The Folded Earth

PART TWO





1


It was early one morning that summer, Diwan Sahib still rumpled with sleep, holding his mug of tea, and I on my way to school, cutting through his lawn. A distant humming sound that came closer every second had stopped me in my tracks and brought him out from his bedroom in his night-clothes.

The sound resolved itself into an olive green helicopter and I said, “It’s just a helicopter.” As I started on my way again, Diwan Sahib said, “It may not be just a helicopter. Not in an army town. Have you any idea what goes on here? This is a town that lives by secrets. State secrets. Army secrets. Grubby little personal secrets.”

He looked more ill-tempered and bleary-eyed than was usual for his early mornings, and looked set to embark on a long story I would not be able to interrupt. I quickened my pace and shouted over my shoulder at him, “It is just a helicopter, and I’ll see you after school.”

That day however, the helicopter noise was insistent, and there were two of them: circling the forests, first coming down very low, then swooping away in another direction, chopping up the sky with their blades. Was it a General visiting, or did a forest fire needed monitoring? Each time the sound approached, people paused in whatever they were doing to look up and puzzle over it.

The restless sound echoed through the skies all day. By mid-afternoon we noticed dark plumes of smoke in the distance, and some people claimed they had heard an explosion. At Bisht Bakery, both customers and bakers were agreed that the Army was trying to find a Chinese spy who had slipped in through the northern border. By the time I reached Negi’s tea stall, the consensus had changed: an escaped terrorist was on the run and had set fire to something important.

On my way back from Negi’s, at about three o’clock, I saw Veer’s jeep turning a bend. I paused, waiting for him to stop and pick me up to drive me to the Light House, with a long detour for samosas. This was our ritual when he was in town. But today he drove past without even a wave. The road was empty. It was narrow. I had to stand aside to let him pass. He was close enough for me to see that he was wearing his dark glasses and a white shirt, that his backpack was on the seat next to him. I stayed where I was, sure he would realise his mistake and slam on his brakes further down the road.

The sound of his jeep died away. Once the cloud of diesel fumes cleared I resumed walking. I made myself focus my attention on the orange creeper that climbed a nearby pine, the yellow-throated marten that was making its way up a tree trunk, the kalij pheasants scuttling in the undergrowth, the mysterious fragrance that always hung over that particular curve on the road – all the while pushing away the thought that Veer had seen me and had not stopped.

When I reached Diwan Sahib and gave him his newspaper, I waited as long as I could, sipping my over-sweet tea, before asking with elaborate casualness, “Where’s Veer disappeared to?”

“He left all of a sudden,” Diwan Sahib said. “That boy’s a mystery to me. He was sitting here, staring at his computer, when his phone rang and within five minutes he was out of the house and in his car. Without a word to me. All he said to Himmat was that he would be away for a few days.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with – ” I looked up at the sky.

“What? Do you mean with this business of the helicopters?” Diwan Sahib said. “As far as I know, our young man has nothing to do with the Army or with helicopters. But I’m the old fool, the senile drunk, I’d be the last to know anything.” He looked as bad-tempered as he had that morning. After a minute’s silence he threw me one of his unexpected questions.

“How old were you during the Bangladesh war?”

I tried to remember when the Bangladesh war had been, without giving my ignorance away, but he knew me too well. “1971,” he said in a voice that could have cut glass.

“Do you know Michael and I had the same birthday?” I said. “Once we added up our ages and had a cake with 44 candles on our birthday. It was a chocolate-cream cake and it had two white sugar mice with pink eyes, I remember. I ate one of them and the tail got stuck in my throat because it was made of a dried noodle.” I giggled at the memory.

Diwan Sahib was looking at me as if I had lost my mind. Then he dismissed me with a you-foolish-woman shake of his head and I resigned myself to the story that had been postponed since that morning. During the Bangladesh war, one of the intriguing political figures was Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Diwan Sahib said, a man he remembered from pre-independence days. He was a largely self-educated villager who had turned fervent socialist. He threw himself into every revolt that came his way in British times, from the Khilafat movement to the non-cooperation movement. In the last days of the British Empire, it was rumoured that he had come to Surajgarh for a secret meeting with the Nawab to plot the state’s secession from India, but that was the time the Nawab had put Diwan Sahib in jail for plotting the opposite, so the Maulana and the Diwan had not met.

By 1970, Diwan Sahib went on, the Maulana was ninety, but still an incendiary demagogue, now fighting for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. Although he was violently against India, like most Bangladeshi political leaders he took refuge in this country when the war started. He was a frail old man of volatile temper, given to making provocative statements. He had to be kept out of the public eye, far away from the newspapers. Which place was secluded and secret enough? Naturally, Ranikhet, Diwan Sahib said, a town whose secrets were kept by the hills, by its remoteness, by the Army.

The Maulana hated the mountains. He kept urging the Indians to give him a few acres of land nearer Bangladesh, in Assam where his son was buried. But he was not allowed to leave Ranikhet until the war was over.

