The Folded Earth

4


In colonial times, the summer months in Ranikhet meant horse races and moonlit picnics, and even now we have a “season” when the town is crowded with people who come up from the plains to escape the heat. They are everywhere for a few weeks: tourists, summer residents, day trippers. Scholars would turn up to see Diwan Sahib. Trekkers heading for the high Himalaya paused in Ranikhet en route; all kinds of people wandered in and out of the Light House as if it were a public monument. If they found Diwan Sahib in the garden they stopped to pump him for information about the hills or to photograph him as a relic of the Raj, a bona fide old Indian nobleman. Sometimes supplies would arrive for one of Veer’s trekking groups, or middlemen tasked with requisitioning porters in the Ranikhet bazaar would come and stay for hours, poring over details. There was a young assistant Veer had employed, who was stationed at the house from time to time. He hovered all day, appearing to do nothing more substantial at all.

Ever since Veer had taken up residence at the Light House, Diwan Sahib’s writing had barely progressed. If I asked him for new chapters to type, he waved his hand at whoever happened to be visiting and said, “I can’t write when there are so many people. I’ll wait till the season ends and then we’ll finish chapter seven. I’ll get the book done this year, that’s a promise. I don’t have much more time. That Welsh poet, what was his name? We learned his poem in school – ‘Job Davies, eighty-five/Winters old and still alive/After the slow poison/And treachery of the seasons.’ – did you have to learn it too?”

“No,” I said.

“You should. Good poem. I’m like Mr Davies – worse – I’m eighty-seven! Every morning I wake up and tell myself, ‘What, still alive?’ I truly don’t have long.”

“You don’t want to write any more,” I said. “There’s too much else to do.” I pointed to the bottle on the table next to him. Now that Veer kept him supplied with superior alcohol, Diwan Sahib’s durbar began soon after breakfast and went on long into the afternoon. He would keep postponing lunch, pouring himself yet another drink, waving Himmat Singh away each time he said, “Shall I serve lunch, Sa’ab?” Mr Qureshi too was under the spruce tree nursing his steel glass on most days. He seemed to have abandoned his workshop to his son.

“Maybe if you wrote for an hour or so in the morning before starting on the gin?”

“What nonsense,” Diwan Sahib said, and poured himself another large measure. “Don’t be such a schoolteacher. My taste buds feel as if they’ve come back to life after twenty years dormant.” He turned to Mr Qureshi and said, “You were going to tell me something. This girl interrupted you.”

“Yes, yes, Diwan Sahib, as I was saying, mysterious are the ways of man.” Mr Qureshi smiled, round-faced, and red-nosed, already a little tipsy. “Do you know, Maya, a car came in for servicing yesterday – a Honda City, belongs to that new doctor at the nursing home, what’s his name? Sharma or Verma. Anyway, the boys started work on the car. They’re strapping young fellows, foul-mouthed and stoned half the time. When they opened the boot to get the spare tyre, right there, one of them almost fell over with fright. There was a head in the boot. Long hair and all.”

“A human head?” I said. “You mean a dead body?”

“Aha, Maya!” Mr Qureshi chuckled. “Scared you, didn’t I? No, when they looked again they realised it was a plastic head, a stand for a wig. There was a wig on it: long curling red hair. Even had two blue hairclips. So what do we do then? Of course we phone the doctor and we say, ‘Sir, you left a wig in your car.’ And the doctor shouts, ‘What wig? What do you take me for? Are you trying to insult me? I have a full head of hair and it’s my own, I’ll come to your workshop and you can pull it if you like and see if it comes off,’ he says, and bangs the phone down, so angry. There is no explanation. None, Diwan Sahib. Correct me if I am wrong, but mysterious are the ways of mankind. I have kept the head in the showroom of the workshop. Maya, you can come and see it if you don’t believe me. What was it doing in the boot? No idea.”

Diwan Sahib said, “Why won’t we believe you? Stranger things than this happened in Surajgarh in my time. Now let me tell you – ”

And Corbett was filed away for another day.

One afternoon, when I came to his lawn with the newspapers, I found Diwan Sahib smoking. I said nothing, but a look passed between us. He took a long, defiant drag and after a pause blew out a lungful of smoke. He tapped his Rolls Royce cigarette case and displayed a neat row of filter tips. If he had been a child he might have stuck his tongue out at me. He had stopped smoking with great difficulty three years earlier. He had sworn then that he was free of the siren call of addiction, and that he would never put himself through stopping again.

