The Folded Earth

7


The monsoon in our hills is a time of thunder, lightning, water, and wind so endless that it has been known to push people into fits of rage. One day, not a month into the monsoon, the taekwondo teacher at one of the other schools punched two boys senseless because he suspected them of stealing his camera. He had come upon them peddling a similar camera in Babita Studio. He wrecked the shop too, shattering framed photographs of just-married couples with a hammer he had bought from the shop next door. The combined strength of three taxidrivers and a policeman was needed for him to be handcuffed and taken to the police station. By then the boys were bleeding, while Babita Studio was in shards – and who was going to pay for the damage? Better to occupy yourself with gossip than break each other’s bones: and that is how most people spent the time, watching the rain, drinking tea, and gossiping.

When the clouds came lower and lower, to rest on our hills, they wiped away the mountains on the other side of the valley and bleached the distant trees of colour, turning them into charcoaled lines on the grey-white sky. Houses felt furry with fungus and damp. Dripping umbrellas spoked pools of water before every front door. The hills were a lush, brilliant green, and wild gladioli drooped everywhere in the rain. The forest was carpeted with pretty, mauve, orchid-like flowers. Roads were reclaimed by nature as landslides buried them and waterfalls drowned them, the wind felled trees, electricity failed, and telephones died, cutting off our town. Some days, the clouds gave way to lurid sunsets, and then the curtains closed again.

That August, I wanted nothing more than for our rain-soaked town to remain untouched, cocooned and cut off from the boiling world below. Instead, the newspaper came in two-day-old bunches, the pages stuck together with damp; when I peeled them apart, they were filled with news from Orissa, every day something more brutal: churches burned, missionaries hounded, Christians driven out of their villages into refugee camps, a young woman raped, thrown into a fire and burned alive.

I could not tell if Miss Wilson deliberately left the paper open to the page with news from Orissa. It stared at me when I sat opposite her for our daily staff meetings. The paper would be turned in my direction so I did not need to read upside-down. She began to say, “We Christians are used to sacrifices for the glory of Our Lord. We have made them since St Thomas landed in Kerala soon after Our Lord’s Ascension. Who runs all of India’s good schools? Who cares for the poor?” She pronounced it as “pore” and then after a perfunctory pause, “We, Christians.”

Miss Wilson had a brother in Orissa who worked for a T.V. channel called DivineLite, which aimed to make Christianity more accessible through stories of everyday triumphs over greed, lust, envy, and such-like. Recent converts who looked jubilant – and prosperous – explained how Jesus had transformed their lives and urged others to find the same sustenance and joy. Every programme began and ended with a feature called “Prayer of the Day” during which the entire cast of DivineLite held hands, shut their eyes, and intoned a recently written prayer. For several days now, the prayer had been, “Let us put down the weapon of hatred and violence and put on the armour of love. Let us forgive one another and ask forgiveness from one another for the wrong we have done to each other and reach out in love to each other.”

One day, the T.V. channel’s office was picketed by a bunch of hoodlums shouting slogans calling for it to be shut down. Miss Wilson told us of the incident the next day. She had tried to reach her brother on the telephone, but he was too choked with fear to talk, she said. They had even been threatened with death. She looked preoccupied and worried and whispered urgently into her mobile now and then. She did not come to the classes to rap tables with her cane and shout “Quay-it”. Nor did she realise that the school bells were often being rung late because the chowkidar was more stoned than usual these days. Whenever I came to speak to her in her room, she shuffled papers or fiddled with something on her desk so that she would not have to look at me.

As things got worse in Orissa, the something invisible and dangerous which Miss Wilson and I had tip-toed around all this time grew in size until it took up most of the space. Despite my marriage and the change in my surname, I had never converted to Christianity. Michael’s parents had said they would accept me if I converted, but Michael did not want me to, and neither did his priest. Only if it comes naturally, Father Joseph had said, only when the time is right. In the weeks after Michael’s death he had asked me a few times if I would meet Michael’s parents: this great grief could be a time for healing and forgiveness, he said. But I thought they might blame me more ferociously now for the years of Michael that they had lost. The time for friendship is over, I had told the Father. The next week Father Joseph had relayed another request from them: they wanted something from Michael’s rucksack as a memento of their son’s last journey, a crumb from his final days. At that time, I was distraught enough to have handed them the entire rucksack, and all his other belongings, to stop them bothering me. But then too, Father Joseph had stopped me. “There is no hurry,” he had said. “Give them something later when you are able to look through his belongings. When it comes naturally. One day you’ll be ready, not now.”

Miss Wilson had none of Father Joseph’s wisdom. From the start she had made it clear that whereas I had a job, there were needy Christian teachers still unemployed. I was the undeserving beneficiary of Father Joseph’s influence in the church and she had no option but to put up with me. Now the world beyond was making matters between us too delicate and brittle to survive much stress. And as if there was a conspiracy, this was precisely the time when the election campaign in Ranikhet charged up enough for the political parties to look around for trouble-filled pots they could stir.

