The Folded Earth

11


That evening Diwan Sahib began running a temperature. For a few days he lay in bed in a stupor that worried me enough to call the doctor, who said, “Give him fluids, but not the kind he usually drinks.” I sat up nights, placing ice-cold swabs on his forehead when his fever rose. I passed my hands over his soft, sparse hair to make him sleep. He babbled in a slurred delirium about people and things I knew nothing of: “Farha … not Char Bagh, meet me at the Imambara … Farha, can you come … the Nawab needs a clock, he has no clock … The letters … my will … Veer … get the box, get the box, go away, take him away from me!” He had great trouble breathing and I had to raise him and massage his back to soothe his aching ribs, which he tried rubbing himself in his restless sleep. I realised he had dwindled much more than I had thought: his ribs poked out beneath his skin, his body was narrow and bony. I felt an unexpected, painful tenderness for him and quietly left his room and paced on the veranda for a while to get a grip on myself. He detested sentimentality and, fever or no fever, he would know how I was feeling from the merest glimpse of my face.

After the fever dropped away, he grew demanding and foul-tempered. He refused help from those of us who were there, but he made cutting remarks about Veer’s absence in times of need. “It’s a talent not to be underestimated,” he said when Ankit Rawat came looking for Veer one day for help with his election campaign. “The art of being away when there is tiresome work to be done for other people. The young man will no doubt come back just in time for your victory speech.” He pushed aside Himmat Singh’s food, said he wanted chicken stew with rosemary. I had no idea how to make it, but I looked up a rarely used cookbook and made a list of the ingredients I would need. I plucked a fistful of rosemary from the bushes around the house. I bought a chicken and whatever suitable vegetables I could find in the monsoon, when it was hard to find any good vegetables at all. The stew had potatoes, beans, and little onions that turned into translucent globes when cooked. Diwan Sahib had one mouthful and said it tasted of slop. I cooked him fish the next day and he said it was smelly. Some days I was so irritated by his cantankerousness that I did not go up to his house at all. “So busy, aren’t you,” he said the next time he saw me. “Huge factory to run. Quite the Madam Corporate.” For the rest of the evening, he did not say a word or look at me again. I sat with him for half an hour, growing angrier each minute, then got up and left without a goodbye.

After ten days, he was well enough to sit up in a chair, but stopped coming outside to sit under his spruce tree. When I came back from work with the newspapers as before and looked in to see him, he would be at his fireplace, although it was the middle of the afternoon. He wore a sweater and even indoors his shapeless, brown woolly cap. “The older, the colder,” he said, sounding belligerent.

The room he sat in was high-ceilinged and dark. The walls were overgrown with dusty bookshelves filled with old paperbacks that the lightest touch might have disintegrated. Diwan Sahib sat there, nursing an “early, medicinal brandy”, poking at the fire with a pair of long cast-iron tongs. We had never spoken of it, but I could not look at the fireplace now without seeing his manuscript burning there. The wall over the fireplace had a paler patch, with dust lines marking a rectangle where the picture of the dogs had been. My eyes kept returning to that bleached rectangle, as if I expected the old photograph to reappear there by magic.

The firelight carved Diwan Sahib’s face into hollows. He had stopped trimming his beard, and it had grown longer, making him look like a sadhu. His eyes were still bright, however, and if he was in a good humour when he saw me, he said, “The prettiest girl in Ranikhet! Dark as coal, so she lights up my room!” To Mr Qureshi, he said one day when I came in: “If I was younger I would warm my hands on her cheeks.” Mr Qureshi looked away quickly and busied himself searching for something he did not find.

Every evening, the rain came down on the tin roof, sometimes drumming on it and collecting in buckets and bowls inside the house where the roof had sprung leaks, sometimes no more than a soft murmur above our heads. If it stopped, all went quiet, and we sat listening to the tup-tup of dripping water from the rainwater drains that ran along the roofs.

Mr Qureshi and I talked all the time, trying to fill the gloomy house with our chatter, telling Diwan Sahib the local news: Chauhan had had a little too much to drink at a party in the officers’ mess and boasted about his kickbacks: now he was trying to salvage the situation; Miss Wilson complained of sleepless nights because of Umed Singh, who was promising in his election speeches that he would make sure all the church land in Ranikhet was turned over to common use if he came to power; Bozo had got into a fight with Bijli and almost had an ear torn off, so the General no longer brought him for walks past my house; and in the last few days Puran had been heard whimpering soft endearments to an owl who had taken to roosting in his shed. Perhaps this meant he would eventually emerge from the grief of Rani’s death.

