The Folded Earth: A Novel (11 page)

Veer fiddled with the projector, and a new picture flickered on the wall, turning it gray and white and very cold. My eyes, half-shut with daydreaming, snapped open. The slide showed a woman looking up into a camera pointed at her from above. She was bent under the weight of her rucksack and her face was etched with pain. Snow had settled like white trim on the purple of her anorak’s hood. The snow-covered slope she was climbing fell behind her into gray-green water half covered with splintered sheets of ice. Flakes of snow were sprinkled all over the photograph. Icy slopes rose out of the water on the far bank.

Veer was saying, “It was freezing and windy that day. This woman almost slipped and fell into the water just after I took this photograph. She was already feeling ill and the altitude made her worse. It’s over sixteen thousand feet. People can start bleeding from the nose. Their skin might peel off. They get terrible headaches and frostbite. My ear and missing finger—that’s from frostbite. Frostbite means your blood has frozen—literally.”

Every head in the room swiveled toward Veer as if they had not noticed his deformed ear and missing finger all these days. He changed the slide to turn them back to the wall.

I did not stop Veer to ask him the name of the place. I did not need to. I knew it was Roopkund. That was the water beside which Michael had frozen to his death. I scoured the pictures that snapped onto the wall one by one. A different angle each time: close-ups, long shots. Water and ice, ice and water. Lead-colored sky. Sheer sides of brown rock and white snow rising from sheets of ice. I examined every inch with frantic concentration in the seconds before one picture made way for another. I had never seen Michael’s dead body. His death felt more a disappearance, still unreal, leaving behind a smoke-like vestige of hope. He was there on those slopes. He had to be. I waited for Michael’s blue and red-hooded jacket to appear. Then he would step away from the wall and into the room.

Long ago, when I was a little girl, I used to believe that radios contained people. No more than a few inches tall, but in every way human, those people were forever imprisoned within the big brown and black radio that stood on my father’s desk. It had a large dial, and round, serrated knobs for switches. When it was turned on, the panel inscribed with frequencies glowed with a yellow light that made the radio look like a little house. If someone took it apart, the singers on
Binaca Geet Mala
would step out onto the table and talk to me.

I felt icy winds curl around my fingertips, my toes, my face, even my heart. I was trembling. I thought I would cry out in pain and fear. I buried my face in my shawl and stopped my ears under it. My throat had wound itself into a tight knot.

“What is that, is it a waterfall?” someone in the room, who still had a voice, asked. Someone else said, “See how the falling water has frozen!” I inched out of my shawl again. The scene had changed to a herd of white sheep on a meadow enameled with flowers. Veer muttered, “Wrong sequence,” and then there was another stretch of water on the wall, a glassy expanse that reflected the sides of the gorge within which it flowed away into the horizon. At the banks were the frilly white edges of waves frozen in mid-surge. Charu went excitably to the wall to get a closer look and everybody shouted to her to get out of the way as the immense shadow of her head, caught in the projector’s beam, obscured the ice-sheeted river and its frozen waves.

Something snapped into place in my head. Roopkund was not a river. Roopkund was a lake. Lakes did not have waves. Lakes did not flow. I found my voice at last and said to Veer, “This sequence of pictures, it’s not—it’s not Roopkund, is it?”

“You obviously haven’t heard a word of my long-winded commentary. Why do I bother? It’s the Zanskar River. In Kashmir. Why would you think
it’s Roopkund? That’s a lake, not a river.” He closed a box with an irritable snap.

The spell was broken; people began to stir. Beena and Mitu scrambled up. They were to leave early the next morning for Varanasi to start a new life at a convent. Diwan Sahib waved them toward him and placed rolls of money in their hands and closed their fists. He patted their heads when they dived downward to touch his feet. “Enough, go now, go,” he said. “Himmat Singh, refill my glass. From the new bottle Veer Sahib brought from Delhi.” The clerk scurried after Himmat into the kitchen in the hope of a stolen drink.

Ama stood up with an abrupt push of her chair. “Traveling is all very well,” she said. “But it’s for people with money to burn and nothing better to do but eat, drink, and idle. Why go walking up and down hills for pleasure? We do that every day for work. Charu, come on, we have to go. Puran will have set fire to the cowshed by now.”

*  *  *

That night, after dinner, Veer collected his flashlight and stick to walk me to my cottage. At the front door we saw that the light outside the veranda was falling in a shower of tiny golden drops. He went back in to find his umbrella, big enough for two in that kind of rain. My cottage was not far—maybe five hundred yards—but the slope was thick with trees, and leopards sometimes lay in wait for stray dogs or forgotten goats; it was not wise for me to walk down alone so late in the evening, he said.

