The Folded Earth: A Novel (13 page)

one

It was early one morning that summer, Diwan Sahib still rumpled with sleep, holding his mug of tea, and I on my way to school, cutting through his lawn. A distant humming sound that came closer every second had stopped me in my tracks and brought him out from his bedroom in his night clothes.

The sound resolved itself into an olive-green helicopter and I said, “It’s just a helicopter.” As I started on my way again, Diwan Sahib said, “It may not be
just
a helicopter. Not in an army town. Have you any idea what goes on here? This is a town that lives by secrets. State secrets. Army secrets. Grubby little personal secrets.”

He looked more ill-tempered and bleary-eyed than was usual for his early mornings, and looked set to embark on a long story I would not be able to interrupt. I quickened my pace and shouted over my shoulder at him, “It
is
just a helicopter, and I’ll see you after school.”

That day however, the helicopter noise was insistent, and there were two of them: circling the forests, first coming down very low, then swooping away in another direction, chopping up the sky with their blades. Was it a general visiting, or did a forest fire needed monitoring? Each time the sound approached, people paused in whatever they were doing to look up and puzzle over it.

The restless sound echoed through the skies all day. By midafternoon we noticed dark plumes of smoke in the distance, and some people claimed they had heard an explosion. At Bisht Bakery, both customers and bakers were agreed that the army was trying to find a Chinese spy who had slipped in through the northern border. By the time I reached Negi’s tea stall, the consensus had changed: an escaped terrorist was on the run and had set fire to something important.

On my way back from Negi’s, at about three o’clock, I saw Veer’s jeep turning a bend. I paused, waiting for him to stop and pick me up to drive me to the Light House, with a long detour for samosas. This was our ritual when he was in town. But today he drove past without even a wave. The road was empty. It was narrow. I had to stand aside to let him pass. He was close enough for me to see that he was wearing his dark glasses and a white shirt, that his backpack was on the seat next to him. I stayed where I was, sure he would realize his mistake and slam on his brakes further down the road.

The sound of his jeep died away. Once the cloud of diesel fumes cleared I resumed walking. I made myself focus my attention on the orange creeper that climbed a nearby pine, the yellow-throated marten that was making its way up a tree trunk, the kalij pheasants scuttling in the undergrowth, the mysterious fragrance that always hung over that particular curve on the road—all the while pushing away the thought that Veer had seen me and had not stopped.

When I reached Diwan Sahib and gave him his newspaper, I waited as long as I could, sipping my over-sweet tea, before asking with elaborate casualness, “Where’s Veer disappeared to?”

“He left all of a sudden,” Diwan Sahib said. “That boy’s a mystery to me. He was sitting here, staring at his computer, when his phone rang and within five minutes he was out of the house and in his car. Without a word to me. All he said to Himmat was that he would be away for a few days.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with—” I looked up at the sky.

“What? Do you mean with this business of the helicopters?” Diwan Sahib said. “As far as I know, our young man has nothing to do with the army or with helicopters. But I’m the old fool, the senile drunk; I’d be the last to know anything.” He looked as bad-tempered as he had that morning. After a minute’s silence he threw me one of his unexpected questions.

“How old were you during the Bangladesh war?”

I tried to remember when the Bangladesh war had been, without giving my ignorance away, but he knew me too well. “Nineteen seventy-one,” he said in a voice that could have cut glass.

“Do you know Michael and I had the same birthday?” I said. “Once we added up our ages and had a cake with forty-four candles on our birthday. It was a chocolate-cream cake and it had two white sugar mice with pink eyes, I remember. I ate one of them and the tail got stuck in my throat because it was made of a dried noodle.” I giggled at the memory.

Diwan Sahib was looking at me as if I had lost my mind. Then he dismissed me with a you-foolish-woman shake of his head and I resigned myself to the story that had been postponed since that morning. During the Bangladesh war, one of the intriguing political figures was Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Diwan Sahib said, a man he remembered from pre-independence days. He was a largely self-educated villager who had turned fervent socialist. He threw himself into every revolt that came his way in British times, from the Khilafat movement to the non-cooperation movement. In the last days of the British Empire, it was rumored that he had come to Surajgarh for a secret meeting with the Nawab to plot the state’s secession from India, but that was the time the Nawab had put Diwan Sahib in jail for plotting the opposite, so the Maulana and the Diwan had not met.

