The Folded Earth

9


It was no use trying to finish reading the newspaper. Ama had arrived with the story of a certain Mangesh who worked for Missis Gracie long ago. He put her into one of those orphanages for old people, she said, and swindled her house away. And his wife, “That woman Asha, you’ve seen her, of course – tall and thin as a bamboo pole, with a voice that reaches the next valley even when she whispers, but she thinks she’s pretty – she has put a spell on my cow Ratna, she gives no milk at all any more.” Ama moved a ball of chewing tobacco from one of her cheeks to the other as she spoke and sat down with a groan on the staircase leading to Diwan Sahib’s veranda.

Diwan Sahib scowled at me and at Ama, and hauled himself out of his chair, retreating behind a line of dripping blue hydrangeas that separated his garden from the nettles below. I glimpsed his hands fumbling at his waist, and after a moment’s pause heard the sound of trickling water on grass. All else was quiet but for the tapping of a woodpecker making its way up a nearby tree trunk, grub by grub. Ama sighed, then said: “He is half mad. Pisses into the bushes like some common villager and they say he was a prince before. He drinks so much he keeps falling down. Did you hear, he fell down yesterday too? His shoulder has a big black mark. Himmat Singh told me.”

Diwan Sahib was hidden by the bushes. I could hear thumping, as if someone was beating carpets. Then my landlord was yelling, “Arre O! Can you hear me? What are you doing?”

The monotonous “whump-whump” from below stopped for a minute, then started again. Diwan Sahib stumbled down the slope clutching his pyjama’s waistband and yelling, “Leave the nettles alone, you donkey!” Now we could see him through a gap in the hydrangeas, tall, thin, teetering at the very edge of the slope, looking as if he would trip and roll downhill with his next step.

I half got up, started to call out, “Be careful!” but stopped myself. He detested what he called “clucking”.

“It’s only nettle,” a man’s voice said from below. “I’m not cutting your precious bushes, am I?” His stick hit the bushes again. I stood up to look, and saw that the man had already beaten down many of the high, overgrown nettle bushes into damp green rags. The nettles formed a barrier around the house and protected it from the road a few metres below. The more impenetrable they grew, the more Diwan Sahib rejoiced at keeping prying people out. The nettles would spring back in a month, so there was no need for an argument. But once annoyed, Diwan Sahib was difficult to reason with. He shouted back, “I planted those nettles!”

“Oh yes? Who plants nettle? Weeds – dirty, stinging weeds! He plants them he says.” “Whump!” The man’s stick began hitting the nettle bushes with even greater force. As the stick came down on the bushes again and again, I winced, imagining the man behind me on a lonely forest road, armed with that stick. “Useless old fool,” we heard the man shout in a harsh voice. “Sanki lunatic! Says he plants nettles!”

“You aren’t young yourself,” Diwan Sahib yelled. “Have you seen how old you are?”

Diwan Sahib came back towards the garden. “Have you seen how old he is? And he has the insolence to call me old.” His white hair stood on end, from his having torn off his cap in a hurry. His dressing gown flapped around his ankles. He had climbed back too quickly and now each gasping breath was accompanied by a whistling sound. He stooped and searched for a glass, one he must have flung into the bushes earlier that morning. He wiped it on his shirt and splashed rum into it from the bottle at the table next to him. Then he sat back in his chair and laughed until it turned into a hacking cough. “Someone’s been attacking the nettle for days, and I’ve never managed to catch the fellow in the act before,” he wheezed. “I recognised him today. He’s that retired forest guard – Himmat says he’s lost his mind.”

Ama said, “Why wouldn’t he have? He’s forever grabbing our sickles and axes and taking them away. Claimed we were stealing wood from the forest. And in secret he was selling our axes in the bazaar. We cursed him, many times. So he went mad.”

“Why don’t you use your curses on a more deserving target – Chauhan, or that politician stirring up trouble?” Diwan Sahib said, picking up his packet of cigarettes.

“You’d better not smoke,” I said. “Your performance is next week, and you can’t cough all the time you’re there, so don’t – ” I stopped as he lit up.

Diwan Sahib had been practising for months and his day at St Hilda’s was almost upon us. Usually he talked of jungle craft and imitated the calls of animals and birds. Sometimes he told the children stories of illustrious Himalayan travellers, old and new, such as Frank Smythe, Edmund Hillary, or Bill Aitken.

“What are you going to do this year?” I asked him.

“This year – ” All of a sudden Diwan Sahib became almost bashful. “This year I want to tell them how fortunate they are. How absolutely fortunate they are. I want your little perishers to understand that.”

