The Folded Earth: A Novel (18 page)

*  *  *

On the evening of our fruitless visit to the police station, I went up to the Light House. When Veer was away, I often went there for a drink and sometimes dinner and sat by Diwan Sahib’s fire before returning home to my exercise books. That day, when I entered the half-dark living room, I saw him crouched over the fireplace, feeding paper into it from bundles lying at his feet. He put in sheaf after sheaf. The fire dipped as each thick bunch of paper was added to it, and then blazed when the new lot of paper caught. I did not have to ask Diwan Sahib what he was doing. I could see it was years of work he was burning, his and mine, the many versions of his Corbett book. His hands shook as he reached for the papers and then for the fire. He was bent close enough over the flames for the room to smell faintly of singed hair. Droplets of a runny cold shone in the firelight as his nose dripped. He swiped at it once with a sleeve, then continued. When the entire manuscript was in the fire, he stood up, staring into the leaping flames. Then he seemed to remember something else. He looked above the fireplace at the framed picture of his golden retrievers. I leaped forward now, with a cry, but I was too late to stop him. He had flung it into the blaze, and the glass shattered against the logs in the fireplace. The old wood of the picture’s frame caught instantly. I saw the photograph curl at the edges and melt away.

ten

I could not account for it on a rational level, but after the death of the deer a whispering began in my head that pointed to change, an alteration so profound and yet so inexplicable as to seem more superstition than logic. It was as if we were standing before a still expanse of water and only I could sense a shark slicing through it below the surface, heading for us. On the brightest days, I felt as if the corner of a deep shadow was edging in, inch by imperceptible inch, until it was no longer a corner but a darkness that in time would obliterate us.

I grew morbidly obsessed with wondering what had happened to Rani’s body in the zoo. They would call it a carcass. I remembered our neighbor’s Alsatian in Hyderabad—a handsome, smiling dog with a long tail that the family never talked to or petted because they considered it a guard dog, too dangerous to touch. I used to scratch his head for him on my way to school. One day, I saw a man cycling down the road before our houses with a gunny bag trailing off his backseat from a long rope. The gunny bag cleared a swathe of dust on the earthen road as he went past. The man hunched forward and pedaled with an effort in the way people do when cycling with a heavy load. Later I learned that the Alsatian had died, and that the family had dispatched its body in a sack strung from that bicycle, to be thrown into the municipal dump.

Was Rani’s body rotting in a dump along with other rubbish? Was it being torn apart by rats? Perhaps the zoo had fed her carcass to their leopards in cages. But there cannot have been much flesh on that delicate fawn’s half-starved body. I told myself that the vet, who had tried to save her life, had carried Rani’s body to the kind of forest she had been born in, and left it there for it to return slowly to the earth again. I tried to make myself believe that this was what happened.

*  *  *

On the morning of Diwan Sahib’s yearly performance at our school, a gentle rain fell, dissolving into the foliage before it met the earth. It was a day or two after Rani’s death. Ever since his soaking on the way to the police station, Diwan Sahib had had a cold, and I wondered if he was strong enough to last through an hour of talking and mimicking animal calls when he was breaking into coughs and sneezes every few minutes. It had been decided that Mr. Qureshi would drive us there in his car since Diwan Sahib would not be able to walk all the way to the school. Charu had been looking forward to this day, and the ride in a car, but after the death of Rani she had been avoiding us, almost as if we were to blame for not being able to save Puran and the deer, and that morning Ama said: “Charu is not well. She won’t go.”

At the school, the children, in order of class and height, sat on the floor of our assembly hall. The hall was blue and white and red with school uniforms and ties. The infants in the front three rows, no more than five or six years old, were my charges. They nudged each other and began to chatter when we entered the room. Two of the daring ones shot out of their places and ran to take my hand in a display of ownership that made Miss Wilson scowl. “Just you look. All this time they were sitting so
diss-iplined
! You appear and immediately there is chaos.”

When the children had been calmed, the microphone tested, a bottle of water and glass procured, and Diwan Sahib seated, all eyes turned toward him. The children had bet that he would begin this year with a tiger’s call. Some of them clutched each other’s hands in anticipation of getting a pleasurable fright.

