The Folded Earth

6


The long summer turned the hillsides to tinder, the rains would not come, and there had been no letter from Kundan since the one with his photograph. Charu was too anxious for anything beyond the mechanical performance of her chores. In earlier times she had always kept a caring eye out for Puran. She was adept at stealing grain from Ama’s stores for his deer and because she knew he fed much of his own food to the animals he made friends with, she made a few extra rotis smeared with salt and ghee to give him when Ama was not looking. Now, more often than not, she forgot and Puran began to go hungry.

He did not ask anyone at home for food. Food had a way of coming to him, he had discovered, if he went up to Negi’s tea stall on Mall Road. That was where Mr Chauhan caught sight of him every other day, and then his long-nursed rage against Puran took on an inexplicable intensity. “This beggar and all these dogs! Just wait, Mam, and you will see what I mean,” he said to me in a hiss one evening when I encountered him on Mall Road. At that moment, Puran was sitting on Negi’s crooked bench, looking innocuous enough. At the road’s edge, boys were arguing over a carrom board, and another group was cheering a volleyball game in the waste-lot next to Meghdoot Hotel. Girls in their brightest, tightest clothes walked up and down in pairs, casting sidelong glances at the boys, who stood around slapping each other’s shoulders, running fingers through their hair, laughing and talking louder when the girls passed. A jeep drew up from the bazaar, roof loaded with sacks and bundles, spilling out people and goat kids and black diesel smoke. Mr Chauhan covered his nose with a white, ironed handkerchief.

The younger Negi came to Puran with an expression of exaggerated patience. “Back again?” he said, and handed him a glass of tea and four fat slices of bread. Puran scurried away with his tea and bread across to the low parapet that ran all the way down the western edge of Mall Road, and sat on it eating in a hurry as if the bread was in danger of being snatched away from him. A ring of woolly dogs formed around him, looking up with pleading eyes and drooling tongues. Puran dropped them scraps and the dogs snarled and yelped as they fought over the food.

Mr Chauhan turned to me in triumph and said, “See? See what I mean? Yesterday I told my secretary – we were in the car – please make a note, I said, too many stray dogs. I would like a list – all dogs’ descriptions and names in one column and owners’ names in the second column. Any dog that does not have a licence must go. We will draw up regulations for licensing dogs and this … beggar? There should be no beggars in an army cantonment. We must be an example for the rest of India. I’ll fix this man. That is what I said.”

He returned to the door of his white Gypsy, whose bright red beacon had been spinning like an angry top all through our conversation. The car roared to life and took him away down Mall Road. Puran sat on the parapet oblivious. The stray dogs lolled at his feet, contented after their snack. The darkening mountains behind him began to swallow the blood-red sun as it turned from a disk to a sliver, slowly disappearing from view.

* * *

That night, I sat at my window in a trance gazing at the fires in the forest. What would happen to the animals that lived in the undergrowth if a wind were to fan those slow fires into a blaze? They were always in danger. One year Puran had run into the flames in the middle of the night and come back with a singed fox cub; another year he had rescued a baby monkey from the burning forest and the next morning a whole family of monkeys had appeared on our doorstep, agitating for its release in angry screeches and chatters.

I was lost in worried thoughts about Puran and Mr Chauhan’s threats to “fix” him when I heard a faint knock on my door downstairs. It was past ten o’clock, the neighbours were asleep. My light was the only one on; I was supposed to be correcting the English class test. At first I thought the knock was a figment of my imagination and applied myself to the exercise book I was working on. And then I heard it again.

Nobody visited this late in Ranikhet. My stomach gave a lurch. This was the call in the night I had known would come one day. Something had happened to Diwan Sahib and Himmat Singh had come to call me. I raced down the stairs and unlatched the front door in a panic.

It was Veer. His nose was peeling with sunburn and his face was thinner than usual from the weeks he had been away walking and climbing. His normally close-cropped hair had grown. That, and an unfamiliar beard, made him look a stranger. For a second my mind sprang to my last night with Michael when I had brushed my fingers over his clean-shaven cheeks in anticipation of the beard he came back with from every trek, when I had pinched the roll of fat around his stomach knowing he would lose it in the weeks away.

Veer was standing so close to me I could smell his sweat. His jeans were dirty and his shoes muddy. I was stabbed by a sudden, fierce need to bury my face in his shirt although it hung on him grimy with dirt. But I remembered the way he had driven away without a look at me. “You’re back,” I said. And then: “I’ve piles of work to finish.”

