The Folded Earth

3


I cannot remember how many weeks I wandered the streets this way, or why I decided that the first person I had to talk to about Michael’s death was his priest, Father Joseph. I waited for the bus that had always taken me to work, and sat beside the girl at the third window who used to save a seat for me every day. She talked about her fiancé again: “My Would-be” is what she called him. They were to be married that year. He wanted to arrive for the wedding on an elephant, but she had since girlhood pictured her groom on a white horse, as she had seen in the movies.

“Are there any elephants in Hyderabad?”

“Maybe not,” she said, smiling. “But my Would-be feels higher up is safer in traffic.” She spoke close to my ear to be heard over the sound of honking cars. I tried to make sense of what she was saying, but her words were obliterated by the panic my own thoughts unleashed: Michael was gone forever. I would never in my life – my days, nights or evenings, never at meals or in bed or on the street – I would never be with him again. What was this city to me now, without him? He was this city. He was the meaning of its buildings and streets.

We were passing the minarets and lawns of the Hyderabad Public School, an old, long, sprawling mansion that might have been a palace. The girl clutched my hand to draw my attention, and pointed at it. “Actually what my Would-be wants is to light up that building, and have the wedding there,” she laughed. “He wants me to feel like a princess.”

I thought of the very few people who were at my wedding: all strangers to me. Our families had stayed away, loathing each other’s religion with a passion. Michael’s parents had refused even to meet me. Only two rebellious young cousins of his came and took photographs – each one a different grouping of the four of us – plus the marriage registrar, whose droopy moustache and drowsy eyes gave his face an all-in-a-day’s-work expression. After the paperwork, we had gone with the cousins to a biryani house in the Charminar area. An aquarium framed by panels of beige satin covered most of one wall. It was filled with murky water and plastic ferns, but there were no fish. The bill for our food came to 378 rupees. In all, our wedding cost us under five hundred rupees. It was nothing compared to the opulent weddings of my relatives and friends, but I had cared only for the happy light in Michael’s eyes, the scent of the flowers in the garlands he had brought for my hair and my neck, and the way he had pressed against me in the cramped seat of the rickshaw on our way to our newly-rented two rooms.

My sari was a dark-green silk that had belonged to my mother. She had given it to me the night I ran away from home. She had not said a word, but had kissed my hair and then my face, staring at it as if she might never see it again. She took off her emerald earrings and twisted them into my earlobes. She draped a corner of her treasured sari over my head to see how I would look in it. For a long minute she stared at my half-veiled face, then put a finger to the kohl in her eyes and smudged its blackness onto my forehead to protect me from evil spirits. We spoke in gestures and were careful not to make a sound: we knew my father was somewhere in the house, alert to every rustle, every whisper.

From the day my father had found out about Michael, he had become as watchful as an animal waiting to pounce. He prowled all over the house, somehow soundless despite the stick he always carried as a crutch to compensate for his shorter left leg. He said nothing, but no longer allowed me to leave the house, not even to go to college. I was only nineteen then, an undergraduate who needed to go to classes. He told everyone I had chickenpox and was too contagious for visitors. He cooked up a doctor’s certificate for my college principal. He put a stop to friends, outings, telephone calls. At times, I felt his cold-eyed gaze travelling over my body as if he were trying to gauge which parts of it Michael had touched. But I was his daughter. Before my fall from grace, he had done his best to train me to follow his example: to be ruthless in getting what one wanted, to take calculated risks. His efforts must have yielded results. I escaped him within a fortnight, knowing I would never return home.

My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board. She shouted, as if in a movie: “Let me go! I want to live! I want to live!” My eyes blurred and I began to see human skeletons and bones at the edges of the pool, on the green tiles: skulls, clavicles, fibulas, tibia and femurs. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with ancient silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. I saw skulls at the bottom of the pool, turning their blind gaze this way and that in the clear water, magnified by it. They bobbed to the surface. One of them splashed to the edge of the pool, next to my feet, and the face streaming away from it in dissolving ribbons was Michael’s.

The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as you do in dreams. It was only when a face rose from the water close to my feet and in a French accent said, “Are you alright?” that I realised my face was wet with tears, my nose was running, my hair was dishevelled, and I was late for Michael’s priest.

I ran up the stairs to Father Joseph’s room and burst in without knocking. I stopped and held the back of a chair to steady myself. A house with a trident-shaped peak framed in its window, Michael had said: a house that looked out at the Trishul, and at its base Roopkund, the phantom-lake. He had seen such a house once, he had told me where it was. He had dreamed we would live there and wake each morning looking at the Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit its three tips one by one.

“Father, find me work in Ranikhet. Please,” I said. “I can’t stay on here a single day longer.”

* * *

Four months after Michael died, I climbed into the train that had taken him away from me. It went from Hyderabad to Delhi, a northward journey that took a day and a night. One more night on a different train brought me further north, to Kathgodam, where the train lines stopped and the hills began. It was another three hours by bus over twisted, ever-steeper roads to Ranikhet, a little town deep in the Himalaya. In my bag was the address of the school in which Father Joseph had fixed me a job. I was going to be two thousand kilometres from anything I knew, but that was just numbers. In truth the distance was beyond measurement.