There was silence. A teacher edged the microphone closer to Diwan Sahib. Someone spoke at the back of the room and Miss Wilson rapped out, “
Quay-it!
We are about to begin.” But Diwan Sahib still did not begin. I was worried he might have forgotten why he was there. The children started to fidget. I stepped up to him and whispered: “Start.” He had shrunk into himself since his encounter with the police constable, had barely spoken since then. His shoulders had acquired a hunch, as if he were curling into himself, and his gaze, when it did turn toward me, looked as if it were fixed on something far away. He had not once cracked a joke or even been sarcastic at my expense.

And then he began to speak, but now nobody could hear him. The audio boy came up and adjusted the microphone, which settled down after a minute’s whistling—“Too loud, too loud,” Miss Wilson had shouted from the front row—and becoming inaudible. Diwan Sahib had carried on speaking, disregarding the microphone. His voice was low and at times he mumbled.

“I don’t know how many in this room live in the bazaar,” he was saying, “how many in villages further away, and how many in the cantonment. How many miles do you walk to come to school? You get up early every morning, at dawn. The older ones among you have to fill water from streams before you do anything else. Some of you have to light fires or help your mothers cook a meal before school. You have to climb up steep hillsides to reach here and you get wet every day of the monsoon during this walk. In the afternoon, you make traffic come to a stop in the bazaar when you come out of the school and stream onto the road, chattering like monkeys—”

He tried to imitate a langur, but began to cough. He drank a long sip of water and resumed.

“I have looked at your faces when you come out of school—so bright and shining and full of promise—and I have thought each time: What kind of future will you have? What will you do with your education? And what kind of world will I or your teachers leave you?

“In one corner of Ranikhet—how many of you know it?—in one corner, on the way to the Jhoola Devi temple, there is a forest path going off to the side and it leads to a knoll. If you walk down that path to the knoll, you will find a clearing on a spur surrounded by tall trees. In the time of our forefathers, there may have been Himalayan golden eagles nesting in those trees and in the rocks. They are rare, majestic birds and have not been seen here in living memory. But even now, those of you who look up at the sky will see eagles over the golf course, circling and looking for prey. These are the steppe eagles that come here each winter from the deserts of Mongolia and Kazakhstan. I used to sit on the knoll and watch the eagles; they used to roost on those tall trees.”

In earlier times, this would have been Diwan Sahib’s cue for giving the children a thrill; he would have said, “They are big enough to eat little children,” with a smacking of his lips. But today he just said, “They are so powerful that they can kill even foxes, goat kids, fawns of deer. Yet the steppe eagle hardly ever calls and as for the golden eagle, can you believe it, their call is just a weak yelp, almost like a puppy’s. Grown-up golden eagles make a two-syllable
‘kee-yep’
sound in a slow, measured series. Their young call with piercing, insistent
‘ssseeeeeeee-chk’
or
‘kikiki’
notes.”

Diwan Sahib managed both these sounds without coughing, but it was a little while before he recovered from feeling winded and could speak again.

“The spur looks at our peaks of snow,” he said. “And all around the clearing, a long time ago, pilgrims planted poles with prayer flags on them. Maybe not many of you know what a prayer flag is? Well, it wafts prayers that are carried on the wind. And Buddhists had planted these flags, who knows when? They were already in tatters by the time I discovered them. And then I went there often, because if you sat still on that spur, after a while the animals would forget you and come out of the forest—”

The children sat up, expectant. Now Diwan Sahib would begin imitating each animal that came to the spur. The hall would become a joyful cacophony of squeals and screams of delight.

“But no animal comes to that spur now,” Diwan Sahib said. “There are trucks that come and go, the entrance to the spur is piled high with logs from trees that have been cut from the forests all around. Have you ever heard the sound of a tree being cut with saws—coming apart at the trunk and falling?”

Still he did no imitation, but paused, as if hearing the sound in his head.

“They are building a log cabin on the spur—for the entertainment of bureaucrats. They are building grand wooden gateways out of logs from these old trees. The trees with the eagles were cut down too. Nobody knows where the eagles went when their trees were felled. That is the forest now—it is a park, it is what is called a resource, a factory. It belongs neither to the people who owned it before, nor to the animals and plants that lived in it. I had thought I would tell you how fortunate you were, to live in this part of the world where you are surrounded by rocks that breathe and animals that call to each other. You wanted me to call their calls for you—but I’ve forgotten their voices now. They have no voices any longer. I can’t do this—” Diwan Sahib pushed his chair back and rose. “I can’t do this any longer,” he said.