He took his shoes off at the door and brushed past me into my kitchen. He went to the shelf where I stacked old newspapers, and extracted one, which he laid on a corner of the kitchen floor. He placed his shoes on the precise centre of the newspaper and said: “See how muddy they are? All your rugs would have been filthy.” He helped himself to water from the steel filter and drank it in gulps, saying in between, “Hot, hot. Monsoon delayed. But C.N.N.’s predicted rain. It’ll come tonight. It’s so still. You can feel the thunder.”

He washed the glass and set it down with the same precision upon the kitchen counter, opened the fridge and examined the jug of milk, cubes of cheese, and the ageing lemon it contained, and shook his head saying, “Don’t you ever eat real food?” He wandered into my living room and paused before the framed picture. It was a photographic panorama of the peaks visible from Ranikhet, with their altitudes written alongside. Why was he examining a picture he must have seen in every house in these hills, I wondered? Was he planning to show me the places his climbs had taken him to? Now? At this hour?

Veer’s hands, resting on the back of a chair, were deep in the folds of a dusty-pink cardigan I had left draped on it. I noticed that his fingers were moving in the wool, kneading it. I knew then why he had come, even before he began to speak. “Every day on this trek I’ve been thinking that I’ve seen dozens of beautiful places in the world,” he said, “and most of its mountain ranges. And I know for sure that there’s nowhere else I would rather be than the Himalaya, and in the Himalaya, Ranikhet, and in Ranikhet, the corner of it that has you.” He turned away from the picture and towards me with a deep breath that he exhaled in a rush. His eyes shone, half-terrified, half-exultant, when unexpectedly, he pointed to his feet and laughed. “Look,” he said, “obviously you scare me more than the worst crevasse.” One of his socks was blue and the other dark green.

That night a cool, moist breeze began ruffling the trees, making a sound like the sea. Pine cones clattered onto the roof. The stars disappeared and thunder boomed. Sword-blades of brilliant white light sliced open the glowing red sky. The breeze grew into a wind that howled and banged. My little house on the edge of its spur became a tilting boat. The wind blew in sprays of rain through the open windows and we closed our eyes to the mist of water as if we were not in the mountains but on a wave-thudded beach. Far below, the still-smouldering, smoking forest began to calm at last.

* * *

Mindful that gossip was almost the only entertainment in a town as small as ours, we did our best to be discreet. Veer came rarely to my house. When he did, it was late at night and he left before dawn. He never left his shoes or umbrella outside my door. When we wanted to be together, we drove miles out of Ranikhet, to one of the isolated hillsides that surround the town. We put a rug on the pine-cushioned forest floor and lay there with nothing above us but the sky in its mesh of pine fronds. It felt as if we were the only two people in all of the jagged, wild, precipitous Himalaya – until we found a goat looking at us, soon followed by a curious goatherd. Sometimes children scampering between school and village through the jungle stopped and gawped at us until I felt ready to brandish a stick at them. But I still preferred this to Ama’s watchfulness, and to prevent anyone seeing us together when we returned, I got out of the jeep some distance from home and walked back by a different route, so that we arrived separately.

However foolproof our stratagems, the young widow’s liaison with her landlord’s relative very quickly became the talk of the hillside. Within days I felt gossip eddying around my ankles. One morning, from my window, I saw Ama in my garden, poking at the earth with her stick, apparently examining my plants. When I came outside she rambled on about the flowers on the cucumber vine, how her beans were being eaten by pests and about Puran’s deer, which had disappeared for two hours the day before, driving him to distraction. I was growing weary of waiting for her to come to the point, when she looked skyward as if she were going to talk about the rains and said, “Do you know about Gappu Dhobi’s younger Bahu?”

I only knew Gappu, our local washerman. “You mean that pretty girl who grazes his cows with a baby strapped to her back in a shawl?” I said. I knew her more as a cowherd than as Gappu’s daughter-in-law.

“Yes, yes, the same one. That baby … now that baby is not by her husband. Her husband died years ago, when she was very young, just like you. Her child from that marriage is about twelve now. Just days after the husband died, this girl – everyone calls her Gudiya, because she looks like a glass doll – she took up with the fellow’s brother. That man had an eye on her even when the husband was alive, and when the husband died, the brother – they call him Vikki – he barely waited till the ashes had cooled when he began to seduce his sister-in-law. Before they could change the sheet, the next man was in her bed. I am not making this up, the older sister-in-law told me – you know that woman who is at the public water tap every day gossiping about the universe as though she’s got nothing else to do?”