We walked slower, I knew, than we needed to. By the time we reached my door, the drizzle had stopped and every night scent was deeper and muskier in the dampness. We stood outside, chatting of this and that in voices softer than usual. Apart from a faint television noise from the postman’s house and a pressure cooker that hissed once every other minute, there was hardly a sound. Above our heads the huge ivory trumpets of datura glowed like dimmed lamps in the starlight. We were swathed in their heavy scent; the flowers were so low that they brushed my face. Veer touched one of the flowers, then looked at me and said, “So beautiful.”

I felt something leap inside me. “And deadly,” I said. “Just like those pretty foxgloves. Never go by appearances.”

I could not see his face clearly in the starlight alone, but he seemed to frown and turn away. He switched his flashlight on again, as if he were about to leave.

“It’s what Diwan Sahib says: we saw valleys covered in foxgloves when we went for walks before,” I said, not ready to confront my empty house yet. “I wanted to pick them because they were so pretty, and he told me how poisonous the prettiest plants and mushrooms in the hills can be.”

Not far from Ranikhet, Diwan Sahib had said, during one of those long walks he and I went on in my first two years, a woman and her child were poisoned by wild mushrooms cooked at home. They ate the mushrooms around a table with five others. Nobody could later remember which of them had eaten the dish with the mushrooms, and which had not. That night, the child’s face turned blue and he began to shiver and vomit. When it was almost dawn, he had a shuddering fit, his muscles relaxed, and he stopped breathing. The mother became bloated as if she had been dredged out days after drowning. She would have exploded if pricked with a pin. They lived in a remote hamlet, and the roads connecting it to the world had been washed away in monsoon rain. No hospital could be reached, though she lived three days more.

Why was nobody else at the table poisoned by those mushrooms? Diwan Sahib said it reminded him of a curious, very old man at the Nawab of Surajgarh’s court, who had been there since the Nawab’s father’s time, and who wore brown clothes and a green pugree and had a face as cavernous as a starving man’s. He walked long hours in the forest and came back with cloth bags full of plants that he disappeared with into his laboratory, which was a quack’s den filled with glass flasks and Bunsen burners and test tubes and vernier cal
ipers, and where, in the instant when the door opened a crack as he slid in, the smells that trickled out were of a kind that existed only in hallucinations and nightmares, so that when he shut the door you wondered if you had imagined them. It was rumored that he manufactured poisons in that den, and the rumor was strengthened by the inexplicable decline or death from time to time of people at the court who had fallen foul of the Nawab. The Nawab had claimed that the man made medicine, Diwan Sahib said, but the line between medicines and poisons is finely drawn, and this very foxglove, so poisonous and so beautiful, in the correct quantity, produced digitalis, which was medicine for troubles of the heart. “Not devastated hearts,” he had said, laughing, “like yours or mine, Maya, for that there is no medicine but death, which too the foxglove can provide.”

By now, despite the chill of the spring night, we were sitting on the steps that led to my front door, inches apart. I could feel the warmth o
f
Veer all along my legs. Twice, by accident, our shoulders touched, and he did not move away. The scops owl began its low, periodic call, a sound so muted that it emphasized how quiet the hillside had fallen. The pressure cooker had stopped hissing. The clerk’s television had been put to sleep. I saw a curtain flutter at Charu’s house. It was sure to be Ama, eavesdropping. “It’s late,” I said, getting up. “I have been talking on and on. You should go.” The clerk too could see us from his cottage. They would exchange notes tomorrow, while grazing the cows or filling water. “That Teacher-ni . . . ,” Ama would say, before she began embroidering her tale.

Veer saw me looking at Ama’s windows. “Yes, it’s late, and the Ranikhet town crier is busy collecting material.” He got up as well and, to my surprise, put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a quick hug. His chin briefly came down and rested in my hair. And then he was gone, the beam from his flashlight flickering and leaping like a large firefly as he walked away. A few nights before, when he and I had been walking downhill just as we had today, we had seen five dancing fireflies a few feet away and stopped, flashlight switched off, and for a time that was both as long as eternity and as short as a second, we had stood gazing at the tiny globules of light racing each other, being snuffed out by bushes, then appearing again.