I marched into the house and found Veer’s assistant there. He was a limp, shy young man from Dehra Dun, who spent most evenings pacing in the garden murmuring to his wife on a mobile. He was a follower of the Radha Soami sect and cooked his own vegetarian meals, minus even onion and garlic, on a separate gas stove that he had set up on a back veranda. If chicken or fish was cooked in the house, he lit incense sticks by the dozen and his face assumed a rigid expression of martyrdom. He regarded cigarette packets and bottles of gin as objects that had been planted in the house by the Devil in person. He looked horrified when I asked him how Diwan Sahib had laid his hands on cigarettes. “None of us smoke, Maya Mam,” he said. “Some visitor must have left the cigarettes in the house.” They happened to be Diwan Sahib’s old brand too. “What’s a couple of cigarettes after three years?” Diwan Sahib shouted towards us. “Do you think I have no self-control?”

That evening, when I told Ama about the cigarettes, she gave me her all-knowing look and said with a cackle of sarcastic laughter, “Life’s improved for Diwan Sa’ab ever since his nephew came back! So much more to drink, and now cigarettes! The nephew will kill his uncle with trying to make him happy, just you wait and see.” I pretended not to understand what she was implying and busied myself with other work. I did not want her to suppose I was encouraging malice. She had never liked or trusted Veer, and she had told me so in the early days, not thinking he would actually start living at the Light House or that he and I would become friends. She was too politic now to be open about her dislike, but sometimes the temptation was irresistible.

Diwan Sahib lost weight because of eating less and drinking more, and that made him look both younger and frailer. However his eyes, spider-webbed with wrinkles, retained their wicked gleam. One afternoon, a buxom woman from somewhere in East Anglia arrived out of the blue, saying she was writing a love story based on the lives of Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. “It is vital to my project, Sir, that I see the letters I believe to be in your possession. If you allow me a day’s access to the papers, I’m willing to share my royalties with you.” She came in a flowing silk sari that repeatedly slid off her shoulder to bare her cleavage, so that, Diwan Sahib later said, two roads converged in a low silk blouse, and he wished he could have travelled both.

When she met with no success the first day – she had installed herself at the Westview Hotel – she returned on each of the next two mornings. Her long black hair was in a bun crested by a red rose one day, a creamy magnolia the next. She sat very straight, adjusted the flower, and looked at Diwan Sahib, focusing her energies through her large pleading eyes. She gifted him a shawl from the local army widows’ co-operative, and, the next day, a bottle of rum.

She tried to talk about Nehru, but Diwan Sahib remorselessly steered the conversation to Corbett. “Did you know,” he said, “that he died the day before Einstein? Einstein stole his thunder. Was Corbett a lesser man than Einstein? If I were lost in the jungles here” – he waved a hand this way and that – ”I hope you are careful when you walk around after dark? And that you know that a slow-moving snake that wriggles as it approaches is very likely a poisonous one? That is when you need Corbett with you, Madam, and not Einstein – when you want someone to be able to tell from looking at scratch marks on rocks, which animals have passed, how far they are from you, why the langur is calling from that tree, why the barking deer leaped away across the path. Do you follow me?”

The woman’s eyes had glazed over, but she nodded.

“But who remembers Corbett now, other than a few senile ancients like me?”

It was only on the afternoon the woman was leaving and had come to say goodbye that Diwan Sahib chose to relent. “Oh, I forgot,” he said, “Nehru came here to Ranikhet with the Mountbattens. He dropped in to see me too – that chair – your chair? He sat on that very chair with a gin and bitters in one hand and a cigarette in the other.”

The woman jumped from her chair, stared at it in disbelief, and scrabbled in her handbag for her camera as Diwan Sahib continued, “Why don’t you drive down to Holm Farm? They have a framed picture there, of Edwina, Dickie, Nehru and Mr Upadhyaya, who presided over the place.” He returned placidly to his newspaper while she gave him a look that combined excitement, impatience, and irritation in equal measure, before rushing off to her driver to consult him about the practicalities of a detour to the Holm Farm Hotel on her way to the station.