Whenever there was a lull in our strained conversation, all we heard was the rain, the cracklings in the fire, and Diwan Sahib’s phlegmy cough, which did not respond to any quantity of hot rum.

Every day, after those long evenings with Diwan Sahib, I returned home and sat in a weary slump with a cup of coffee, trying to stay awake and deal with my daily bundle of schoolwork to be marked and account books to be checked. I was very tired. It was the kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep would take away. I was fed up with the endlessness of my work and Diwan Sahib’s illness and his moods. I was fed up with my ironclad routine. I did not want to spend one dismal evening after another at his fireplace, going over the same old stories. Ranikhet’s want of urban pleasures began to gnaw at me: why was there not one decent cinema, not a single good bookshop, not even a library? I wished I could take off in a bus to Nainital for the day – have a pizza for lunch, stroll in and out of shops, eat ice cream. But of course I could not leave as long as Diwan Sahib was ill.

This made me boil up immediately into a broth of resentment at Veer’s absence. How did he manage to be out of reach when he was most required? What was the point of our togetherness if he was never there? My thoughts slid with an aching sense of loss to my mother. Even when I had no friends in my first years in Ranikhet, it was reassurance enough that she was there, somewhere – that I would have a letter from her every so often, that I might hear her voice on the telephone. It was my fault, I told myself. I had not managed to make any real friends after leaving Hyderabad. On and off there was a new teacher at St Hilda’s who made me feel hopeful because we spoke the same language, laughed at the same things, but usually they tired of Ranikhet and within a few months went away again. Until Veer arrived, I had found no-one in town to spend time with.

One such worn-out night, when I was half asleep on my table with my head on the account books, I heard sounds from Charu’s house, voices I could not recognise. I switched off the light and pulled my curtain aside just a crack. Ama was outside, holding a stick and talking at the tin shed they had in front of their cottage. Someone was babbling and crying inside the shed; occasionally I heard a loud, unfamiliar, agitated voice, neither fully male nor female. The single, naked light bulb they had outside, hanging from a tree branch, swung in the breeze, making shadows leap and subside. There was something so eerie about the scene that I felt afraid of the dark corners of my own little house.

The next morning I asked Ama, “What was happening at your house yesterday?”

“I called the Ohjha,” she said, looking combative in advance. “I needed him.”

Ama did call the Ohjha now and then to exorcise evil spirits from her cows or rid them of spells she thought malicious neighbours had cast on them. Not even the plainest evidence would make her see he was a charlatan. The Ohjha usually came in the afternoon, performed his rituals, sat on a stool in the courtyard smoking and drinking tea, and after pocketing some of Ama’s money, bemoaned his failing bijniss. Once he was gone, Ama invariably reported miraculous change. He had not saved Gouri Joshi, she admitted that, but that was his only failure, and it had happened because the cow’s time had come: Gouri’s enemy had been Death itself.

“You called the Ohjha?” I said, “For the cows?”

“No,” she said. “Not for the cows.”

She shooed a hen away, bent to poke at something in the earth. She told me of a little boy who had fallen into an open manhole on Mall Road and come out covered in muck. She observed that while Diwan Sahib’s blood relatives were never there when needed, I was looking after the old man like a daughter. And talking of daughters, had I noticed how shamelessly Janaki’s teenaged girl had gone off for a ride on that Muslim boy’s motorbike? Everyone knew they had a thing going between them, but Janaki was too doped to care.

She did not meet my eyes when at last she said: “I called the Ohjha for Charu. Here I am, trying everything to fix a match for her and she makes things go wrong. She is in the clutches of a bad spirit.” She saw the look on my face and her voice rose. “You think I’m a foolish old woman to believe in evil spirits.” She shook her stick towards the flat grey sky to our north. The high peaks were lost in the monsoon mist. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” she said, “would he believe you? What can he see but an ordinary, everyday sky that he can find anywhere? But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” She looked at me in triumph and set her stick down. “You city people think you know everything.” This was a phrase she liked using because it never failed to infuriate me.