I wrapped my shawl tighter and strolled around my house, brushing past geranium leaves that unloosed clouds of lemony perfume. I thought back to the morning that Michael had left on his last journey. I had gone with him to the station to see him off and we stood on the platform, our hips touching, our shoulders touching, as long as he dared, until departure was announced and the chaos of people on the platform emptied into waving arms, and the train began pulling out. I said, “Go, go, you’ll miss it!” He held me close for an instant, kissed the top of my head, then loped off into the train. That was the last time I saw him, and the last time any man had touched me—until this evening.

The humps of hills all around the spur on which I stood were shadows. After a while, the lights at Ama’s and at the clerk’s went off. In the absolute darkness the sky felt larger, the stars came down, the trees grew blacker. The lopsided half moon was trapped in a cage of branches. Now that I was alone again, a corner of the terror I had felt during the slideshow edged its way back. That woman’s pain-filled face, the ice, the green water—it was not Roopkund, it was a river in Kashmir, but how different could Roopkund be? I felt a shiver go down the back of my neck from some fear I could not define. I was reminded of the way Corbett said he sensed the presence of a man-eating tiger even if he had not seen one: “I felt I was in danger,” he wrote, “and that the danger that threatened me was on the rock in front of me. The fact that I had seen no movement did not in any way reassure me—the man-eater was on the rock, of that I was sure.” I had typed three of Diwan Sahib’s drafts in which those lines appeared and they were engraved on my mind. Corbett’s words had never felt so palpable. Now I understood what he meant, and the apprehension was all the more powerful for being illogical.

I looked up at the stretching limbs of the deodars. The trees were vastly high. Only eagles reached their very top and they told nobody what they saw from there. Each fringed branch was almost large enough to be a tree on its own. For a dizzy moment, it felt as if I were the one human left alive, glued by gravity alone to the edge of a spinning globe, only just keeping myself from being flung off.

fourteen

That night, I had a vivid dream in which skulls rolled down white slopes and fell into pools of green water. I saw a woman hooded in an anorak, clawing her way up a snow slope. Someone was photographing her as she struggled, saying, “Smile, say cheese?” The voice was Veer’s. Then the woman’s face turned into Michael’s and suddenly he was falling, toppling over the edge of the slope, and as he fell through the white space toward the water, I felt myself falling too, flailing, unmoored, weightless, helpless, until I woke up sweating under my blankets.

It was long past the time for the army bugles. The sun was blazing through the window. It was a holiday. I could hear children playing and the clerk’s boom box pumping out music with a bass beat that resounded across the hillside. Ama’s side of a conversation was taking place in shouts just below my window. Someone had wound barbed wire around my head and set fire to it. I staggered down to the kitchen to make myself coffee. How much rum had I drunk the night before? One at Diwan Sahib’s. And did I have one, or was it two, after Veer left?

I sat at the dining table with my coffee and a painkiller, and noticed a familiar piece of paper on it, weighed down with a jam jar: Diwan Sahib’s electricity bill. He had asked me to deal with it—that was a week ago, and now it was late, so there would be a fine. How much? I looked at the bill—an extra thirty rupees. It was not a lot, and I missed the due date almost every month. But today it made me feel as if someone had just tightened that wire round my head. I covered my aching eyes with my palms and felt them dampen with tears. I was always in trouble with Miss Wilson, my students failed their exams, my house was a mess of old and useless things because I could not bring myself to throw anything away, every month I paid late fines out of my tiny salary because I put things off. The two people most precious to me, my mother and Michael, were dead, and my father was growing old alone in that vast, echoing house in Hyderabad while I was alone in mine, thousands of miles away. Yet he and I, equally implacable, could not find a way back to each other. I put my head on the table and broke into sobs.

After a while I picked my head up, swallowed my mud-cold coffee, and decided I would visit Michael’s grave. If I went to his grave and talked to him I would calm down and the knot in my throat, which had come to live there since the evening before, would dissolve. I would pay that overdue bill on the way.

I walked down to the electricity office by various shortcuts past the backs of people’s houses. Past Tiwari, the plumber, who raised his hands in a namaste; past three lumbering olive-green army trucks, each one as big as my bedroom; past the sign that said “Military Area, You May be Questioned”; past the soldiers who stood at attention all day at the gates of the officers’ mess; past Mr. Qureshi, who rolled down his car’s window and told me a long story about how he was driving around house-hunting for relatives who had been given an eviction notice. “It is impossible, there’s not even a tin shed to be found, Maya. You’d find gold hidden under a tree in Ranikhet more easily than a place to live in.” I tried to hurry away from Pande, the hobbling old advocate, but he stopped me and said with a worried look, “Where to, Maya Mam, where to? Tell me, did you know there is a London in Canada also? Do you think that somewhere else in the world there is another Ranikhet? What is real in this world, Mam, can you tell me? Till last week I thought Timbuctoo was not a real place. Then my grandson—he is only seven, you know, and this little one already knows much more than me!—he says, ‘No, Dadaji, it’s a city in China!’ Child is the grandfather of man, I feel it truer every day.”

