The Folded Earth: A Novel (25 page)

She gave me a significant look and repeated, “I notice everything, make no mistake. People may not pay attention to what an old woman thinks. People who are educated and think they know it all.”

*  *  *

That night I again had the nightmare that had visited me from time to time, each time subtly altered. This time I was speaking to someone whose breath I could hear only inches from my ears: wheeze and gurgle, wheeze and gurgle. It was a man—who could not hear me. I could not see his face for the hood of his anorak, but I knew who it was. “Stop,” I cried in my dream with a terrible urgency:

I woke up with my own name in my ears. Through the uncurtained windows the eastern slopes of Nanda Devi and Trishul, suspended between night and day, were icy blue. It was going to be a clear morning, with beautiful views, but I wanted to run away: push aside the forest, escape the oaks and the darkness of deodars, clear a path to the plains, run down and away from the cold, the damp, the rain and snow, the calls of owls at night. I wanted the mango trees of my childhood, the visible heat of the afternoon sun, the creamy flesh of young green coconuts and their spring-sweet water.

I flung away my mass of blankets and sprang out of bed. I wriggled under it to where I stored things I might never need: suitcases, bags, cartons of books. I dragged a suitcase out and prised at its catches. It would not open. My hair streamed over my face. The dream was still vivid; my heart thudded with the certainty of knowledge. I ran down and brought up my box of old keys, which I tipped onto the floor. Rummaged through the jumble of metal and tried key after key in the rusted locks of the long-unopened suitcase. I flung aside the wrong keys, not caring where they fell. I found my hammer and smashed it against the locks: once, twice, three times, until the locks broke.

I opened the creaking lid of the dusty suitcase and pulled out the heavy, plastic-covered bundle inside it: Michael’s rucksack. It had been delivered a week after his death and I had never looked through it. Today, when I opened it, there was the generations-old smell of mildew.

I pulled out the sweatshirts—the blue one with the dolphin that I had bought him days before he left, a red one with John Lennon’s face; other clothes that I recognized tumbled out, crushed into tight balls in these five years of storage. And then a carefully folded packet in which I could see a book, a Tibetan good luck charm, and a letter that I had written and sent by courier to wait for him in Dehra Dun as a surprise before he started the trek.

I opened the packet and saw that there were other papers too that Michael had placed in it for safekeeping: a few pages torn from a first-aid manual; two maps; a few typewritten, official-looking sheets from the mountaineering institute with details of the trek: the list of things the trekkers needed to carry, meeting points, train connections. On a separate sheet, there were the names and phone numbers of the trekkers. Three names, as Michael had said—he and two others—one of them an experienced mountaineer, he had told me that night before he left, the other a porter.

I closed my eyes. I was certain I knew what I would see.

The names on the typewritten sheet were:

I went back to a time when I had woken from one of my nightmares gasping for breath. Veer had calmed me with slow whispered reassurances. I had talked to him until the night paled into dawn, about Michael’s death, about everything I had gone through that year—things I had never talked about to anyone. Veer had held me close, not once interrupting me. When I finished, he had described the terrain to me with a cartographer’s accuracy. But said nothing to suggest he had been Michael’s last trekking companion. He did not mull over what might have gone wrong. He did not list the many horrific possibilities—death by frostbite, death by falling, by injury, by brain damage, by pulmonary edema. And not suspecting what his silences hid, I had been grateful for all that he had left unsaid.

He had not told me he even knew of Michael’s mountaineering institute.

He had not told me Michael had broken his ankle.

He had not told me he had left Michael to fend for himself in a snowstorm with a broken ankle when they both knew it meant certain death.

I sat on the floor holding the papers, fragments of Michael strewn around me. The bugle at the army barracks trumpeted to wake the cadets as on every morning. Window squares lit up one by one and smoke rose from fires for the morning’s hot water. Birds sang to each other across trees and forests. The daily business of mornings that usually made me uncurl from my quilt with a smile now hammered nails into my heart. I felt utterly, absolutely alone. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I held myself as my body shook with sobs. I wept as if Michael had died the day before. I picked up thing after thing from his rucksack and flung them across the room in a rage. How easy to be dead! Everyone had marveled at the way I had made myself a new life in a faraway town after my husband’s death. What unnatural composure, what a swift recovery, they had said. Today it was as if I had torn off a dried-up scab with my fingernails and exposed the wound oozing for years beneath.

