The Folded Earth

13


Veer returned at the end of the month from Dehra Dun and Delhi. He had been away for a fortnight, getting things organised for the next trekking season, which he was going to run from Ranikhet. He came back laden with gifts. There were exotic southern edibles for me: yogurt marinated chillies, murukkus. He had even brought me a bottle of pickle, made from whole baby mangoes – the kind I had been used to in Hyderabad and had only dreamed of ever since. Had I told him about my past? I flipped through our old conversations, which I could recall virtually down to the last detail. The bottle remained unopened on my table for several days as I tried to get used to it. I picked it up every now and then, my heartbeat quickening each time I examined the label, which said, “Begumpet Pickles: Traditionally Made from a Secret Recipe Handed Down for Generations”. I was reminded of the day my father had put one of his palms over my eyes as he led me to a thick-trunked mango tree in our garden to show me my new tree house. I must have been seven years old. A little red ladder led up to the house, and its inner walls were painted with butterflies. It had a toy telephone with a bell that rang. One morning my father had called me down from the tree house saying in an absurd telephone-operator voice: “Hello, hello, phone call for the Princess of Begumpet Pickles. She must come down at once to see the new labels on our pickle bottles!”

For Diwan Sahib, Veer had brought an expensive illustrated guide to India’s birds that had just come out. I began leafing through it as soon as Diwan Sahib let go of it, to look up a bird I had seen that very morning, when I turned a wooded corner so loud with harsh screeches of magpies that it sounded like the playground at St Hilda’s when the bell rang at the end of the school day. I had crept closer to see what the birds were agitated about, and a slow, large, brown shape had detached itself from a shadowy branch and sailed off towards a nearby tree, with the magpies in outraged pursuit. It was an enormous owl, made eyeless by the sun. It sat immobile on the second tree, submitting to the screeching and pecking of the many magpies, like some ancient nobleman resigned to his suffering. The prince of darkness, reduced to nothing when his time was past, I told Diwan Sahib in an unthinking attempt at cleverness. He raised an eyebrow, and with a rueful smile murmured, “How true.” He reached for the book again, opened it to the right page, and returned it to me. “Maybe this one?” he said. There it was, in glossy colour, my owl: a Brown Wood Owl. I snapped the book shut, triumphant. The caption said it was usually almost two feet tall.

“It was exactly that height, it hardly even looks like a bird,” I said.

“ ‘After variations in colour, form and melody on a million birds, he was cast on earth, an afterthought’.” Diwan Sahib spoke in the voice he kept for quotations. “Maya, do you know that poem about the owl? And then how did it go? ‘When stars their voyages fulfil, attired in light from east to west, cloaked in night he moves to kill’ … no, I think I missed a verse.”

Veer had also brought alcohol: two cases of superior rum and gin. Until Veer came, Diwan Sahib had bought humbler alcohol, a bottle at a time, via the General, who had access to subsidised army supplies. Despite his grand past, Diwan Sahib was no longer wealthy. He had rented out the two cottages on his estate for extra income, but he ended up taking no rent at all from Ama, and for the past two years he had left my own rent cheques uncashed. If I protested, he said I was paying him rent in kind, by running his errands and typing his manuscript. He lived an austere life and his bare house contained nothing but worn essentials. I rejoiced now to see him surrounded by creature comforts: a new heater, an imported, feather-light duvet, thermal socks, and good gin and rum. Veer saw to it that Diwan Sahib had the best, and plenty of it. But since Diwan Sahib in turn passed on a bottle or two to me, I had nothing to grumble about.

For himself, Veer had brought a new wristwatch. If you pressed any of the tiny knobs that ran down each side in a row, it turned from watch to compass, altimeter, thermometer, or barometer. The needles that told the time swung up and down to inform us that in the cantonment we were at about 6,100 feet while St Hilda’s, in the bazaar, was at 5,600 feet. Veer could not stop fiddling with the watch, but when I teased him, saying he was like a child with a new toy, he protested. “This is survival for me. It’s work. It’s like having a phone or a computer. It’ll be my lifesaver in a blizzard on some glacier far from help.”

