The Folded Earth

14


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

I turned away to go, without waiting for tea or our newspaper session. He said, “What is it? Why do you look as if you walked into a tree?”

Diwan Sahib could be perverse. When you least thought you would find sympathy he could be kindness personified. Yet when you felt battered, afraid, uncertain, he might turn it all into a joke. It was with some reluctance that I told him what had happened at the graveyard. A mocking smile began curling his lips before I had finished.

He said, “A few drunks go berserk and you report it as if the end of the world has come. They must have been college boys, looking for a lonely place to go wild in … and the bazaar booze shop is down the road from that graveyard.”

“It is not down the road from the booze shop, the bazaar is two kilometres away.”

“What is two kilometres these days? Boys have motorbikes.”

“It’s not a few drunks,” I said. “Don’t you read the papers? Haven’t you noticed how missionaries are being threatened and beaten up? I told you how those election workers threatened me and Miss Wilson. The poor woman was terrified.”

“The poor woman! You’re constantly complaining, ‘Agnes-this, Agnes-that, Agnes needs her vocal cords changed, no wonder Jesus didn’t want Agnes Wilson for His bride’.” Diwan Sahib spoke in high-voiced imitation of my own. “So why is your heart bleeding for her now?”

“That’s different. This is serious, I’m sure this is another way of giving the Church a message.” I was stumbling over my words in my anger and tried to slow down. “I’ve noticed things going wrong there over the last few months. Most of the old gravestones have chunks missing. Some of the writing on them is wiped off. That beautiful angel on little Charlie Darling’s grave is headless.”

“Why have graves, is what I say. The man’s dead and you hold onto his bones. It’s all molecules.” Diwan Sahib looked sullen and obstinate. “Throw the ashes into a fast-flowing river. Or scatter them in the air. Much more poetic.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” I said in as sharp a voice as I dared. “That graveyard is sacred to some people.”

Diwan Sahib refused to take me seriously. He poured himself another drink, topped it carefully with an equal amount of water, and flung himself back into his chair. “Chandan and Puran and Joshi and Tiwari,” he said. “I suppose they’re all hiding country bombs in their haystacks and shops and cowsheds to go and attack your precious school and church and jam factory, one of these days. And your chaiwallah at the temple, who spots a leopard for every cup of tea he sells? He may be manufacturing gunpowder boiled in leopard blood as we speak. Look for another job, Maya, while there is time. And go back to your maiden name.”