“Fortunate? Half of them don’t get enough to eat,” Ama said. “They won’t even have a job when they finish with that school. All this studying is a waste of time.” She gave me a look of concentrated scorn. The day before she had had yet another argument with Charu about the amount of time she was spending at my house on her lessons.

Diwan Sahib ignored her. “I am going to tell them,” he said, “that they must put their ears to the earth and rocks and hear them breathe. Because here in Ranikhet the rocks do breathe. I am going to tell them to listen for one second on their way through the woods to their school for the sound of the sap rising through the trees; to spend one day painting the snow peaks they never bother to look at. They are like people born rich who don’t understand what money is until it disappears.”

“I’d rather have some money and not just the mountains,” Ama said. “You can’t eat mountains.” She made a move as if to leave.

Diwan Sahib was too deep in thought to notice her. He continued, “I want to tell them they live in a corner of the earth where predators still roam free. Where, on an evening’s playing among the trees, they might hear movement in the undergrowth and see a kalij pheasant scuttling away with its mate. Where they do all these ordinary things, like lessons and tuitions and games, and then come home to the call of foxes and owls.”

I said, taking care with my words, “It’s natural for them not to notice owls and foxes calling. They’ve grown up with them. Just as city children pay no attention to car noises – ”

Diwan Sahib looked at me aghast. “A Scop’s Owl like a car noise! Are you off your head?” He was overtaken by another of his coughing fits as Charu rushed in. She never spoke directly to Diwan Sahib, afraid of him or shy; today she ran to his chair and held its arm, panting, and said, in a high, trembling voice, “You have to save Puran. They have arrested his deer.”

* * *

Diwan Sahib changed into a rather grand if crumpled and mothballed grey jacket and white shirt. “You can’t deal with the police and that fool Chauhan in a dressing gown,” he explained when he emerged in his uncharacteristic finery. We had to walk slower than usual because he coughed a lot and had to stop frequently to catch his breath. Halfway there, the drizzle thickened, raindrops were flung into our faces by the wind. Ama hitched her sari to her knees and fished out the plastic bag she kept tucked in her waistband for such eventualities. Her white hair straggled out from under the bag-cap. I rolled up my jeans. By the time we reached the police station, we were cold, soaked, bedraggled.

We charged into the police station, past the shouts of the chowkidar, to the bars of the lock-up. The deer was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was Puran, caged behind the bars. He sat in a corner, whimpering and groaning, scratching his head and slapping his thighs. Tears and snot smeared his face. The room was rank with the effects of rain on his foul-smelling clothes.

The constable sat at her desk looking irritable and shouting for the chowkidar to light some incense. “What do you think? I want him here? I want to throw him out, he smells enough to make me want to cut off my nose,” she said to Ama, who looked frightened and tearful at the sight of her son imprisoned. I had never before seen Ama at a loss for words. Now she slid to her haunches and half-sat, half-crouched on the floor, head in her hands, quite unmindful of the plastic bag that topped it like an upturned boat. Charu stood very straight, holding the bars of the lock-up. Her face had frozen into anger at the constable’s words and she had assumed a fierce, silent hauteur.

The constable had not invited Diwan Sahib to sit. He stood over her desk, still panting, leaning on it with both hands. He drew a wheezy breath and began to explain the situation to her with painstaking, careful courtesy. Puran was a little different from others, he said. He could not talk to people, but he could talk to animals. Animals trusted him. Foxes came to him if he called them. Injured birds arrived on his doorstep to be cured. Dogs with broken legs found their way to his cowshed. It was necessary that he be treated differently because he was incapable of understanding such things as wildlife laws.

Diwan Sahib’s baritone was interspersed with fits of coughing and he searched in his long-unused trousers for a handkerchief. I passed him a tissue. The constable tapped her pencil on the table. Then she spun a five-rupee coin on it again and again like a top and waited each time till it rattled to a halt.

Puran was not raising the deer with a view to eating it, Diwan Sahib continued patiently. He had rescued it from the forest. If he had not rescued it the lost deer would have been devoured by other animals.

“That is the law of the jungle,” the constable interrupted him to say. “And the deer is a wild animal.”

“Of course,” Diwan Sahib said, “and in every other instance you would be absolutely right. But Puran is a special case. Did you know that – ”

A note of ingratiation crept into his voice. I had never seen him bend over the way he was doing now. He smiled at her as if trying to please.