“So it was good in the end, wasn’t it?” I said. “The girl seems happily married now.”

“Aah – but they are not married, you see!” Ama said with a cackling laugh. “No, no, Vikki is too shrewd for that. Gudiya’s husband was a peon in a Gormint office in Haldwani. When he died, Gudiya started getting a fat pension – I’ve heard it is two thousand rupees now. You think this Vikki would let himself lose that? Oh no. He knows only widows get the pension. So he just took Gudiya to a temple and told her, ‘Now before God we are married, but if any Gormint babu asks, you must say you are a widow.’ And every year she goes to State Bank and has to put her thumb print on a paper to swear she has not married. Then they release her pension for the next year. Even the bank babus know it’s a lie, but what can they do?”

“So what?” I said. “Everyone breaks laws.”

“How do you trust a man so greedy he wants his wife to be called a widow? Now you look at our Diwan Sahib. He’s old, he has that house and money, just wait and see, there’ll be vultures circling him till he dies. People who haven’t cared a bit for him. All these years, who looked after him? You did, I did, Himmat did. But you wait and see what happens. Old men without children start sprouting relatives faster than weeds after rain. It’s not easy knowing who to trust. And women alone? We never know when – did I tell you about that girl in our village? She put her hand into the tin to measure out rice like every other day and before you knew it she was screaming and writhing on the floor and there was a snake – as thick as my arm – who had her hand its mouth.”

Veer and Ama disliked each other equally, I realised. One evening a discussion about Puran’s deer exploded into a nasty argument when Veer insisted that Diwan Sahib get rid of Ama and her family. “What purpose does it serve,” Veer demanded to know, “to waste all that space for some peasants to turn it into a squalid slum and for their cattle to breed dirt and flies and destroy every inch of the garden?”

Later, when I tried to calm him down, he said, “You don’t know a thing about that woman and her damned family. I’ve seen them here since I was a kid. They were all over the place, as if they owned it. There was that drunk of a son. He bullied me when I came for holidays, he stole from my uncle, he beat his wife to death here – ten feet from your cottage – how would you have liked that? The police came, there was a real stink. My uncle almost got charged just for being the landlord even though he was nowhere near the house when it happened. I was hardly ten, but I’ve never forgotten the sound of that woman screaming. I’ve tried for years to make my uncle see reason and make them go. He could pay them off. But the old man is such a mule.”

When the poison ran so deep it was no use reasoning. I did not want Ama to be evicted any more than Diwan Sahib did, nor was I going to have an argument with Veer. “Speaking of mules,” I said, “did you ever find out if mules need shoes? And elephants and bullocks? And zebras and wildebeest? Maybe we could discuss this while you walk me home?” I slipped my fingers into his and wove them together.

* * *

Ama was not the only one with barbs to dispense: everyone was discussing Veer and me. Mrs Chauhan gave me a knowing look when I met her on Mall Road one evening and said, “Arre, Maya Memsa’ab, you are looking ten years younger! Tell me the secret, and I will buy it too!” Maya Memsaab was the name of a Hindi film based on Madame Bovary, in which a bored wife entertains herself with a series of love affairs. Mrs Chauhan nudged me towards a sign that her husband had just had nailed to a tree. It said, “Fighting Fire is Our Desire”. She read it aloud, gave my hand a conspiratorial squeeze, and left, suppressing giggles behind her palm. The General had a view as well. One morning, I went to the cemetery, to talk things over with Michael as I sometimes did. I sat by his headstone, chin resting on my knees, absent-mindedly plucking at the grass by my feet, when the General, who had come to visit Angelina’s grave, came upon me. “Ah, Maya!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here any more … it’s been long enough, you’re too young to be moping over the past. Move on, my girl, move on. High time.”

Diwan Sahib’s response took me by surprise. I had assumed that he would be happy about Veer and me, but he became curiously resentful. One afternoon, I went to get his newspaper from Negi’s shop, and the boy there said Diwan Sahib had relayed instructions that the paper was not to be given to me; it was to be delivered straight to him. I asked Diwan Sahib why he was changing such an old arrangement, and his face turned sulky. “Why not? When you forget to come every other day? I can live without your august company, but I do need my daily paper.” He started keeping tabs on me and noting how little time I was spending with him. If he saw me looking better dressed than usual he would say in sardonic tones, “Where’s the untidy hair, poked through with a pencil? You look like a society lady now, all shining and combed.” When I wore a new kurta one day, he said to Mr Qureshi: “Our wild Himalayan rose is turning into a memsa’ab.” Another day, mellow after a long evening’s drinking, he said in a thoughtful tone, “If you went climbing, Maya, you would know: unknown territories need caution. One step at a time and lots of reconnaissance.”