“That’s different,” I said. “If Charu doesn’t want to marry, it’s for a real reason, not because of bad spirits.” Charu’s simple, unspiritual reason for turning away prospective grooms almost escaped my lips. I knew Ama suspected enough without any encouragement from me, and that this had added urgency to her efforts. Kundan Singh, a cook from the unknown east and of some indeterminate caste, would have struck her as anything but suitable. She was tapping clan networks, sizing up prospective grooms: most of these she rejected, either because the man’s family would ask an exorbitant dowry, or because the man was too old, or unemployed and without prospects, or had “bad habits”. I had been given reports from time to time in tones of contempt.

“They say he is about to get a Gormint job, but I know better than to believe it.” Or, “They said he runs a restaurant in Almora. Lachman drove there to see. There’s nothing, only a straw-roofed tea-shack by the road, with two bricks to sit on and one burned pan to boil tea.”

None of these dead-loss grooms had reached the point when their relatives were allowed to have a look at Charu; I had seen the process a couple of times, a troop of the prospective groom’s family sizing up a girl as horse dealers might a horse. Ama had told me stories of her own long-ago ordeals when she had been similarly displayed. “Must not show a girl to too many families, that is no good,” she had advised me in sage tones.

In the past few months, she had winnowed the list of possible grooms down to two. One was a clerk in a government office in Haldwani. She admitted he was dark-skinned, “But who looks at a prospective groom’s looks? It is his nature that matters, and this boy’s nature is good.” One symptom of his goodness was that he said he wanted no dowry. And her network said he had no bad habits: he did not smoke or drink, he did not chew tobacco, not even paan. An additional bonus was that his family was small, so Charu, as the daughter-in-law, would not be worked to the bone. There were only two sisters, parents, and one old granny who, she said, did not count because, “She’s halfway up there already, and seems in a hurry to reach.”

The boy Ama had in fact set her heart on was an assistant in a medicine factory in Bhimtal. People said he had excellent prospects; what was more he was younger than the government clerk who, Ama conceded, was perhaps a few years too old for Charu. Though the young man she favoured did have a considerable paunch, her view was that it showed he was from a family that could afford to eat two full meals every day. This second possibility was also fair-skinned, and from what I could see, a sharp dresser: he had sent a colour photograph of himself against the backdrop of a painted Taj Mahal, posing on a red Kawasaki motorbike that the studio used as a prop.

Charu had been unconcerned about this resolute quest for a groom; the talk of it had been going on so long that she had stopped paying attention. But when the families of these two prospects announced they would come to assess the future bride, and Ama agreed to the visits, Charu began to worry.

The families of the prospective grooms came on their inspection tours, a month apart from each other. Both times, Ama dug into her cash reserves and cooked up meals that by their standards were lavish. She had even thrust some money at me one day, saying, “When you come back from work, bring a cake with pink kireem from Bisht Bakery, the small size.” The Kawasaki groom’s family, being from Bhimtal, “was used to city things”, she said. Her homemade kheer would not sufficiently impress them.

The reason for calling the Ohjha was that all Ama’s efforts and expense had gone to waste. The Kawasaki sisters had gone away suspecting Charu was feeble-minded, and perhaps deaf. “That is how the wretch behaved with them!” Ama said. “They asked her simple questions and she kept staring at them as though she’s an idiot and she went on squawking, ‘What? What?’ like a parrot.” With the other groom’s family, Ama had spotted Charu working up a squint when she thought her grandmother was not looking. When asked to serve the Coca-Cola that had been bought for the guests, she had limped to and from the kitchen as though one of her legs were shorter than the other, and had spilled half a glass of the precious drink on the floor.

“These things take no time to spread, I won’t be able to find a single boy for her if she goes on this way,” Ama cried in anguish. “I know she wanted them to go away thinking she’s deaf and insane and a cripple. Tell me, what is wrong with her? Has she said anything to you? Doesn’t she care about her future? Doesn’t she care about my reputation?”

The Ohjha had said two or three sessions would be needed if the spirit was a vengeful and determined one, as he thought it was. He worked at night, when the evil spirits that possessed human beings were at their strongest, in a rickety shed made of corrugated iron sheets. The moment they saw a snake or a toad or a scorpion leave that shed they would know Charu was free of the possession, he had promised.

When I saw Charu the morning after the first exorcism, she looked red-eyed, as if she had not slept. Her hair was dishevelled and she dragged her feet as she herded the goats and cows to their grazing on the slopes below her home. But from far down the slope, as soon as she saw the postman appear and turn towards my cottage, she bounded up the hill. She was at my door less than a minute after the postman had left, chest heaving, panting for breath, bright-eyed, waiting for me to tell her there was a letter from Kundan.