Diwan Sahib watched the car disappear into a cloud of dust, then went inside. He poured us both a rum and we sank into our usual chairs. For a while, exhausted with talk, we did not speak. Above the fireplace was a tall vase filled with half-dead pink roses into which Himmat Singh had stuck a few blood-red Aztec lilies. It was so quiet that I thought I could hear when, from time to time, the decaying rose petals dropped onto the mantelpiece. Flames ate at a small log in the fireplace. A fire was lit in that room every day, even on the hottest summer evenings, to kill the damp and protect the books from silverfish.

“The prime minister of a newly independent country,” Diwan Sahib said after a long spell of silence. “Devoted to the wife of his departing Viceroy. Is it a surprise that this woman wants to turn it into a lurid romance?” He emptied half his glass in one gulp. He sighed, tilted his head back on his chair and shut his eyes.

When after a long pause he began to speak, it was half to himself. His eyes were still shut and his voice so low that I had to lean forward to catch his words. It was a strange relationship, he said. They began to feel a closeness to each other at the end of Edwina’s time in India, on the brink of her departure, and after that they could hardly bear to be parted for a single moment. Some of their letters were written when they were both in the same room, some were written moments after they had left each other; there was one scribbled across an official banquet’s menu card. In the years to follow, they were rarely alone together, and saw each other only for brief snatches when one of them visited on the way to somewhere else. They were constantly among other people. Yet they wrote to each other every day for several years. The letters came and went by diplomatic bag. Each one was numbered because they were afraid the letters might fall into the wrong hands. And why should they not have feared that eventuality? So much in those letters was dangerous for people in public life. Nehru had called his friendship with Edwina a battle between convention and chemistry in which chemistry had won – more or less. It could not be allowed to win entirely. Public life is relentless, it is unforgiving, it is held together by conventions and the fear of any threat to them. “I should know,” Diwan Sahib said.

His voice took on the tones of someone reciting a poem: “I lose myself in a dreamland, which is very unbecoming in a prime minister. But then I am only incidentally a prime minister.” A man willingly imprisoned by his political destiny, said Diwan Sahib, separated from the woman he loved by duty, distance, necessity, even instinct. If either of them abandoned their own orbits, Nehru had told Edwina, they would both be terribly unhappy. The impossibility of their love was also what sustained it.

Diwan Sahib’s brow remained furrowed in thought. He stared at the fire as if reading from it. I hardly dared say a word, never having seen him so lost to the world around him. He had not once sounded like this talking about Corbett. I could not understand it. The story was startling, of course, but surely so well known and often repeated that it had lost its power to move anyone, especially someone as unsentimental as Diwan Sahib. You are starting to sound like a romance writer too, I would have said, if he had not looked so unlike himself.

“There were letters in which Nehru said he felt Edwina’s presence like a fragrance in the air,” Diwan Sahib murmured on. “She said she felt a sense of peace and happiness with him as she did with no-one else. He sent her things to remind her of the country she had left: birch bark from Kashmir, leaves, stones. Edwina had even given him a ring before leaving India. When she died in her sleep, alone in Borneo, Nehru’s letters were by her bed. She travelled with them everywhere. It was what she read before she slept every night.”

“Why didn’t you write a book on this instead of on Corbett?” I said, when his next pause grew too long.

He blinked as if he had been asleep. His face was etched with pain, but he rearranged it into an imitation of his usual half-seriousness. “Because of Edwina’s dog, entirely because of her dog,” he said. Edwina had a dog called Mizzen. She did not know what to do with it when the time came to leave India. Given England’s quarantine rules, the dog would have had to be isolated for several months before being allowed to re-enter the country. Edwina consulted Nehru and they agreed it was better to put it down than make it suffer quarantine; the dog was too old to survive it, they thought. “That did it for me,” Diwan Sahib said. “All those gardens at his prime-ministerial doorstep and the man didn’t offer to adopt it and let it live out its remaining years in peace? How do you think an old dog like me feels about that? You won’t put me down, will you, if I become inconvenient?”

“Do you really have any of their letters?” I asked him. “Couldn’t I see them once?” I had had a hunch all along that he had made it up to amuse himself watching people like the woman from East Anglia pay him obeisance.

