The Folded Earth

16


My house was very small. It had two rooms, and a tiny kitchen with two doors. One of the doors opened towards a rockface that in summer was covered with wildflowers. There was so little space between the rockface and the door that you had to walk between them sideways. The larger room, on the ground floor, led out to a north-facing veranda where I had hung geranium overhead that trailed pink and red when it flowered. Every afternoon, after I finished with the school and factory and had had my tea with Diwan Sahib and read the papers with him, I would come back and sit in my veranda, waiting for the sun to set over the snow-peaks.

I was not a good housekeeper, but I could not bring myself to employ someone to clean up. I did not have the spare cash, and besides I had never liked people going through my belongings. The only time someone – a childhood friend – came to stay with me in Ranikhet, she was lecturing me by the second morning: “Maya, for heaven’s sake! You’re never going to use that broken lamp again! And this ancient toaster? Has it ever worked? Why don’t you throw out that ugly tin trunk and get a proper side table? And, my God, look at those cobwebs!” When I told her cleaning cobwebs had been Michael’s department because I was not tall enough, she gave me an exasperated look and climbed onto a chair with a broom in her purposeful hand. She kept picking clothes out of my cupboard, holding them up for display between a finger and thumb, and saying, “Hey, there are flood victims who would turn this down if you donated it to them!”

Sometimes I did have cleaning fits, but just as I was about to throw something out, I would be held back by a memory: that’s the chipped blue ceramic bowl Michael and I bought when we set up house, that patched and darned sweater I never wear is the one my mother knitted for me, and that’s the toaster Diwan Sahib gave me during my first month in Ranikhet – it fused in a blaze of sparks the very next week and resisted all attempts to repair it, but still. Over the years, the clutter had become part of the comforting topography of the house, and after I had locked up at night and drawn the curtains and sat down with my glass of rum, I felt the house sighing with me, as if it were unwinding as well.

The cleanest part of the house was the earthen courtyard around it, which Charu swept every morning as if it were an extension of her own yard. She would come early with a broom, her hair and mouth covered with her dupatta, sweep and rake and sweep again, and leave in a cloud of dust and dry leaves. She would return a minute later and sprinkle a mug of water before the door to settle the dust, and when the smell of damp earth reached me inside the house, I would know she had finished.

In the days after Gouri Joshi died, Charu did not come. I did not expect her to: her grandmother said she was moping and hardly managing her chores. Then she did begin to come once more, but the sweeping was haphazard and the leaves remained unraked in many places. I watched her listless movements and was reminded of Mr Chauhan’s despair over the filth in the cantonment and his promise to turn Ranikhet into a Switzerland. He had said he would do something about the vandalism at the graveyard where Michael was buried, but he had done nothing that I could see. The lilies had struggled back to life, however, and no more damage had been done.

Charu disappeared for long hours with – and sometimes without – the other cows and goats. She often left Bijli behind too, tied to the door-post, indignant and restless, barking all afternoon. She left Ama to do all the work in their vegetable patches. When she ate at all, she poked at the rice on her plate, pushing much of it away. I heard her grandmother’s strident voice shout at her. “You think food grows on trees? Half your rice is thrown into the cow’s feed every day. You need to starve a day or two and then you’ll know what food is about.”

I did not know it then, but Charu did: Ranikhet appeared to be a dead end to the hotel manager and he had decided to move back to Delhi. With him would go his cook, her Kundan Singh. Charu had never been to the city he would go off to: she had no way of picturing his future life far away. What unimaginable lures and temptations did it hold? She did not know if she would ever see him again.

Later, when things fell into place, I was able to understand what I had seen that summer when I went deep into the forest one afternoon. I had followed my usual route to the temple until, near Westview Hotel, I decided I would walk along the stream instead, to see where it led. I went down a low slope and with every step seemed to leave a little more daylight behind. There was a path of sorts, beaten by human feet for some of the way, then the undergrowth grew dense and thorny bushes began to catch on my clothes. Somewhere I could hear a whistling thrush. Its piercing, clear song cut its own path through the forest, each surge of melody punctuated by a few seconds of rustling quiet.

I had not thought of it for years, but the air, the trees, the aquarium-green light all around, took me back to a forest near Hyderabad where I had once gone with Michael. It was a wilderness with a half-dry stream somewhere in it and we had chanced upon it during one of our joyrides on Michael’s motorbike. He had been teaching me how to ride it, seated behind me, putting his hands over mine on the handlebars to guide me. For several days we had had nothing but painful falls, collisions and quarrels, but that day I had finally got the hang of it and was speeding down the empty road, jubilant, when Michael suddenly said, “Stop!”

The sound of the motorbike died down, I parked it at the edge of the forest, and we walked into it, hand in hand, as if we were children in a fairy-tale entering an enchanted wood. Broad-leaved trees, stacked close and deep, blocked out the sun, their green looking black in the shade. There was dark earth and mulch underfoot, and a drumstick tree with a furry blanket of caterpillars over its trunk. The air was sweet with the dense scent of the tiny white flowers of wild curry leaf plants. I picked up a dead branch to use as my machete, but it broke in half with my first swipe at the brush. I plucked a red wildflower and stuck it behind my ear. We laughed a lot. I felt beautiful. My hair was loose, it fell to my waist. We found a small, dead bird on our path. I mourned for the loneliness of its mate. Michael had a smile in his eyes when he said, “The mate is happily mating with a newer, bluer, larger bird.”

“If I died,” I had said, “you would find a newer, bluer bird within a week, men are like that.”

And Michael had said, “You wouldn’t wait for me to die to find another man, look at the dozens humming around your ears like butterflies on a flower.” He had stopped walking then and kissed me everywhere, his urgent hands inside my clothes.

* * *

I was summoned to the present by the call of a fox. It was some distance away, invisible in the undergrowth. Its cry made the forest seem quieter and more deserted than I had noticed, the road very distant. The canopy formed overhead by the trees hid most of the sky. In the stillness, I heard voices, and then saw them: Charu and Kundan Singh. They were a little way ahead, in a clearing, the sun giving their hair golden halos as if they had stepped out of a painting. I stopped, hardly daring to breathe. I noticed every detail: his white and blue shirt, his mop of hair, the way his eyebrows overhung his deep-set eyes, her dupatta, the green of a tender new leaf, his young man’s Adam’s apple, the brass amulet tied to his neck with a thick black thread, the sparkling green glass studs in her ear lobes, the look on her face of desperation.

Her back was against a giant chestnut tree. He stood facing her, barricading her between his arms against a tree. I heard him saying, “I will be back, you’re not to worry, I will be back. You must wait. I’ll write to you.”

She said, “You’ll write!”

“Yes!” he said, fervent. “Every week. Every day.”

She turned her face up to him and I could see tears in her eyes. In a mumble so quiet I could hardly hear it, she said, “But I can’t read. I can’t read or write. I never learned.”

He looked flummoxed for a second. Then in a pleading voice he said, “I’ll do everything else. You just have to learn to read and write. Or find someone to read for you.”

She laughed despite the tears. “And how will I get someone else to read out your letters? What will you write about? What you cooked for lunch, what the manager said to you?”

He buried his fingers and then his face in her hair. “I’ll write in riddles,” he said. “It is only you who will know what I am saying.” He twisted the studs in her ear and said, “Give me one of these, and when we meet again, it’ll be back with the other. It’ll be our lucky charm.”

It was about a fortnight later, early in May, that Charu came to me with a letter from her friend “Sunita” and asked me to teach her to read and write.