By 1970, Diwan Sahib went on, the Maulana was ninety, but still an incendiary demagogue, now fighting for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. Although he was violently against India, like most Bangladeshi political leaders he took refuge in this country when the war started. He was a frail old man of volatile temper, given to making provocative statements. He had to be kept out of the public eye, far away from the newspapers. Which place was secluded and secret enough? Naturally, Ranikhet, Diwan Sahib said, a town whose secrets were kept by the hills, by its remoteness, by the army.

The Maulana hated the mountains. He kept urging the Indians to give him a few acres of land nearer Bangladesh, in Assam, where his son was buried. But he was not allowed to leave Ranikhet until the war was over.

The helicopters drew closer again and louder. Diwan Sahib shouted over the noise, brandishing a book at me. “And do you know when I found out about this? Yesterday. From a book! Here was this walking archive, lodged maybe a mile away from me in one of those army houses, and I had no idea.” The sounds died down as the helicopters circled away and Diwan Sahib shook his head irritably at them. “Nothing makes you as irrelevant as retirement, Maya. There was a time when Nehru and Patel trusted me with secrets. All these bloody generals in Ranikhet used to beg for invitations to this house. And now?” He withdrew into scowling silence.

That evening, I sat on my veranda with a cup of tea, staring absently at the spot in the sky where the peaks would have been if the heat haze had not rubbed them out. I thought of the ninety-year-old Maulana hidden away in Ranikhet’s silent hills, longing for his familiar rivers and swampy heat. My reasons for coming to Ranikhet were strangely similar to the Maulana’s, I thought; we had both been on the run.

My thoughts turned to Veer. From all he had said in passing over the last few months I had constructed a story in my head about his reasons for moving to Ranikhet. He had been an orphan looking for his home, and in his childhood he had found one, after a fashion, in the Light House. Diwan Sahib’s affection had been understated, but combined with the force of his personality it had been enough to make an impact on the lonely child. Veer was a man in search of a father figure and had found one in Diwan Sahib. Nothing else could account for his rough-edged tenderness toward the old man. He was short-tempered at times, he could be brusque or impatient, but when he sat listening for a whole evening to Diwan Sahib’s reminiscences of Surajgarh, or when he came back from Delhi with just the book his uncle had been looking for, it was clear their bond was a deep one. I saw them walking around the garden together sometimes, their heads level with each other, one white-haired and the other dark, each man tall and spare, uncanny in their similarity from the back, and it was oddly moving, as i
f
Veer was a younger version of Diwan Sahib.

I had no doubt about it, Veer had come to Ranikhet to tend to Diwan Sahib in his last years.

When I once tested out this hypothesis on Ama, her response was succinct by her garrulous standards, and enigmatic: “Cares for his uncle, does he?” she said. Then added, “Cares for his uncle’s things, he does, the way he cleans up his papers, more than Himmat Singh has done in years.” Veer had in fact been dusting and sorting shelf after shelf of Diwan Sahib’s work papers in whatever little leisure time he had. In my eyes this made him more considerate than even his gifts of rum and thermal socks.

Now I wondered if there was more to Veer’s presence in Ranikhet. Was he somehow involved with the army? Was the trekking a front for something else? Was he here merely to position himself as Diwan Sahib’s heir? Or like all the others, had he come after the letters of Edwina and Nehru?

I pushed away my teacup—and with it my suspicions. They were too far-fetched and too petty. Veer often had to leave town in a hurry because he had work in other places. He had never seen the need to explain his every action. There was no more to it.

In a day or two we forgot the helicopters and the Chinese spy, and the terrorist on the run—it had been another of those things the army needed to do in its secretive, military way
.
The only person upon whom the helicopters appeared to make an impact was the clerk, whose son Gopal was preparing for trials to join the army. Every morning, if I was awake that early, I heard the bugle that summoned the army cadets: four blasts at dawn, at intervals of two minutes in order to awaken them. For many months now, the bugle had been followed, moments later, by a light at the clerk’s house. Gopal woke with the cadets. On cold mornings, he emerged hunched in the mist of his own breath, crunching the frost-glassed earth in hawai chappals. At the baked-mud clearing outside his hut he did push-ups followed by at least forty sit-ups, a hundred sometimes. Once there was more daylight he did short sprints up and down the hill, and exercises that he had observed the cadets doing in their training area. Gopal had dreamed of being in the army for years. Since his childhood he had watched soldiers in rows of khaki and green, hair sheared above their ears, marching down roads, carrying the gear of the day, anything from bedrolls to brooms, buckets, and guns. The soldiers looked at other people as if some invisible but impenetrable barrier cordoned them off. Gopal dreamed of being inside that magic cordon, marching with them.