By the time I had paid the bill, reached the low wall that crumbled around the graveyard, and walked under the stone archway toward Michael, my headache had turned into hammer blows. I reached the grave in a mist of pain, hardly able to open my eyes or see straight. I thought I had walked by mistake to the wrong grave and began to stumble away, when I stopped and looked at the headstone again. It was the right one, of course—low, dark, square, inscribed with Michael’s name, and the words “ever after”—a modest stone with no decoration. At this moment, it had one broken bottle on it and another empty bottle propped against it. Shattered glass lay all around the grave. The day lilies I had planted had been dug out and thrown aside, their long leaves wilted, their light-starved tubers helpless under the sun. Some of the plants had buds on them, some had shriveled flowers.

The day I buried that tin of ashes there and planted the bulbs, I had had nobody for company but Miss Wilson. She had not thought it worthwhile to summon the church gravediggers for my small tin, so she had stood by, reading aloud from her Bible, her dull voice reducing the beautiful words to monotonous rubble as I dug with a kutala, an implement whose curved blade I was then unused to. It had been a cold day, with a clammy, gray wind that swept through the pines around the cemetery
.
The earth was frost-hardened. Nearby was a nettle bush that set my skin on fire if I brushed against it. Miss
Wilson interrupted her reading occasionally to say, “Deeper, deeper. At least three feet.” Her double chins wobbled, and the large mole under her right eye, which sprouted hair, seemed to twitch. She sucked on her buckteeth, making a kissing sound as she read. Though I knew she was there out of compassion and was trying to help, I felt a concentration of hatred for her such as I had not felt before for anyone. The burial had taken more than an hour—she had noted the time on the round gold watch she wore on her right wrist. It had belonged to her maternal grandfather from Kozhikode, she told me that morning; he was once the collector and this was his retirement present. At intervals she said, “It is eleven. This watch has never been wrong in
six-tee
years. You have taken half an hour already. We should have brought the gardener with us after all. I thought you’d be able to dig a simple hole. I would do it faster.” But she did not once offer to take over the digging.

In a heart-stopping flash the thought crossed my mind that the tin with Michael’s ashes had been dug out and flung away as the lilies had been. It must have rusted by now, or disintegrated altogether. What if vandals had thrown it down the valley? I went this way and that in a panic, looking for the tin, then decided I was being irrational, that the tin must still be where I had put it: three feet down, as Miss Wilson had insisted. The vandals had not dug so deep, I could see that. I began to gather the lily bulbs from all around the grave to replant them.

*  *  *

On my way back from the graveyard, when I reached Mall Road, I saw Mr. Chauhan standing at the fork of the road leading down toward the Light House. I was tired and aching; my clothes were filthy and my fingernails black and split from returning the lily bulbs to their places with my bare hands. Mr. Chauhan did not seem to notice my disheveled condition. He was studying one of his signs, which said, “Don’t Drive Rash, You Will Crash.” The yellow paint still glistened wetly on the dark rock face. He swayed back on his heels and tilted his head for a different view, caressing his thin mustache with a smile of satisfaction. I had not noticed the purple birthmark by his ear before. It was shaped like Australia.

When he saw me, he smiled. “Ah, Mam, as you see, I’m doing what I can for our town. I think it has potential, but nobody has known how to tap it. This could be a great tourist destination. I am going to beautify it from top to bottom before the Regimental Reunion in November.”

“What needs beautifying is the graveyard,” I said. “Have you ever been there?” I knew I sounded short, but could not help my tone.

“These signs, you see,” Mr. Chauhan went on, as if I had not spoken. “Daily you will pass them, without thinking you will read them, and slowly—what will happen?” He smiled in triumph. “They will start altering your mind. You will begin to think differently. I don’t mean you, of course, you are a good citizen. I mean all these . . .” He waved an arm over all the landscape. “All these wretched villagers, their dirty children . . . they have to learn.” The grass along the side of the road was strewn with plastic cups, beedi wrappers, and deflated foil packets that had once contained fries and gutka. He poked at the rubbish with a stick and said, “No civic sense, I tell you, none. This road was swept only last week.” Then he spotted Charu at a distance, slapping the rump of a cow to make it move. Instead it raised its tail and let out great dollops of dung that steamed in the cool air.