Trekking and exploring suddenly featured a great deal in conversation. Veer said lightheartedly, when our murmurings on the rug in the forest edged towards the future: “Life’s a trek too, isn’t it? You meet people on the way that you like, spend days with them under tents, and then your time with them is over. But you don’t stop walking the route; you have to go on. Look at you, you’re the best example.”

What was he trying to tell me? I was not sure I wanted to know. We were too new and fragile, too skinless to be exposed to daylight just yet. What Veer’s life had been before me, I did not care about. I only knew that I could no longer do without him. Ama’s disapproval was a given, of course. But whatever had Diwan Sahib meant about trekking and caution? I had no idea if he himself knew, now that he was drinking himself insensible every day.

I could think of nothing but Veer: he was with me every minute. I became more than usually distracted in my classes. One morning, Miss Wilson slammed a wooden blackboard duster down on my table and said, “This is too much, Maya! I told you twice yesterday to inform Mr Chauhan that the school will not be used as a voting centre. Don’t you hear a word I say? Now you go and handle him. He’s already come with some orderlies and he’s selecting classrooms.” Sometimes stirring a vat of jam at the factory I would go on and on stirring while my mind and body were far away, under the lacework of deodar in the forest, until one of the girls would say, “Maya Mam?” and take the long ladle from my hand.

I had to force myself not to barge into Veer’s working day, when he was immersed in his e-mails and his telephone, to suggest an expedition in his jeep. I waited for him to finish work and notice me. I waited every minute, when he was away, for him to come home.

Veer’s days were unpredictable. He worked from a room in the Light House. On some days he would lock himself away in it and, apart from the low hum of his voice on the telephone, there would be no sign of his presence. On other days he did no work at all and would sit in the veranda chatting with Diwan Sahib and Mr Qureshi, or go down to the bazaar to pick up his mail, stock up food for an approaching trek, and idle with people he met. The wool shop owner’s son, who was a budding politician, had become a friend of his, and there was a hotelier in the bazaar who would buttonhole Veer to try and persuade him to bring his clients to his hotel for a few days of relaxation after their treks. Veer played along, pronouncing it a great idea, but he never did bring his clients to Ranikhet. Instead, he picked them up from the railhead at Kathgodam, from where they drove directly to wherever they would begin the trek. I had only the foggiest understanding of his work and if I asked questions about routes and clients, he would answer with a smile, “Were you thinking of signing up? The next trek is to the Pindari glacier. Leeches and high-quality instant noodles guaranteed.”

Sometimes it worried me that he could disappear for weeks, when no-one had any way of telling, except in the most general sense, where he was. After one of his trips to Delhi in early July, when I went into his room for something or the other I found he had left his dirty clothes in a heap on the floor next to his bag. Out of a corner of my eye, I saw that one of the shirts was discoloured. I looked closer at it. The shirt’s blue denim was smeared all over with blood. The large stains looked fresh, still red, perhaps still damp. I did not want to touch the shirt to find out, but I was so startled I sat on a chair in his room and studied it from a safe distance to make sure I was not mistaking ink or paint for blood.

Veer had only returned that morning and was out in the veranda. He had changed into clean jeans and a loose grey T-shirt and sat on a low chair with a tea mug beside him. His feet were bare, he was whistling “Hey Jude” and staring at the screen of his laptop. When I went out and asked, “What’s all that blood on your shirt?” his face became such a mask of annoyance that I winced. Then his expression changed to one of amused tenderness. He gave me the half-smile that I found irresistible and said, “I have something to confess? Will you forgive me? I killed someone.” He looked around to see if there was anyone watching, then gave my cheek a quick pinch. “Look at your face: did you believe me? No, something else happened,” he said. “I overnighted in a hotel in Kaladhungi. Weird place: all night they kept shifting metal furniture across the floor of the room upstairs and walking up and down, knocking a walking stick or something like that on the floor above my head. Total silence in between and then the sounds again. The dead of night in the middle of jungle – I wondered if there were ghosts upstairs. Then someone began to sing songs – very beautifully – old folksongs – but that was the last straw, I couldn’t sleep at all. So I left at three in the morning. And you know that deep forest you have to drive through? You feel as if tigers will spring out of the bush any time. Some guys were standing there in the dark, in the middle of the road, with a torch and a dead man on the ground – they had put a tree branch across the road to make cars stop. I thought I was going to be robbed and killed, but they just wanted my help to take the man to hospital. He was unconscious it turned out, not dead. A huge Sardar, bleeding all over. I managed to spread a rug over the back seat, but in the process of hauling the man in, my shirt … musn’t give it to Gappu Dhobi, he’ll imagine the worst.” He paused and added, “As you did.”