All this time, his father had been proud of his martial son and boasted that his boy would retire as a captain—at least. The mystery of the helicopters and the smoke made him take fright. He quarreled volubly with his son for several days. He now wanted the boy to join the water board instead: they would give him a safe clerical job, he knew they would; a father’s job often passed to the son. “What’s good enough for your father is good enough for you, you fool!” I heard him shout. “The army is not fun and games. You’ll thank me when you see your friends being sent off to die!”

One inexplicable consequence of the helicopters was that the mail did not come for a week. Perhaps the two things were not connected; later we came to know that a postal strike had begun in the plains the same day. But rumbles began after the second day without the mail and we heard that our letters were being looked through for clues, that the postmaster was involved in the trouble, and that the post office was the terrorists’ next target. I was unconcerned, but Charu grew more anxious with every passing day. The postman arrived in the late afternoon, sometimes in the evening; ours was his last call because he lived across the stream from us. Charu hovered nearby as the time of his homecoming approached, waiting for him to go limping past. She did not dare ask him if there was a letter. She had only received one letter, in May, soon after Kundan Singh had reached Delhi. Since then, there had been silence. Charu behaved as though an eternity had passed.

two

How are you? How is your family? I hope all are well. I am well.” So began the second letter Charu received, which arrived when she had all but given up hope.

I had brought a Hindi primer from school, with the alphabet and brightly colored pictures, and some exercise books. After I read out the letter from Kundan, I opened the primer and made Charu find each letter he had used. I made her write the simpler words from his letter into an exercise book. His spellings were often not correct, but at that stage I did not pause over spelling. She sweated and muttered and pushed away strands of hair in her effort to concentrate. She had only the foggiest recollection of reading and writing from her classes of long ago, though there were unexpected shafts of clarity. Charu’s delighted giggles at such times were so infectious that we sounded more like two teenage conspirators than a teacher and her young student. These occasions were not frequent. She had forgotten much of the alphabet; it was coming back, but slowly. She had forgotten all her numbers.

I drew her cartoons of the letters as people and animals. I made her write them again and again. I brought back different books of nursery rhymes and stories from the school’s library cupboard every few days. I made her read the larger print on cookie packets and soap bars. I was possessed by my task: it had become a mission. I had failed with Charu all those years ago when she was a little girl in my class. This time it would be different! I let no opportunity pass. Once Mr. Chauhan came upon us when I was trying to make her read one of his Hindi signs as she grazed her animals, and he exclaimed overjoyed, “I knew it, Mam! I knew it! You have a velvet fist in your iron glove. That day when I told you the peasants need education in civic sense, I thought you were annoyed. I thought you walked away in anger. But no, you took my words to heart. Mam, you have given me a fresh lease of life! Now I will charge ahead with my mission—on a war footing.”

Charu applied herself to this new chore in her life with resolve, and often, when I saw her pressing a piece of chalk to a slate I had bought for her, her skin glowing in the honey-colored sun of evening, she looked to me less an ordinary peasant girl and more a heroine from a folktale, even if her battle was not with fabulous monsters and wicked witches but only with the alphabet and absence. I would see her sitting in her courtyard with an intent look in her eyes, chin resting on knees, tongue sticking out, writing on the ground with a twig as she waited for the evening fire to catch or the hens to come in. She swore in frustration if, despite retracing the letters in the dust with her own fingers, she could not tell what they added up to. The “ba” and “ka” and “pa” confused her. The lines wobbled and dissolved and swam into each other. The letters flipped over as if they had a life of their own. She had to stop herself from tearing the page up in her fury at her own slowness. But still, evening after evening, she came back for her lessons.

*  *  *

“I have to go every afternoon to Sa’ab’s hotel,” Kundan’s second letter said.

