months when the sound of shells began to shake the windowsills. Samad and Archie had taken to sleeping there because of the thin mattresses and the large airy windows. Samad had taken an interest too (due to loneliness, he told himself; due to melancholy) in the powdered morphine to be found in stray storage cabinets throughout the building; hidden eggs on an addictive Easter trail. Whenever Archie went to piss or to try the radio once more, Samad roved up and down his little church, looting cabinet after cabinet, like a sinner moving from confessional to confessional. Then, having found his little bottle of sin, he would take the opportunity to rub a little into his gums or smoke a little in his pipe, and then lay back on the cool terracotta floor, looking up into the exquisite curve of the church dome. It was covered in words, this church. Words left three hundred years earlier by dissenters, unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic, locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die in there – but not before they covered every wall with letters to family, poems, statements of eternal disobedience. Samad liked the story well enough when he first heard it, but it only truly struck him when the morphine hit. Then every nerve in his body would be alive, and the information, all the information contained in the universe, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire. Then his head would open out like a deckchair. And he would sit in it a while and watch his world go by. Tonight, after just more than enough, Samad felt particularly lucid. Like his tongue was buttered and like the world was a polished marble egg. And he felt a kinship with the dead dissenters, they were Pande’s brothers – every rebel, it seemed to Samad tonight, was his brother – he wished he could speak with them about the mark they made on the world. Had it been enough? When death came, was it really enough? Were they satisfied with the thousand words they left behind?
‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ said Archie, following Samad’s eyes and catching the church dome’s reflection in them. ‘If I’d only had a few hours left, I wouldn’t have spent it painting pictures on the ceiling.’
‘Tell me,’ inquired Samad, irritated to have been dragged from his pleasant contemplation, ‘what great challenge would you undertake in the hours before your death? Unravel Fermat’s Theorem, perhaps? Master Aristotelian philosophy?’
‘What? Who? No… I’d – you know… make love – to a lady,’ said Archie, whose inexperience made him prudish. ‘You know… for the last time.’
Samad broke into a laugh. ‘For the first time, is more likely.’
‘Oh, go on, I’m serious.’
‘All right. And if there were no “ladies” in the vicinity?’
‘Well, you can always,’ and here Archie went a pillar-box red, this being his own version of cementing a friendship, ‘slap the salami, as the GIs say!’
‘Slap,’ repeated Samad contemptuously, ‘the salami… and that is it, is it? The last thing you would wish to do before you shuffled off this mortal coil is “slap your salami”. Achieve orgasm.’
Archie, who came from Brighton, where nobody ever, ever said words like orgasm, began to convulse with hysterical embarrassment.
‘Who is funny? Something is funny?’ asked Samad, lighting a fag distractedly despite the heat, his mind carried elsewhere by the morphine.
‘Nobody,’ began Archie haltingly, ‘nothing.’
‘Can’t you see it, Jones? Can’t you see…’ Samad lay half in, half out of the doorway, his arms stretched up to the ceiling, ‘… the intention? They weren’t slapping their salamis – spreading the white stuff – they were looking for something a little more permanent.’
‘I can’t see the difference, frankly,’ said Archie. ‘When you’re dead, you’re dead.’
‘Oh no, Archibald, no,’ whispered Samad, melancholic. ‘You don’t believe that. You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence, Archibald,’ he said, gesturing to the church walls. ‘They knew it. My great-grandfather knew it. Some day our children will know it.’
‘Our children!’ sniggered Archie, simply amused. The possibility of offspring seemed so distant.
‘Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.’