* * *

By the middle of August, the bazaar looked as if Diwali had come early. The narrow main street had acquired a glittering, latticed ceiling made of orange, green, silver and gold tinsel. Party symbols hung from it. Every day the bunting grew more ragged in the rain and wind, and the posters on the walls peeled with the damp so that the candidates’ faces grew more and more lopsided.

This was a national election, especially significant for our town because it was the first time a local, Veer’s new friend, the son of the wool merchant, had decided to stand as a candidate. If he won, Ranikhet would no longer be a backwater; it would be pitchforked straight into the centre of Uttarakhand politics; it would get grants and attention, public money would flow in. The wool merchant’s son was called Ankit Rawat. He had adopted a ball of red wool as his logo and his motto was: “Santusth, Surakshit, aur Garam/Ankit Rawat ka hai Dharam.” Warm, Safe, Free of Need/This is Ankit Rawat’s Creed.

The older Mr Rawat, who had a shop in the bazaar, had hung a red woollen globe at the entrance to it: it was as large as several footballs and tall people tended to bump their heads against it on their way into the shop. All over town, there were soggy posters with Ankit Rawat’s purposeful young face beaming from the centre of a ball of red wool. I had only encountered him before across the counter at his father’s shop, when he had sold me thermal vests, socks, and cardigans. “Now I will have to employ an assistant,” his father said in jovial tones. “My son will be too grand for my shop.” He gestured towards the sacred red circle of kumkum and rice grains on his forehead. “All God’s grace, all His wish.”

Ankit Rawat’s supporters, mostly young friends from his college days, tore through the market and Mall Road on motorbikes, shouting his election slogan into megaphones and telling people when and where to vote. “Send your son to Delhi! Uttarakhand needs a man from Ranikhet at the centre,” they urged, to cheers and jokes from the shopkeepers and the people in the streets. Ankit switched from his jeans and jackets to long white kurtas and a red chadar that billowed from his neck when he thundered past with his motorbike cavalcade. Surrounded at all times by his cohorts, he acquired a pop star aura that made people want to be noticed by him. He was clean-featured and tall, and when he posed next to toothless old village women or porters and farmers hunched by years of bending, people said he looked like a prince. He happened to pass by Ama’s cottage one evening at the end of his monthly Ranikhet Darshan, when he would meet common folk and discuss their problems. “He sat on that stool in the courtyard outside our hut, just like an ordinary man,” Ama said later, to anyone who would listen. “I had nothing in the house but some batashas and tea. Mud all over me because I had just come from the fields. He told me he had never drunk such sweet tea. He promised double water supply. And the electricity will never go off.”

Ankit’s opponent was a man from Nainital who had won election after election promising to serve the Hindu cause. Umed Singh was said to be a battle-hardened, canny politician, and had taken to calling Ankit “chota bachha” – little child. “Mind you, every child should be encouraged,” he said, to a Nainital journalist who used the comment as a headline. “Children need to learn the ropes.” Umed Singh had not yet come to campaign in Ranikhet: in the past he had never needed to. This year was different.

The Baba who had taken up residence at the temple near my favourite tea shack caused a flutter one day when he appeared in the market, where an orange and red marquee had been set up. He was greeted by singers who were bleary-eyed and hoarse-voiced from singing songs all night that were broadcast across the valley on loudspeakers. The occasion was Umed Singh’s first campaign visit to Ranikhet. The Baba blessed them, and he blessed Umed Singh’s campaign. One of his assistants read women’s palms and handed out amulets that guaranteed offspring to childless women so that Hindus were not outnumbered in the coming years by those who were allowed four wives.

Umed Singh appeared next on stage. For long minutes he did not speak, letting the crowd settle and expectation build. When he began, he spoke in a ponderous voice, with measured pauses during which he gauged the temper of his audience while it held its breath for his next aphorism. He said it was time the hills were released forever from foreign imperialists who had taken over the hills in British times and replaced ancient temples with churches and mosques. Everywhere, he said, Hindus were being falsely accused of violence when all they wanted was to preserve their way of life against terrorism and against their own people being converted to other religions. It was time to redress the balance. This was not a task that could be left to children who had sold wool the previous week and now on a whim had set out to turn the world upside-down.

“Now what?” I said to Diwan Sahib. “Do you still think the graveyard was vandalised by boys who’d drunk too much – and not by this lot? If Umed Singh wants to, he can make lots of trouble for Agnes W. Just to add some spice to his campaign.”

“It’s ‘Agnes W’ now, is it, behind her back? To her face it’s, ‘Yes Miss Wilson and No Miss Wilson’, “ Diwan Sahib said. “Your beloved principal! Be a little respectful. What do you call me when I’m out of earshot?”