They do not like eating hotel food. They like daal-roti-sabzi, food from home. They like it hot. So every morning I cook it and then pack it all in a special lunch carrier that keeps it hot. Then I cycle with it to the hotel. It has been built very recently. Your eyes would be dazzled by the hotel. It is like a magic palace. I am not allowed to enter it. I have to go to the back entrance and hand the food to someone. But when I pass the main door I can see how shiny everything is. It smells different. Music comes out of there when people go in and out. I saw a pool of totally blue water. People swim in the water, with hardly any clothes. You would laugh to see them. Mostly the people are dressed like kings and queens. But none of them look as beautiful as hill people. I think of my parents in Siliguri. But more than that I think of Ranikhet. Send me something from the forest.

Your friend.

When I finished reading a letter, Charu would ask me to read it again, sometimes three times, and listen carefully, frowning, as if trying to memorize it. Then she would take the letter from me and hide it in her clothing. Charu’s living quarters were so cramped she could not find a place to hide the letters there. Ama, Puran, and she had two small rooms, one of which was partitioned in half: one half was their kitchen, the other had bright blue walls and a black-and-white TV covered with a crocheted cloth. A vase with pink plastic roses stood on top of the TV and on the wall was a picture Charu had painted, of purple and blue flowers that might have been irises. There were two chairs and a bed and a trunk made into a table. Through patterned plastic curtains you could glimpse the second room, which had a bed. Of course, Charu did not have her own room or cupboard; it was sufficient if she found the same corner every night to sleep in. After two near misses, when Ama very nearly lighted upon her letters, Charu now put them in a plastic bag and tucked them into a rafter in the cowshed, along with her magpie feather and bead necklace.

It was a problem finding the time for her lessons. We were both busy. Charu was forever rushing back and forth between her chores at home and her part-time job at the factory. Even when she managed to come to my house, she had to leave if her grandmother yelled for her: “Where did you put the spade?” “Run to Mall Road and buy some oil.” “Who do you think will put in the hens?” “God knows where the girl is, or her dog. Charu!”

I had to divide my time between taking classes at St. Hilda’s and overseeing jam making, bottling, and accounting at the factory. May and June were our most crowded months: all the soft fruit of summer—plums, peaches, apricots—arrived from distant villages, baskets and crates of them together, and they had to be dealt with at once. Some days, neither Charu nor I got home from the factory till after dark. At times it was late afternoon when I reached Diwan Sahib for my newspaper session and on the rare days that he decided to work on his book with me, I was lucky if I returned in time for the sunset on my veranda.

I would sit there with a cup of tea, waiting for Charu, watching the blues and greens of the hills darken range after range. When the farthest ranges were smudged into shadows, and the flying squirrels began skittering up the deodar trees, Charu would appear, bounding down the slope, not bothering to look where her feet fell, tossing from hand to hand two warm potatoes her grandmother had baked in the embers of their cooking fire. They were fluffy and tender inside, steaming with stored-up warmth, the charred skin smoky and delicious. Since I hardly ever managed more than an egg and bread or instant noodles when I ate at home, I was as grateful for the potatoes as Charu was for her lessons.

She came for her lessons when her grandmother was unlikely to need her, and she thought she had covered her tracks well, but Ama was too shrewd a woman for Charu’s efforts at subterfuge to go unnoticed. Although she could not put her finger on it, she knew something about her granddaughter was different. She had sensed currents of gossip too, from which she was being excluded: she had heard Charu’s name in conversations between drugged-out Janaki and the clerk’s wife, which dried up the minute Ama came within earshot. She smelled a rat and so came one day to my house and settled on the bottom stair of the veranda to find out where the smell might lead. “Did you hear,” she asked me as she sat, “of Rosemount Hotel’s cook?”

I knew that the cook was probably not why she had come to me, but I said no, I had not.

“He was riding pillion on a scooter when he was hit by a speeding car—a Delhi car, of course,” Ama said. “He fell from the scooter. But thought he was fine. And then—then he looked down and he had no right leg! It had been sliced clean off. There it was, still in shoe and sock, lying in the pine needles. They wrapped it in a shirt and carried it to the hospital with them, but nobody could stitch it back on.”

“That Puran,” she began next, still not ready to come to the point. “He’s as senseless about his deer as about everything else. Lunatic fool giggles and whispers to it like it’s his lover, and feeds it all the grain I store for the hens. Between his deer and Charu’s useless dog, I am losing all the money I earn from selling milk.”