He began shuffling to the door. He was in the corridor, coughing and panting for breath, before I could extract myself from where I was sitting, and reach him. There was an air of bemusement in the hall. The children had neither clapped nor moved. A few had been startled into silence and sat looking thoughtful. A boy from the senior section was telling everyone how good Diwan Sahib’s performance had been the year before and what a dud it was today. Miss Wilson was furious. “Waste of time . . . and so many arrangements had to be made!” she protested when the audio boy came to her saying, “Where to give my bill, madam?”

“This is the last time, Maya,” Miss Wilson said, taking the bill from the man. “He’s too old now, he’s senile. What’s all this nonsense? When we call him for a purpose and make so many arrangements! He should stick to the purpose. This is not done.”

eleven

That evening Diwan Sahib began running a temperature. For a few days he lay in bed in a stupor that worried me enough to call the doctor, who said, “Give him fluids, but not the kind he usually drinks.” I sat up nights, placing ice-cold swabs on his forehead when his fever rose. I passed my hands over his soft, sparse hair to make him sleep. He babbled in a slurred delirium about people and things I knew nothing of: “Farha . . . not Char Bagh, meet me at the Imambara . . . Farha, can you come . . . the Nawab needs a clock, he has no clock . . . The letters . . . my will . . . Veer . . . get the box, get the box, go away, take him away from me!” He had great trouble breathing and I had to raise him and massage his back to soothe his aching ribs, which he tried rubbing himself in his restless sleep. I realized he had dwindled much more than I had thought: his ribs poked out beneath his skin, his body was narrow and bony. I felt an unexpected, painful tenderness for him and quietly left his room and paced on the veranda for a while to get a grip on myself. He detested sentimentality and, fever or no fever, he would know how I was feeling from the merest glimpse of my face.

After the fever dropped away, he grew demanding and foul tempered. He refused help from those of us who were there, but he made cutting remarks about Veer’s absence in times of need. “It’s a talent not to be underestimated,” he said when Ankit Rawat came looking for Veer one day for help with his election campaign. “The art of being away when there is tiresome work to be done for other people. The young man will no doubt come back just in time for your victory speech.” He pushed aside Himmat Singh’s food, said he wanted chicken stew with rosemary. I had no idea how to make it, but I looked up a rarely used cookbook and made a list of the ingredients I would need. I plucked a fistful of rosemary from the bushes around the house. I bought a chicken and whatever suitable vegetables I could find in the monsoon, when it was hard to find any good vegetables at all. The stew had potatoes, beans, and little onions that turned into translucent globes when cooked. Diwan Sahib had one mouthful and said it tasted of slop. I cooked him fish the next day and he said it was smelly. Some days I was so irritated by his cantankerousness that I did not go up to his house at all. “So busy, aren’t you,” he said the next time he saw me. “Huge factory to run. Quite the Madam Corporate.” For the rest of the evening, he did not say a word or look at me again. I sat with him for half an hour, growing angrier each minute, then got up and left without a good-bye.

After ten days, he was well enough to sit up in a chair, but stopped coming outside to sit under his spruce tree. When I came back from work with the newspapers as before and looked in to see him, he would be at his fireplace, although it was the middle of the afternoon. He wore a sweater and even indoors his shapeless, brown woolly cap. “The older, the colder,” he said, sounding belligerent.

The room he sat in was high ceilinged and dark. The walls were overgrown with dusty bookshelves filled with old paperbacks that the lightest touch might have disintegrated. Diwan Sahib sat there, nursing an “early, medicinal brandy,” poking at the fire with a pair of long cast-iron tongs. We had never spoken of it, but I could not look at the fireplace now without seeing his manuscript burning there. The wall over the fireplace had a paler patch, with dust lines marking a rectangle where the picture of the dogs had been. My eyes kept returning to that bleached rectangle, as if I expected the old photograph to reappear there by magic.

The firelight carved Diwan Sahib’s face into hollows. He had stopped trimming his beard, and it had grown longer, making him look like a sadhu. His eyes were still bright, however, and if he was in a good humor when he saw me, he said, “The prettiest girl in Ranikhet! Dark as coal, so she lights up my room!” To Mr. Qureshi, he said one day when I came in: “If I was younger I would warm my hands on her cheeks.” Mr. Qureshi looked away quickly and busied himself searching for something he did not find.