The rhythm of my life changed whenever Veer returned. My days became changeable. I could not tell if he did it on purpose, but very often he drove up the hill from the bazaar just around the time I walked up from St Hilda’s to the factory. His jeep would stop beside me, a look would pass between us, and I would get in. Sometimes he paused to buy hot samosas and we took the longer, more isolated route back home, stopping on the way for a brief picnic. I could talk to him in a way I could with no-one else. I knew I would be understood, and knew exactly the conversation we might have when, for example, I said, “I wonder if mules too wear horseshoes.”

Our road had been blocked by a line of sweet-faced, slow-witted mules. They were being urged on with much shouting and prodding by their herdsmen. Some of the mules, living up to their reputation, simply refused to move despite being pushed from behind.

“Do mules wear shoes or not?” I said. “And what about elephants? Do they wear horseshoes? And if they do, what are the shoes called?”

“A topic most worthy of research,” Veer said. “The field could be extended and deepened. What decides it? Is it soft-footedness or hoofedness? Is it the distance travelled, the load carried? Shall we propose it to my uncle as the subject of his next book?”

“What about bullocks? They have to walk miles. Dragging heavy carts.”

“Not to forget camels,” Veer said in a parody of a formal, professional voice. “And yaks. Have you considered yaks? Nilgai? Zebras? Other than research, I see definite business possibilities here. Maybe you should give up your school and get into making shoes for animals? Might they have standard shoe sizes? Should you outsource the manufacturing to China?”

Once a new teacher at St Hilda’s was in the jeep with us when Veer and I wandered into one such nonsensical conversation. She had wanted to visit me at home – to test out the possibility of a friendship, I suppose. She looked out of the window throughout the drive, saying nothing, and after five minutes I forgot that she was there. After Veer had dropped us off at my door and driven away, she walked through my two rooms picking up this and examining that while I made tea. She paused before the pictures of Michael on my desk, and of my mother, and wanted to know about Michael, about when my mother had died and why I did not return to my father to be with him in his solitary old age. When we had settled down with cups of tea in my veranda, she said, “You talked very funnily with that gentleman in the jeep. Like you’re a mad child. And the way he replied – as if you’re both eight-year-olds. Are you friends? Or is he a relative of yours?”

She gave me a searching look. I changed the subject as soon as I could. Neither she nor I mentioned a next visit when she left.

One evening soon after coming back from his Delhi trip, Veer unveiled his slide projector. With the first slide, the far end of Diwan Sahib’s disused dining room, usually a bare expanse of rough whitewash, turned gold and blue and a sigh went across the room. It was the high altitude desert of Leh: barren gold earth in moon-surface formations beneath a vast sky. The land looked as raw as on the day of creation. In its folds you could see the shifting of continents, the breaking away of the Indian peninsula from Africa, and hear the cosmic boom as it crashed into Asia and thrust the Himalaya out of the ocean.

Another click and we moved to blue goats somewhere on a mountainside, and traditional stone and slate houses that had stood intact through earthquakes when new concrete structures had tumbled into the dust. Then the wall turned indigo with water and a gasp went around the room. Slopes of snow rose out of the liquid and clung to a very blue sky. “This is Pangong Lake,” Veer’s voice said from the back of the darkened room, “in Ladakh. I took a group of Swiss birdwatchers there a few years ago.” A whir and a click lit up another view of the lake. Ama said, “That’s one place in the hills where water won’t ever run short,” and there was a murmur of laughter until Veer said, “It’s salty water.” Ama came back with, “No need to spend on salt then, just boil the vegetables in it straight.”

The room was dark, crowded with shadows of people: all of the hillside – Charu, Ama and their three visiting relatives from a remote village, the deaf-mute twins Beena and Mitu, the clerk from the water board and his young son – had assembled to watch the magic of pictures from Veer’s just-unpacked projector. Ranikhet had only one battered cinema. It cost money. A free slideshow was a novel treat.

“We went by motorbike from Manali to Ladakh – through the Rohtang Pass, the Baralacha La, and we could even see the Karakoram.” The slides moved almost too quickly for us to register details as Veer showed us pictures of prayer wheels, exotic Buddhist dwellings, and the monasteries of Shey, Thikse, Alchi. It was remote, spectacular, and unfamiliar for those of us who had only seen such great heights from a distance. Another click: a view from the Ladakh plateau of barren land far below. Veer said, “That is China; half of Pangong lake falls in China. Nobody is allowed up that close to the boundary, but I knew someone in the Army. We left our motorbikes and trekked all over Ladakh and reached here in the end.”