I murmured and waited. After a brief pause, unable to hold herself back any longer, she demanded, “Why is the girl with you all the time? People are talking.”

“She is learning to read,” I said. “I have told her she must.”

“She missed school all those years when I was paying for her, what is this new hobby for?”

“It’s never too late,” I said.

“Why?” Ama said, narrowing her eyes. “I never learned to read a word, and has it been a problem for me?”

Before I could argue, she appeared to reconsider and said, “No, it’s a good thing. She won’t be as helpless as her poor dead mother. She won’t let a man get away with treating her badly. But don’t teach her too much. Girls who study too much are no good for anything—she won’t get a husband and she’ll have all sorts of silly ideas about herself.” She continued in a heavy voice, “I’m growing old. She is such a worry. I have to find her a groom, but my son is such a drunk—everyone knows it and stays away. These last few months his face has gone black—did you see him when he came yesterday? Just comes to me to demand money, as if I grow rupee notes in the field. As thin as a stick and lies about all day in a daze. That woman he’s taken up with is a born witch.” She shook her head. “How long will I live?” she said. “Every day I feel closer to death. My heart feels as if it has slid to my stomach sometimes. And who will look after Charu if I am dead? Sometimes I think it’s a curse that she’s pretty. How is an old woman to keep her out of trouble?”

Her wrinkles deepened and darkened. Her fingers were callused, dry, and chunky like small yams from overwork. The strap on one of her slippers was held together by a safety pin. I felt a deep pang of guilt and worry at what I was doing behind Ama’s back. I said, “You mustn’t worry about her. I’ll look after her.”

Ama shook her head and smiled in the ironical, all-knowing manner she adopted with me at times. Usually it annoyed me, but this time I thought her attitude was justified; even to myself, my words sounded like a tall claim. How was I planning to look after Charu?

In a rush, as if I had planned it all along—although the thought had not crossed my mind till that minute—I said, “She’s my responsibility too, I’ve known her since she was twelve. And . . . everything I own will be hers.” It was suddenly self-evident: who better to inherit my savings bank account, the bits of jewelry my mother had given me over the years, and the furniture I had collected? I had been told that my chest of drawers, bought secondhand from people moving house four years ago, was an antique.

“You!” Ama exclaimed. Her thin body shook with mirth. Her long teeth, stained from chewing tobacco, were black and yellow. She noticed my offended look and stopped her laughter. “How are you to look after her?” she said. “You can barely look after yourself, far away from family, all alone.”

I started shuffling the pile of books beside me. I could not tell why my thoughts turned to Miss Wilson’s watch, the round gold one that had belonged to her grandfather, the collector of Kozhikode. For the first time in sixty-five years, it had stopped working, and she had, with the greatest reluctance, left it for repairs at a watch shop in Haldwani. But last week she had heard the shop had burned to the ground, taking her watch with it. Agnes Wilson had been distraught. Her face had crumpled and her glasses had misted with tears. She could do nothing else but speak of her grandfather: how he had adored her and thought her capable of great things while for the rest of her family she was an unwanted fourth daughter, dark skinned and ordinary. Her grandfather had dreamed he would see her installed as collector, or even district commissioner, and that was what he had whispered on his deathbed, when he handed her that watch. “Not one of his dreams for me came true,” Miss Wilson had said in a broken voice. “And on top of everything, I couldn’t look after his dying gift.” The other teachers had found her grief over an old watch comical. One of them had even done a flawless imitation of her overdone distress. But to my surprise I had felt a pang of sympathy so strong that I had almost reached out to give her hand a squeeze. I had sat with her in silence that afternoon, as if I were on a condolence call, listening to her rambling memories as long as the lunch break allowed. I found my own behavior mystifying. I had said nothing about it to anyone, not even to Diwan Sahib, knowing he would unleash the full force of his amused sarcasm if I had told him how Miss Wilson’s solitary grief haunted me.

Distracted by my own thoughts, I had not heard a word of what Ama was saying. I scrambled back to our conversation. By now, her tone had turned conciliatory. “You are doing enough for her, Teacher-ni,” she was saying. “But Charu can’t work in that jam factory forever. She has to have a normal life: marriage, children, her own home. I have to marry her off before I die.”