The helicopters drew closer again and louder. Diwan Sahib shouted over the noise, brandishing a book at me. “And do you know when I found out about this? Yesterday. From a book! Here was this walking archive, lodged maybe a mile away from me in one of those army houses, and I had no idea.” The sounds died down as the helicopters circled away and Diwan Sahib shook his head irritably at them. “Nothing makes you as irrelevant as retirement, Maya. There was a time when Nehru and Patel trusted me with secrets. All these bloody generals in Ranikhet used to beg for invitations to this house. And now?” He withdrew into scowling silence.

That evening, I sat in my veranda with a cup of tea, staring absently at the spot in the sky where the peaks would have been if the heat haze had not rubbed them out. I thought of the ninety-year old Maulana hidden away in Ranikhet’s silent hills, longing for his familiar rivers and swampy heat. My reasons for coming to Ranikhet were strangely similar to the Maulana’s, I thought, we had both been on the run.

My thoughts turned to Veer. From all he had said in passing over the last few months I had constructed a story in my head about his reasons for moving to Ranikhet. He had been an orphan looking for his home, and in his childhood he had found one, after a fashion, in the Light House. Diwan Sahib’s affection had been understated, but combined with the force of his personality it had been enough to make an impact on the lonely child. Veer was a man in search of a father figure and had found one in Diwan Sahib. Nothing else could account for his rough-edged tenderness towards the old man. He was short-tempered at times, he could be brusque or impatient, but when he sat listening for a whole evening to Diwan Sahib’s reminiscences of Surajgarh, or when he came back from Delhi with just the book his uncle had been looking for, it was clear their bond was a deep one. I saw them walking around the garden together sometimes, their heads level with each other, one white-haired and the other dark, each man tall and spare, uncanny in their similarity from the back, and it was oddly moving, as if Veer was a younger version of Diwan Sahib.

I had no doubt about it, Veer had come to Ranikhet to tend to Diwan Sahib in his last years.

When I once tested out this hypothesis on Ama, her response was succinct by her garrulous standards, and enigmatic: “Cares for his uncle, does he?” she said. Then added, “Cares for his uncle’s things, he does, the way he cleans up his papers, more than Himmat Singh has done in years.” Veer had in fact been dusting and sorting shelf after shelf of Diwan Sahib’s work papers in whatever little leisure time he had. In my eyes this made him more considerate than even his gifts of rum and thermal socks.

Now I wondered if there was more to Veer’s presence in Ranikhet. Was he somehow involved with the Army? Was the trekking a front for something else? Was he here merely to position himself as Diwan Sahib’s heir? Or like all the others, had he come after the letters of Edwina and Nehru?

I pushed away my teacup – and with it my suspicions. They were too far-fetched and too petty. Veer often had to leave town in a hurry because he had work in other places. He had never seen the need to explain his every action. There was no more to it.

In a day or two we forgot the helicopters and the Chinese spy, and the terrorist on the run – it had been another of those things the Army needed to do in its secretive, military way. The only person upon whom the helicopters appeared to make an impact was the clerk, whose son Gopal was preparing for trials to join the Army. Every morning, if I was awake that early, I heard the bugle that summoned the army cadets: four blasts at dawn, at intervals of two minutes in order to awaken them. For many months now, the bugle had been followed, moments later, by a light at the clerk’s house. Gopal woke with the cadets. On cold mornings, he emerged hunched in the mist of his own breath, crunching the frost-glassed earth in hawai chappals. At the baked-mud clearing outside his hut he did press-ups followed by at least forty sit-ups, a hundred sometimes. Once there was more daylight he did short sprints up and down the hill, and exercises that he had observed the cadets doing in their training area. Gopal had dreamed of being in the Army for years. Since his childhood he had watched soldiers in rows of khaki and green, hair sheared above their ears, marching down roads, carrying the gear of the day, anything from bedrolls to brooms, buckets, and guns. The soldiers looked at other people as if some invisible but impenetrable barrier cordoned them off. Gopal dreamed of being inside that magic cordon, marching with them.

All this time, his father had been proud of his martial son and boasted that his boy would retire as a Captain – at least. The mystery of the helicopters and the smoke made him take fright. He quarrelled volubly with his son for several days. He now wanted the boy to join the water board instead: they would give him a safe clerical job, he knew they would, a father’s job often passed to the son. “What’s good enough for your father is good enough for you, you fool!” I heard him shout. “The Army is not fun and games. You’ll thank me when you see your friends being sent off to die!”

One inexplicable consequence of the helicopters was that the post did not come for a week. Perhaps the two things were not connected; later we came to know that a postal strike had begun in the plains the same day. But rumbles began after the second day without the post and we heard that our letters were being looked through for clues, that the postmaster was involved in the trouble, and that the post office was the terrorists’ next target. I was unconcerned, but Charu grew more anxious with every passing day. The postman arrived in the late afternoon, sometimes in the evening: ours was his last call because he lived across the stream from us. Charu hovered nearby as the time of his homecoming approached, waiting for him to go limping past. She did not dare ask him if there was a letter. She had only received one letter, in May, soon after Kundan Singh had reached Delhi. Since then, there had been silence. Charu behaved as though an eternity had passed.