The Folded Earth

5


Charu hovered at home around the time the postman made his rounds, pretending she had work to do there. She looked up each time she heard Bijli bark and subsided when she saw there was nobody in particular the dog was barking at. For a few days after a letter from Kundan Singh, I could hear her happy voice everywhere. She tripped down the shortcut through the forest to the bazaar with canisters of milk for regular customers, and when she returned, her face would be wreathed in smiles, although her shoulders were bent with the leaking sackfuls of rotting vegetables that she collected from the market for her cows and carried home on her head. Then as the days passed, and the gap between letters lengthened, her ebullience dwindled.

Each time a letter came, I asked her if she wanted me to write a reply and she shook her head. One day she said, “I’ll write when I can write by myself.” She was improving. She no longer forgot spellings from one day to the next. To begin with I was teaching her words like “hum”, “tum”, and “theek” that I thought would most quickly help her frame her first independent letter. Meanwhile she made me write Kundan’s address on stamped envelopes once in a while and she posted him things – leaves, pine needles, pressed flowers – that I came to know about when he mentioned them in his replies.

“It is very hot here,” the letter I read to her that June said.

You will never be able to imagine how hot. In the afternoon I can see flies falling dead out of the air. When I come back to my room my bed has dead flies on it. There are dust storms here instead of rain. The wind picks up dust from the ground and blows it around. It looks dark with the dust as if it’s very cloudy. It stings your eyes. It is very hard to cook in this heat. The kitchen is as hot as a pot on the fire. The water in the tap is hot enough for tea. Yesterday I went to a fair after work. There were dancers like in movies. It had bright lights and a giant wheel like we had seen once in the army grounds. But I remembered that wheel and did not want to climb into this one alone for a ride. I walked around and thought of walking in the mountains. I bought earrings with red stones. It is pretty, but not as pretty as the one I have, with a green stone. I will write again.

Your Loving Friend.

Kundan Singh’s large-lettered scrawl covered all three sides of his inland letters, and all the space on the flaps, as if he were determined not to waste a millimetre. His letters were in simple language, and crowded with vivid details from his days. The landscape of his life became clearer with each blue inland that arrived. He described his room: it was a small one over the garage. From it, he could sometimes hear a lion roar at night – the house was close to Delhi’s zoo. Not far from the house was Purana Quila, the ruins of an ancient fortress. He had never been on the boats that sailed around in the fortress’ moat, but he dreamed of doing so one day, with his “dear friend in Ranikhet”.

Kundan Singh was originally from Nepal, and had a sister, for whose dowry he was saving. His family lived on the outskirts of Siliguri, a town in the plains at the eastern end of the Himalaya. His father made a sort of living as a gardener, odd job man and chowkidar. He had struggled all his life and dreamed that some day his son would get a government job. But Kundan Singh had skipped school and joined a local hotel instead, as a helper, from where he had progressed to his present job.

His employers appeared to be fond of him. The woman (whom he had nicknamed Jhadu because she was very thin and particular about cleanliness) often bought him clothes and gave him extra money to send home. Their house had a deep veranda shaded by chiks made of khus. I had to explain to Charu that chiks were blinds made of a kind of grass, khus, which became fragrant when dampened. The other servants sprinkled the khus with water before guests arrived. They filled tall vases with scented white tuberoses and dusted the pictures. On summer evenings, Kundan’s employers and their friends sat in the veranda looking into the large old trees that shaded the lawn, with a big cooler whirring at them. The tables around them began filling with empty bottles and glasses as the evening passed. One of the frequent visitors was a woman who dressed in very short skirts and long earrings; she drank the most, and also smoked long cigarettes. “She looks like a Nepali,” Kundan had written to Charu, “but she may be Chinese. She wears strange clothes. You can see her legs from top to bottom. She drinks five or six bottles of beer in one evening.”

The short-skirted woman wanted one day to learn how to make mutton the way hill people cooked it. She had demanded a lesson and Jhadu had told him to be ready. Kundan, who had seen cookery shows on television, placed all the ingredients he would need – chopped, diced, ground, or powdered – ready in a line of little bowls. He had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly and cleared all the surfaces so that it looked as much like T.V. kitchens as he could make it. But when the guests arrived, he felt shy. “I did not want to teach anyone anything,” he wrote in his letter. “I stayed in my room. Then Jhadu sent for me.”

When he came into the kitchen, still reluctant, the woman laughed and said, “What, you don’t want to teach me your secrets?” She stood by him and watched and took notes as he cooked the meat. She kept dipping in a spoon, blowing on it and tasting the gravy. One of the other friends took pictures of them cooking. They gave Kundan copies of the photographs, one of which he sent to Charu. It was the first photograph he had ever sent her.

I looked at it before giving it to her. The kitchen in the picture was shiny and new, like something from a magazine. The friend, a pretty young woman with slanting eyes and high cheekbones, was in a slate-grey mini-skirt, very chic. Earrings dangled to her shoulder and a long silver necklace slid down the centre of the low-cut, ivory-coloured top she wore. She was smiling at the camera, a lovely smile. Kundan too was smiling from over the steam in his cooking pot, which had made his face shine. His mop of hair had grown and the brass amulet at his neck blazed in the camera’s flashlight.

When Charu looked at the picture she did not smile. And for the first time, she did not spring about light-footed, humming and chattering, as she usually did after receiving a letter. The next few days she went to the market with her canisters of milk banging sullenly against her legs, and on her way back with the sack of rotting vegetables on her head, she slashed at every bush she passed with her stick.