I could not tell where the thought came from and I could not stop the words when I heard myself saying, “Where was it you rushed off when those helicopters were circling Ranikhet? Remember? You saw me on the road, but you didn’t stop. You didn’t come back for weeks. Nobody knew where you were.”

“What are you talking about?” Veer said. He seemed mystified by the question.

“I mean that time in May, when there were choppers in the sky all day, and you got a call on your phone and left without a word to anyone. What was that about?”

“Why do you sound so aggressive? I can’t tell you everything. That doesn’t mean I’m up to something fishy. What do you think I do anyway? Don’t you trust me?”

“You might trust me too, and tell me what that was all about. Most of the time I have no idea where you go, what you do, who you see – nothing.”

Until the moment I asked him, I had not even been aware that my suspicions about that morning were still gnawing at me. But now that I had begun, each thing I said stoked my rage.

Veer said nothing. When he clamped his lips shut the way he was doing now, and sucked in his cheeks, his face grew thinner still and grimmer, locked away. He looked at his computer screen, not at me, and said in a voice that was clipped and cold, “It was to help the Army with a search they needed to do. I know that area well, and I’ve done chopper searches before. Which is why they called me in.” He did not look up from the screen, and said nothing more.

I did not know what to say. I fiddled with a Banksia creeper by the door. I looked at a goat chewing on a young plant in the garden. It had rained that morning and now every leaf gleamed in the clear, washed light. Water plopped from a rainwater pipe into a tin drum. The grass had turned a tender green, but I knew it now hid black threads that bloated into blood-gorged leeches where they found warm skin. I could feel one on my ankle and bent to pluck it off. The scab would itch for days. Bijli appeared from somewhere and wagged his tail at us and gave a few short barks to suggest a walk. I patted him and said I would take him.

I turned to go, paused, trying to form the words for an apology, but could not. As I left the veranda my footsteps slowed and I came back. “Sorry,” I said, “it came out wrong.” I knew I still sounded grudging, and I was filled with regret for starting a quarrel and ruining a beautiful day, especially when he had just returned after a long journey.

I waited for him to say something forgiving, but he did not look up from his typing.

One afternoon soon after, I stood looking at the mountains, which had risen out of the monsoon sky. Clouds were piled high at their base so that they floated in mid-air, detached from everything earthly. Something in the quality of the light made the peaks appear translucent, as if the molten silver sky were visible through them. In the next few moments, I saw an extraordinary cloud form out of nothing, gather over the peaks, and grow larger and larger, spreading a black cloak as it travelled towards me, seemingly at the speed of a rocket. In no more than a minute it reached our hills and turned afternoon into twilight. Then the rain came sheeting down.

I ran inside, and as I shook my hair dry I wondered if I should interpret the cloud as an omen. I looked around for something to do to drive the thought away. I began to pull books out of the shelves and pile them on the floor. Silverfish scuttled out from between their pages. The books needed dusting and sunning. I pulled out shelf after shelf of books, possessed with energy and purpose. I would arrange them alphabetically – or maybe by genre. I would give away the thrillers I would never read again and all those books I had bought and kept thinking I would read the next month. Why did I have multiple copies of Man-eaters of Kumaon? And where had this book on the arts and architecture of ancient Greece come from?

In a while, I was exhausted. I sat on the floor, and looked in despair at the tumbling heaps of books around me. I would never get them back on their shelves now.

I began to look through the ones close enough to reach without getting up: a murder mystery, a book on hill plants, Sàlim Ali’s Indian Hill Birds. And then, between the pages of a fat collection of short stories, the old copy of T. S. Eliot’s millimetre-thin Practical Cats that Michael had given me long ago. His angular handwriting rode a diagonal across one of the blank pages, “To my own perverse, pigheaded Rum Tum Tugger”.

I pulled a cushion to me and lay on the rug, tenting my face in the opened pages of the book, breathing in its antique smell.

I would not look into the future. My life had been too cruelly overturned once before for me to think of anything but the present moment. I would negotiate each day as if I were riding a leaf in a flowing stream: enough to stay afloat. I would not ask for more.