I had grieved for Michael’s death before. Now I would torment myself to the end of my days for my intimacy with the man who had walked away from him when he most needed help. How had I allowed it to happen? When had Veer dropped his last name and shortened his first? Even Diwan Sahib had never called him anything but Veer, and sometimes “Mr. Singh,” or, when in a bad temper, “the Great Climber, Mr. Singh.”

Where had the Rathore part of his name gone?

Perhaps Veer never used that last name except in formal documents. That was possible, even normal, as was the abbreviation of his first name.

Or maybe he had chosen to lose pieces of his names in the snow after abandoning Michael to his death.

I wanted to scour off my soiled skin with a rough stone. I wanted to tear out the long hair Veer had murmured endearments and promises into, playing on my sympathies with his bitter stories of childhood suffering and homelessness, the search for his identity. I had been held in thrall by the quietness of him—his enigmatic, troubling aura of unknowability. Now I knew his silence was no more than a shroud in which he had tried to bury his connection with Michael’s death.

twenty

It is December in Ranikhet. A pair of eagles wheel slowly through the sky’s ceaseless blue. They are above the golf course, circling the yellow-capped army caddies, the colonels and brigadiers and lesser beings ambling behind white balls, knocking them with misdirected clubs, sending them hurtling down slopes. The caddies look upward as the shadows of eagle wings pass over their faces. They swing golf clubs in their direction and the eagles become faraway dots quicker than the eye can see.

Nearby, a dark olive convoy of army trucks is inching down the road. The line is unable to move fast for the press of people saying their last good-byes to the young, shorn, uniformed boys packed into the trucks. There are reports of infiltrators on the remote icy border with Pakistan, and every day trucks leave with soldiers to be transported to the trouble zone. In one fortnight, everything has changed. The soldiers’ daily morning training, their target practice, the camping in the woods in camouflage is no longer playacting. They try not to see every familiar house, barracks, gateway, and shop as if it were for the last time. In his head, Gopal is already somewhere inside one of these trucks winding their way toward trouble. The clerk is too exhausted with anxiety to say to his son, “I told you so.”

The eagles fly unconcerned over the trucks filled with young men thinking their somber thoughts. Further down, at Bisht Bakery, the staff are sunning themselves on the courtyard outside the shed with the ovens. They have decided not to bake bread that day because the old bread is still unsold. The tourists will only return next year. Christmas is just over, and Christmas pastries are getting drier and staler in the glass case. The eagles have their eye on a tastier morsel: they swoop down on the rubbish dump near the bazaar, having seen movement—a rabbit, or a mongoose. People leap away in alarm. The town’s local environmentalist takes a picture on his mobile phone’s camera and says he will send it to
Hornbill
. “What is
Hornbill
?” the friend asks.

Up the steep Alma Hill and away from the bazaar toward the cantonment, the eagles pass over the church and St. Hilda’s school. There are women sitting outside the church in the sun, peeling fruit that has been heaped high, orange and yellow. Music plays; some of them sing. In another corner, women make earrings and bead necklaces. This is their new line of business. The elections are over, Ankit Rawat is installed in Delhi as the first-ever MP from Ranikhet, and nobody is any longer interested in the Christian mission of the school, not until the next elections. Miss Wilson has placed a larger portrait of herself on the wall facing the old one. Next to the laminated Pietà, she has added a portrait of the Pope, whom she dreams of glimpsing one day in the Vatican. She has decided she will not object to the girls playing film music in the factory. She will not admit it, but she enjoys it.

At Mall Road, the eagles pause on the summit of a deodar tree. They look down at the people sunning themselves on the parapet, storing up heat for the long, dark, cold evening ahead. They observe the man roasting peanuts, the shopkeepers chasing monkeys away with sticks, the girls lining up at the water tap, the jeep-taxis coming and going. There is a baby monkey alone by the roadside, tiny, pink-eared, a morsel of flesh, blood, life. The eagles stretch their wings, and think of food. But the monkey’s father and mother appear from somewhere; they have sensed danger. They collect the baby in their arms and leap away over rooftops to a place less exposed.