Every evening, the rain came down on the tin roof, sometimes drumming on it and collecting in buckets and bowls inside the house where the roof had sprung leaks, sometimes no more than a soft murmur above our heads. If it stopped, all went quiet, and we sat listening to the
tup-tup
of dripping water from the rainwater drains that ran along the roofs.

Mr. Qureshi and I talked all the time, trying to fill the gloomy house with our chatter, telling Diwan Sahib the local news: Chauhan had had a little too much to drink at a party in the officers’ mess and boasted about his kickbacks, and now he was trying to salvage the situation; Miss Wilson complained of sleepless nights because of Umed Singh, who was promising in his election speeches that he would make sure all the church land in Ranikhet was turned over to common use if he came to power; Bozo had got into a fight with Bijli and almost had an ear torn off, so the General no longer brought him for walks past my house; and in the last few days Puran had been heard whimpering soft endearments to an owl who had taken to roosting in his shed. Perhaps this meant he would eventually emerge from the grief of Rani’s death.

Whenever there was a lull in our strained conversation, all we heard was the rain, the cracklings in the fire, and Diwan Sahib’s phlegmy cough, which did not respond to any quantity of hot rum.

Every day, after those long evenings with Diwan Sahib, I returned home and sat in a weary slump with a cup of coffee, trying to stay awake and deal with my daily bundle of schoolwork to be marked and account books to be checked. I was very tired. It was the kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep would take away. I was fed up with the endlessness of my work and Diwan Sahib’s illness and his moods. I was fed up with my ironclad routine. I did not want to spend one dismal evening after another at his fireplace, going over the same old stories. Ranikhet’s want of urban pleasures began to gnaw at me: why was there not one decent cinema, not a single good bookshop, not even a library? I wished I could take off in a bus to Nainital for the day—have a pizza for lunch, stroll in and out of shops, eat ice cream. But of course I could not leave as long as Diwan Sahib was ill.

This made me boil up immediately into a broth of resentment at Veer’s absence. How did he manage to be out of reach when he was most required? What was the point of our togetherness if he was never there? My thoughts slid with an aching sense of loss to my mother. Even when I had no friends in my first years in Ranikhet, it was reassurance enough that she was there, somewhere—that I would have a letter from her every so often, that I might hear her voice on the telephone. It was my fault, I told myself. I had not managed to make any real friends after leaving Hyderabad. On and off there was a new teacher at St. Hilda’s who made me feel hopeful because we spoke the same language, laughed at the same things, but usually they tired of Ranikhet and within a few months went away again. Until Veer arrived, I had found no one in town to spend time with.

One such worn-out night, when I was half-asleep on my table with my head on the account books, I heard sounds from Charu’s house, voices I could not recognize. I switched off the light and pulled my curtain aside just a crack. Ama was outside, holding a stick and talking at the tin shed they had in front of their cottage. Someone was babbling and crying inside the shed; occasionally I heard a loud, unfamiliar, agitated voice, neither fully male nor female. The single, naked lightbulb they had outside, hanging from a tree branch, swung in the breeze, making shadows leap and subside. There was something so eerie about the scene that I felt afraid of the dark corners of my own little house.

The next morning I asked Ama, “What was happening at your house yesterday?”

“I called the Ohjha,” she said, looking combative in advance. “I needed him.”

Ama did call the Ohjha now and then to exorcise evil spirits from her cows or rid them of spells she thought malicious neighbors had cast on them. Not even the plainest evidence would make her see he was a charlatan. The Ohjha usually came in the afternoon, performed his rituals, sat on a stool in the courtyard smoking and drinking tea, and after pocketing some of Ama’s money, bemoaned his failing bijniss. Once he was gone, Ama invariably reported miraculous change. He had not saved Gouri Joshi, she admitted that, but that was his only failure, and it had happened because the cow’s time had come: Gouri’s enemy had been Death itself.

“You called the Ohjha?” I said. “For the cows?”

“No,” she said. “Not for the cows.”

She shooed a hen away, bent to poke at something in the earth. She told me of a little boy who had fallen into an open manhole on Mall Road and come out covered in muck. She observed that while Diwan Sahib’s blood relatives were never there when needed, I was looking after the old man like a daughter. And talking of daughters, had I noticed how shamelessly Janaki’s teenage girl had gone off for a ride on that Muslim boy’s motorbike? Everyone knew they had a thing going between them, but Janaki was too doped to care.