“So if we start walking today in Ranikhet, one day we will reach China?” This was Ama.

Diwan Sahib said, “You’d get a bullet in your head when you crossed over.” Diwan Sahib had no patience with Ama’s garrulity and what he called her “animal husbandry department”. Every so often he had futile arguments with her over her goats lunching on the lilies and marigolds that still survived in his garden.

“Arre Ama,” the clerk said, “your forefathers and mine walked to China many times. That’s what my great grandfather told me. He went twice with some firanghis in the time of the British.”

There was a babble of voices. “Your great grandfather was a coolie,” Ama said. “What was he doing in China?” Himmat Singh gave a series of phlegmy coughs and struggled up a thought: “I have heard they eat tigers in China. And dogs. They also eat dogs.” “Aah, but then what do the leopards in China eat if the people eat the dogs?” the clerk wanted to know. They laughed. Charu, who had not spoken so far, said, “I would kill any leopard or Chinese who laid a finger on my Bijli.”

“That useless dog has a magic life,” Ama said. “So many dogs get eaten. But this one roams all over in the dark and next morning he’s sitting right there, by the stove, waiting for a roti to fall.”

I sat back, warm in my shawl, feet tucked into it, a woolly bundle listening to voices eddying over me. Diwan Sahib began to talk about the Great Game – the intrigues and spying, the explorers sent in disguise over the undiscovered massifs, passes, peaks, and ravines of the Himalaya by the Russians and the British looking to gain control of them. The names of early travellers fell from his lips like those of old friends: George Moorcroft crossed the fast-flowing Sutlej on the inflated skins of buffaloes and travelled disguised as a Hindu sadhu to search for the goat whose wool made Pashmina shawls. Nain Singh Rawat surveyed the Himalaya to map it accurately for the first time. He was a Pandit from our region, the Kumaon, said Diwan Sahib, and he reached Lhasa, Xinjiang, Nepal, and China not once but three times in the 1860s. His brother Kishen Singh Rawat went to Lhasa too. At that time nobody even knew exactly where Lhasa was.

How did they do that, Charu said in wonderment, on foot? To which Ama replied, impatient, “That is what was his bijniss. Other people run shops and offices, his work was to measure distances. Just like us: don’t we walk up and down the hills after cows day after day in rain and sun and snow? Can a city person do that?”

“You illiterate woman,” Himmat Singh said. “Walking Ranikhet’s slopes is not like walking through the mountains to China.”

“They could walk for days,” Diwan Sahib said, “Look at Corbett. When he was hunting the Chowgarh tiger, he went without food for about two days, and he was quite comfortable sleeping in the forks of trees.”

“Maybe he thought an underfed man would be less appealing to a hungry tiger,” Veer said. “And a lighter weight on the forks of those trees.”

I thought Diwan Sahib would lose his temper this time. Why was Veer attacking Corbett again? It was childish, the way he tried to antagonise Diwan Sahib. But Diwan Sahib went on as if Veer had not spoken and I relaxed in my shawl again. “Those people were made differently from us,” he said. Nain Singh Rawat had to use exactly 2,000 footsteps per mile, using a rosary with a hundred beads to keep count. Because the Chinese would have executed him if they found him, he travelled dressed as a lama, turning his prayer wheel, in which he had hidden a compass.

For the moment everyone was too busy talking to remember they were in the middle of a slideshow and that there were many more slides to see. Veer was behind me, at the back of the room. If I turned an imperceptible fraction, I could glimpse him outlined against the faint light that came in from the veranda through a murky old glass pane, could sense his eyes upon me in the darkness. I curled deeper into my shawl, my arms holding my shoulders close. He had bought the murukkus because he had heard me saying how much I missed them – I had said it only once, in passing. But he had remembered – and the pickle, which by some miracle was from my father’s factory. I wished the room were empty and his show for me alone.

Veer fiddled with the projector, and a new picture flickered on the wall, turning it grey 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 grey-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 16,000 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 swivelled towards 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-coloured 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 enamelled 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 towards 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. “Travelling 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 torch 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 torch 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 callipers, 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 rumoured that he manufactured poisons in that den, and the rumour 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 of Veer all along my legs. Twice, by accident, our shoulders touched, and he did not move away. The Scop’s Owl began its low, periodic call, a sound so muted that it emphasised 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 torch 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, torch 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.