“That is
exactly
what I mean,” Mr. Chauhan said. “Disgusting, disgusting! Is this what an army cantonment should be filled with? Dung?”

Charu threw us a guilty look over her shoulder, as if she had overheard Mr. Chauhan, and harried her animals to make them go down the hillside, out of sight. She gave me a quick, apologetic smile as she passed us and tugged at Bijli’s collar to make him follow her. He had other plans.

“I went to the graveyard,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice. “And not only was my husband’s grave vandalized, I saw that the wings of the angels on one of the colonial graves have been broken—smashed deliberately. Many of the graves had garbage on them. The wall around the graveyard is broken.”

Mr. Chauhan said, “Do you know what I think the real problem of the Indian state is?” He paused for effect. “We are too soft, far too soft on everything. Just as we are with terrorists. They keep dropping bombs here and there and what do we do about it? Nothing. And here? Same thing, different situation. All antisocials. These cows, dumping dung, is anyone able to stop them?”

He was startled into silence by a voice exclaiming in a foreign accent, “Oh
look
! Another foraging party!” We had not noticed the bearded man who had stationed himself on the grassy slope below, with binoculars round his neck. He was pointing them skyward at a flock of passing birds. A backpacked woman stood next to him, staring up through an identical pair of binoculars.

Mr. Chauhan lowered his voice to a hiss. “What sort of impression does the tourist get of Ranikhet when he arrives expecting a neat and clean army town and sees all this garbage? In foreign countries I have heard people have to pick up even their dog’s . . . waste from roads.”

“Mr. Chauhan, I am trying to tell you something,” I said. “A genuine problem.”

Maybe I was shouting, because he said in a soft, dangerous voice, “I heard you, madam, please do not raise your voice. People throw rubbish everywhere, it is a big problem in Ranikhet, not only Ranikhet, all of India. I have seen it in Lucknow, Bareilly, Dehra Dun—wherever I have been posted. Foreigners rightly remark that India is a country ruined by us Indians. We requisition trash cans, but nobody uses them. As for the old graves, and angels’ wings, even stone has a lifespan, and these are two hundred years old. And your late husband’s grave? I will send someone to check. We will look into it. We have correct procedures for everything.”

I was about to retort with something acid when a pleased expression spread over his face. The army band had just struck up. The first notes of brass music were rolling over the hills. Sounds of instruments being tuned reached our ears. A baritone voice joined them, with a line from a sentimental Hindi film song.
“Ek akela is shahar mein, raat mein aur dopahar mein,”
the voice warbled mournfully. “Alone in this city, all alone, at night and through the afternoon.”

Mr. Chauhan stood with his eyes closed in pleasure until the song was interrupted by the General’s barks. The General rounded the bend, thwacking Bozo with his Naga spear in an effort to stop the dog from tugging at his leash to get at Bijli, who was growling back from a parapet across the road. “What is the reason, Bozo?” the General demanded as he pitted his wispy strength against his dog’s muscle. “I fail to understand.
What is the reason?
” He glimpsed the bird-watching couple and called out to them: “Hello there! Spotted anything yet?”

“Before the regimental reunion,” Mr. Chauhan said, walking toward the General with a wide smile, “I will make it all new. This town will be the star of the hills, that is my promise.”

*  *  *

I gave up on Mr. Chauhan and headed for the Light House. I was earlier than usual and Diwan Sahib, expecting no visitors at that time, was sitting in his garden practicing birdcalls. Once a year, he went to St. Hilda’s and put on a performance, educating the children about forest sounds and signs. He had done so for the past sixteen years and it was now part of the school’s Annual Day celebrations. The assembly hall would ring with his leopard and barking deer and owl calls while the children sat in rows on the floor, shrieking in delight and terror. He had got the idea from Corbett, who used to put on similar performances at schools in Nainital. I was not able to make sense of it in someone as irritable and solitary as he was, but he took it seriously and began practicing months ahead, so I stood still, waiting for him to finish. After a long while he noticed me, and stopped a chital’s call midway with a frown.

I handed him the receipt for his electricity bill, and his newspaper.

He looked at the receipt and said, “Today? You were supposed to pay it two weeks ago. It’s long overdue, there must be a fine.”

My knees and fingernails were sore. The cloud of my headache hovered as if it would return at the least inkling of distress. Diwan Sahib’s tone made my head throb. “Not two weeks ago, one,” I said, and then, for no reason that I could think of, I lied. “I did pay it then, just forgot to give you the receipt.” Diwan Sahib raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“It’s paid, isn’t it? That’s all that matters.”