She did not meet my eyes when at last she said: “I called the Ohjha for Charu. Here I am, trying everything to fix a match for her and she makes things go wrong. She is in the clutches of a bad spirit.” She saw the look on my face and her voice rose. “You think I’m a foolish old woman to believe in evil spirits.” She shook her stick toward the flat gray sky to our north. The high peaks were lost in the monsoon mist. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” she said, “would he believe you? What can he see but an ordinary, everyday sky that he can find anywhere? But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” She looked at me in triumph and set her stick down. “You city people think you know everything.” This was a phrase she liked using because it never failed to infuriate me.

“That’s different,” I said. “If Charu doesn’t want to marry, it’s for a real reason, not because of bad spirits.” Charu’s simple, unspiritual reason for turning away prospective grooms almost escaped my lips. I knew Ama suspected enough without any encouragement from me, and that this had added urgency to her efforts. Kundan Singh, a cook from the unknown east and of some indeterminate caste, would have struck her as anything but suitable. She was tapping clan networks, sizing up prospective grooms: most of these she rejected, either because the man’s family would ask an exorbitant dowry, or because the man was too old, or unemployed and without prospects, or had “bad habits.” I had been given reports from time to time in tones of contempt.

“They say he is about to get a Gormint job, but I know better than to believe it.” Or, “They said he runs a restaurant in Almora. Lachman drove there to see. There’s nothing, only a straw-roofed tea shack by the road, with two bricks to sit on and one burned pan to boil tea.”

None of these dead-loss grooms had reached the point when their relatives were allowed to have a look at Charu; I had seen the process a couple of times, a troop of the prospective groom’s family sizing up a girl as horse dealers might a horse. Ama had told me stories of her own long-ago ordeals when she had been similarly displayed. “Must not show a girl to too many families, that is no good,” she had advised me in sage tones.

In the past few months, she had winnowed the list of possible grooms down to two. One was a clerk in a government office in Haldwani. She admitted he was dark skinned, “but who looks at a prospective groom’s looks? It is his nature that matters, and this boy’s nature is good.” One symptom of his goodness was that he said he wanted no dowry. And her network said he had no bad habits: he did not smoke or drink, he did not chew tobacco, not even paan. An additional bonus was that his family was small, so Charu, as the daughter-in-law, would not be worked to the bone. There were only two sisters, parents, and one old granny who, she said, did not count because, “she’s halfway up there already, and seems in a hurry to reach.”

The boy Ama had in fact set her heart on was an assistant in a medicine factory in Bhimtal. People said he had excellent prospects; what was more he was younger than the government clerk who, Ama conceded, was perhaps a few years too old for Charu. Though the young man she favored did have a considerable paunch, her view was that it showed he was from a family that could afford to eat two full meals every day. This second possibility was also fair skinned, and from what I could see, a sharp dresser: he had sent a color photograph of himself against the backdrop of a painted Taj Mahal, posing on a red Kawasaki motorbike that the studio used as a prop.

Charu had been unconcerned about this resolute quest for a groom; the talk of it had been going on so long that she had stopped paying attention. But when the families of these two prospects announced they would come to assess the future bride, and Ama agreed to the visits, Charu began to worry.

The families of the prospective grooms came on their inspection tours, a month apart from each other. Both times, Ama dug into her cash reserves and cooked up meals that by their standards were lavish. She had even thrust some money at me one day, saying, “When you come back from work, bring a cake with pink kireem from Bisht Bakery, the small size.” The Kawasaki groom’s family, being from Bhimtal, “was used to city things,” she said. Her homemade kheer would not sufficiently impress them.

The reason for calling the Ohjha was that all Ama’s efforts and expense had gone to waste. The Kawasaki sisters had gone away suspecting Charu was feeble minded, and perhaps deaf. “That is how the wretch behaved with them!” Ama said. “They asked her simple questions and she kept staring at them as though she’s an idiot and she went on squawking, ‘What? What?’ like a parrot.” With the other groom’s family, Ama had spotted Charu working up a squint when she thought her grandmother was not looking. When asked to serve the Coca-Cola that had been bought for the guests, she had limped to and from the kitchen as though one of her legs were shorter than the other, and had spilled half a glass of the precious drink on the floor.