Frustrated, one of the eagles perches low on the arm of the new statue Mr. Chauhan has installed on Mall Road. The first month, it was a statue of B. R. Ambedkar, wearing a suit and round glasses. The second month, overnight, the blue suit was painted olive and given a belt, an army cap was placed on its head, and the very next morning the people of Ranikhet had gasped in collective astonishment, for they had found Subhas Chandra Bose where Ambedkar had been, as if by magic. Mr. Chauhan had seen possibilities that no one before him had seen. He alone had noticed there was no need to change the statue’s face, since both men were rotund and wore similar glasses. Now Mr. Chauhan cannot stop himself from telling every passerby that he has invented the world’s first transformable statue, ready for any occasion. With a bit of effort, he thinks, it can become Nehru too, though removing the glasses may present a problem. “But where would solutions be if there were no problems?” he says.

One of the eagles pecks at the statue, leaps onto its head, stretches its wings, and takes off. The pair fly further up Mall Road, over the decrepit, rambling colonial houses. They have nested there once and may do so again. They fly over Aspen Lodge and the forest road to the Westview Hotel. They fly over a leopard padding down the dusky ravine near the Rosemount Hotel. Over Gappu Dhobi’s house, where lines of clothes are drying and fading in the strong winter sun. They start their descent when they reach an overgrown lawn, and I open my eyes, sensing a shadow sliding over my face. I can see their feathers and talons, they are so low.

I have never seen eagles before, these beautiful and dangerous birds, in my part of the hillside, and I stare at the pair wheeling and circling over me. Where have they come from? Where are they headed? Could they really have come here all the way from Mongolia or Kazakhstan? Diwan Sahib would have told me everything about them; we would have looked at them, together, spellbound. Their wings are immobile in flight, the barest whisper of movement, and they pare the sky in unbroken circular lines, as if it’s an orange. I watch them for as long as I can until they become high, black specks swallowed up by the blinding dazzle of the sun. I close my eyes and savor my last few days at the Light House before it is returned to the army. All of us have to look for new places to live in. Ama thinks she will take Puran and return to her ancestral village in the high mountains. She has nobody to live for in Ranikhet any longer, she says.

Charu came once, changed. Married now, bride-like, and not at all disheveled as before. Her arms were covered in red bangles from wrist to elbow, she was still wearing her mother’s gold and pearl nose ring, and the parting in her hair was red with sindoor. She looked remote and grown-up, although just eighteen. Ama, practical as ever, scolded her once to show her what was what. After that she reveled in telling the hillside lavishly spiced stories of Charu’s brave journey to Delhi. She fed Charu kheer every day, and would not let her do any work—now she was not the daughter anymore, she was a guest who belonged elsewhere.

A month after Charu’s visit home ended, I had a letter, which I ran to show Ama, saying, “See! Your daughter can write!”

Maya Mam,

Are you well? Are Ama and Puran Chacha well? I am well. He is also well. Singapore is very beautiful. I have seen the sea.

With respect,

Charu.

Ama has proven yet again that there is no woman more shrewd this side of the Nanda Devi. After I read her Charu’s letter, she went into her house and reappeared with a brown-toothed smile, holding out a packet wrapped in layers of plastic.

“I have something for you too. This is what Diwan Sa’ab’s nephew was looking for, I think,” she said. “Now he’s gone, it’s yours to do with as you please.” Her smile broadened and twisted. She said nothing more as she left me holding the packet.

I unpeeled the packet and read its contents with a sense of astonishment mixed with disbelief. For it was clear that in the end, Diwan Sahib’s closest, darkest secrets had been biding their time in the care of our town’s greatest gossip. The packet was not even sealed. Could Ama have stolen and hidden away those papers to spite Veer? Or had Diwan Sahib given them to her, thinking his papers would be safest with a trusted, unlettered village woman? Even when that woman was Ama?