“Maybe I have them, maybe I don’t,” Diwan Sahib said. “Maybe, maybe not. You’ll find out.” He had shut his eyes again. “I should chop this house into firewood,” he said, his words slurring. “Too big for me, too big – ”

He was drowsy now. He slouched in his big armchair, and in the dim light he looked shrivelled, old and haggard, all bones and loose skin. Above him, the photograph of his dogs in silhouette was scarcely visible, but it made me think of Veer’s stories of Diwan Sahib’s youth: his parties, his horses, the music, his women. He was receding before my eyes, fading out of reach.

I felt the need to do something to stop him disappearing from my life. I pulled a few pages from one of the old bundles on Corbett that had emerged a month ago and said, “Tonight I’m going to type up a few of these and we’ll go over them tomorrow. O.K.? We’ll start again. We’ll find out if we missed anything in the third draft.”

He did not answer. He was lost again in his own thoughts, staring into the sputtering flames.

* * *

That night, I sat up with his papers, and the sound of my typewriter clacked into the night. I typed page after page, overcome by a sense of loss, which, if it had not been overpowering, would have struck me as absurd. How had I missed knowing the man who wrote those words at the time he wrote them? And if his time was short, as he insisted more and more often these days, could I bring myself to look into the abyss of Diwan Sahib’s certain absence?

This is what I typed from Diwan Sahib’s manuscript that night: it was his statement of purpose, his optimistic, tongue-in-cheek plan for a biography – when he had not known the project would take him forty years and still remain incomplete.

Being petrified ever since birth of even the most minor forms of physical injury, it is conceptually difficult for me to grasp something as foolish as bravery. I can only gape in wonder at people who do not require wild horses to drag them onto a cricket pitch, at batsmen who face fast bowlers without being shackled by iron to the wicket. I am similarly bowled over by the idiocy of people who go walking of their own free will in forests where they might be eaten by bears or be clawed by tigers whose talons can sometimes be as sharp as those of certain women I have known. Next to schoolteachers, a tiger seems to me the most terrifying thing in the world, and its immediate extinction (or at least caged enclosure) is a wild inner desire that I have to keep suppressing, given that I am writing a book on Jim Corbett. One look at a tiger’s dental arrangements is sufficient to convince anyone that vegetarianism is not a notion likely to have been entertained even by its remote ancestors. In early youth I was regularly carted off into a forest by my employer, the Nawab of Surajgarh. I was informed by him that the object of these expeditions was to try and glimpse one of these beasts. After I had got over the feeling that either he was joking or lunatic, I transcended the condition of fright in which one merely sobs uncontrollably, and was restrained from the suicide I was attempting by jumping off the swaying pachyderm transporting us in the direction of Blakean fearful symmetry. The Nawab had a profound effect on my early predisposition towards being separated, via a stout iron cage, from all species of four-legged life larger than myself. In part, this accounts for my fascination with Jim Corbett, who seems to have been braver even than the Nawab of Pataudi when he captained our national cricket team. His life was years of shunting and hooting, then hunting and shooting – he was a railwayman before he became a celebrated shikari. By his own account Corbett voluntarily, even assiduously, did the very last thing I would ever do, namely “get in touch” (as he sweetly puts it) with man-eaters. As we know from his riveting tales, the man-eaters were not equally keen to get in touch with him. Once he was on their tails, so to speak, they found it hard to shake him off – which we can’t either, once we get hooked to his tales. Man-eaters of Kumaon looks to me like India’s third greatest storybook, after the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. How did Corbett acquire the art of writing so brilliantly? He read James Fenimore Cooper; Jack London and Mark Twain may also have influenced him. He seems to have read fiction set in frontier territory; novels of exploration and adventure. In my book on Corbett, I want to model myself on Corbett’s tales, telling a sequence of stories that provide a picture of Corbett along with glimpses of his context. I want to give a sense of original, archival fact-finding. There will be entertaining digressions that show how Corbett’s immersion in wildlife was a substitute for the wilderness he suffered in relation to women because of a possessive and devoted sister. The chief source of information on Corbett is a sheaf of notes – thirteen pages dictated by the same sister (whose name was Maggie) to her friend in Kenya, Ruby Beyts, where she and Jim spent their last years. Maggie functioned for India’s greatest naturalist as a mother, sister and wife, much as Dorothy did for Wordsworth. I am starting this book today – the 13th of September, 1967. I plan to finish the book in two years, at most three. But will anyone ever publish it?