The constable interrupted again. Nothing was possible, she said. She began to shuffle her papers and files. She looked Diwan Sahib up and down with scarcely concealed disdain. She had been posted to Ranikhet only a few months before, and had no idea who he was. To her, he looked like any other rain-soaked, old, small-town man – educated, no question – but she had no time for such refinement and slow civilities. She had risen the hard way, she was tough, her tongue was sharp, and as a policewoman she had to be feared and respected, not loved. All this was written on her face. No doubt, too, she could smell the rum on Diwan Sahib’s breath. His big hands, even when resting on her table, shook with the tremor that we were familiar with but which she must have thought another symptom of his drunkenness. Her eyes went to his feet. He had managed a shirt, trousers, and jacket, but his feet had been too swollen for shoes and he had pushed them into purple bathroom slippers. She looked at the wet, mud-spattered slippers and back at his face. “The law is the law,” she stated. “I have work to do. It is illegal for people to keep wild animals at home whether as pets or as food. He is no different from anyone else in the eyes of the law.” She returned to her file and did not look up again.

Mr Chauhan had left instructions that if Puran came after the deer, he was to be locked up until the deer was safely in Nainital’s zoo, and for a few days after, to teach him a lesson. If anyone made a fuss, Mr Chauhan had ordered, tell them this is a non-bailable offence under the Wildlife Protection Act and Puran would have to serve a proper jail term for fattening a barking deer in order to kill and eat it. “And while you are at it,” he had instructed the constable, “I want those army clothes off him, and burned, this time to ashes.” Having issued his instructions, Mr Chauhan had left for Bhimtal.

* * *

Puran came home in someone else’s clothes after three days. He went into his ramshackle shed and would not emerge, not even to eat. We heard from a friend in Nainital that Rani was moping and pining in her new cage at the zoo, and had refused food and water. All day she stood virtually immobile in a corner of her cage, despite the persistence of the zoo’s vet. A week later, the vet advised a revolutionary step: he wanted Puran brought to Nainital. “That’s the only hope,” he said, “the deer might eat if he feeds it.”

Mr Chauhan’s permission was sought. He slammed the telephone down, fuming. “Here I am, the Ad-Min-is-Trator of this city,” he said, emphasising every syllable with a rap of his pen on the desk. “And they want me to give all my time to these foolish matters!” It would be the ultimate humiliation for him to have to send Puran to Nainital. He would not hear of it. He got into his jeep, its large pimple of a red beacon gleaming, and went off to inspect the site of a new amusement park, his flagship project, for which a swathe of oak forest was being cleared. It was pointless saying to tourists, “Come just for the peace and the landscape.” Ranikhet was to have sights. It must generate as much revenue as Bhimtal and Nainital, Mr Chauhan had decided, and once he decided something, he acted. This was no time for nonsense with madmen and deer. He told his secretary to say he was in meetings all day if there were more calls from the zoo.

On the thirteenth day, the deer died of malnutrition, dehydration, and grief. It became a small news item in the local paper and a journalist came to interview Puran for a “human interest” feature. Ama, frantic with excitement at the thought of her son being in the newspaper, showed him to the cowshed Puran had taken refuge in. The journalist walked to the shed as gingerly as a stork in a marsh and waited ankle-deep in mud and dung for Puran to emerge, but despite Ama’s knocks, entreaties, scoldings, and curses he remained inside his shed and would speak to nobody.

* * *

On the evening of our fruitless visit to the police station, I went up to the Light House. When Veer was away, I often went there for a drink and sometimes dinner and sat by Diwan Sahib’s fire before returning home to my exercise books. That day, when I entered the half-dark living room, I saw him crouched over the fireplace, feeding paper into it from bundles lying at his feet. He put in sheaf after sheaf. The fire dipped as each thick bunch of paper was added to it, and then blazed when the new lot of paper caught. I did not have to ask Diwan Sahib what he was doing. I could see it was years of work he was burning, his and mine, the many versions of his Corbett book. His hands shook as he reached for the papers and then for the fire. He was bent close enough over the flames for the room to smell faintly of singed hair. Droplets of a runny cold shone in the firelight as his nose dripped. He swiped it once with a sleeve, then continued. When the entire manuscript was in the fire, he stood up, staring into the leaping flames. Then he seemed to remember something else. He looked above the fireplace at the framed picture of his golden retrievers. I leaped forward now, with a cry, but I was too late to stop him. He had flung it into the blaze, and the glass shattered against the logs in the fireplace. The old wood of the picture’s frame caught instantly. I saw the photograph curl at the edges and melt away.