The Folded Earth

14


There is only one way for people to leave Ranikhet: by road. Long-distance buses leave from two bus depots in the bazaar. The government bus depot has a cluster of shops around it: fruit shops, a barber shop, and small restaurants grimy from years of living close to badly sprung, rattling buses that spew out black, oily fumes. This is the more genteel bus stop, since the government bus staff do not feel the need to fight for custom: they get their salaries regardless of the number of passengers they pick up. At the other end of the market is the bus stop for private operators. This is loud, aggressive, sleazy. The staff there hustle people into their buses with all sorts of false promises: “Leaving in a minute! Haldwani, Rudrapur, Rampur, Moradabad, Delhi! Leaving in a minute!” Once you have bought your ticket and found a seat on the bus you might wait all the next hour while the driver yells out to passers-by, asking them to hop in. Through that hour people harangue you to buy bananas and oranges for the journey and drunks lurch up and down demanding small change.

There are also phalanxes of jeeps and shared taxis to carry people to nearby hill towns. Charu had never travelled out of Ranikhet before, except once or twice to go to villages further into the mountains for weddings and festivals. She had never gone alone; the only town she knew was Ranikhet. How big was Delhi? she had asked Kundan Singh when he was about to leave. Was it like four or five Ranikhets put together?

At that time she had only been curious. Now it was a matter of survival. Kundan Singh’s last letter had made her understand that her daydreaming had to stop. It was time for action. If Kundan was doubtful about coming to Ranikhet before he left for Singapore, she had to go to him.

Charu had no inkling of what to expect or how to find Kundan Singh if she did reach Delhi. All she had were inland letters on the back of which he had written his address. She posted him a letter, the first she had ever written in her life, telling him only the date, 12 October, that he should come to the bus stop in Delhi to get her. She had decided to leave on an evening when her grandmother was away, a regular occurence now that Ama went so often to see Diwan Sahib at the hospital. Charu picked the Friday a week away. She would have to wait till Puran was asleep, and then she would take a night bus out of town.

Every night, as Ama snored next to her and Bijli whimpered in his sleep, she lay awake, eyes open in the dark, thinking of ways to slip away unnoticed. The bus stop was a problem. Because she delivered milk in the bazaar every day, and one of her customers was Nanda Devi Sweets near the government bus depot, they knew her there. At the private depot end, there was Bimla, the Nepalese vegetable seller, from whose shop Charu collected spoiled stock every day for her cows. To dodge these inquisitive acquaintances, she had to avoid the bazaar and both bus stops.

The minute Ama left for the hospital on the 11 October, Charu began to look around their rooms for what she needed. She put some things from her grandmother’s box into a cloth pouch that she then tied round her neck and slipped inside her kurta. Into the cloth bag that she used on her trips to the market she put the few stale rotis kept aside for the cows. She added some batashas and lumps of jaggery, a change of clothes and a comb. She slipped in the rubber-banded bunch of Kundan’s letters. As an afterthought, she put in the smaller of her two sickles. She wore her everyday clothes and her plastic slippers.

As she was getting ready to leave she noticed Bijli, bright-eyed with curiosity, wagging his tail in anticipation of a late-hour romp through the forest. He got up and gave himself a full-body shake that made his ears flap, and stood at the door, ready. Charu said, “Not now, later.” She gathered a clump of his fur in her hands. She felt as if she would not be able to let go. Quickly, she locked him in. She crept up the path that led away from their house to the cow-shed to breathe in their smell and to touch their wet noses one last time. In a far corner she could see the huddled, sleeping form of her uncle, Puran. Tears sprang to her eyes. Who would look after him now? How would Ama milk Ratna? Ratna only let Charu touch her, nobody else. Before Ratna looked towards her, she slipped out of the shed and ran up the slope away from the Light House and its grounds.

She kept to the forested hillsides, meeting the roads only occasionally to cross them and hop onto the next slope. In order to avoid Mall Road, where she might be seen, though it provided the shortest, safest route to the highway, she had to walk away from it in the opposite direction, past the Jhoola Devi temple, from where she could cut through the forest, down the western ridge, to the highway. She had decided it might be best if she caught a bus outside town: she would walk down the highway to Uprari, the hamlet seven kilometres away, where buses stopped to pick up passengers.

Dusk was falling. Window-squares glowed in the houses above and below her, and tubelights stuttered to life on street corners. Across the airy space of the big valley, one, two, then twenty lights began to twinkle on a distant hill misted over by the fading of daylight. The roads were deserted: the evenings had grown chilly and most people were indoors by this time. Charu drew her shawl around her head and half covered her face to avoid recognition. Only a few danger spots remained: in the marigold yellow house she was passing lived one of the girls who also worked at the jam factory; further down, where a woman was shouting for a dog, Charu knew the daughter. They had sometimes found their cows mingling as they grazed.

Soon she had left the houses behind. She began to hurry, breaking into a run. She ran past the Jhoola Devi temple, then turned superstitiously back. The tea shack next to it was shut, no-one was around. She tore a thin strip off her dupatta and tied it to the railings in a knot. She could see the dimly-illuminated image of the goddess through the little doorway of the temple. She touched her head to the cold steps that led inside and said, “Jhoola Devi, I have no bell I can tie, but please look after me.”

She struck a match and lit a pine branch to act as a torch to guide her descent through the forest beyond the temple. It was a craggy, steep hillside beyond all habitation. Charu had never been there before and felt as if she was stepping into a land so primeval it was as if no human feet had stepped on those stony slopes. Hillock-sized boulders leaned over her. Cacti and stunted pines struggled out through their cracks. She recalled people saying they had seen animals – leopards, of course, but also jackal cubs – basking on the rocks. Somewhere on that slope, she knew, was Diwan Sahib’s old blue car, home to foxes now.

Charu found the narrow trail through the forest and began sliding, slipping downhill, feet unsteady on gravel and pine needles, trees and bushes catching at her shawl and hair. She heard rustling sounds. A pair of foxes stopped and looked at her without fear, then went on their way. Her shawl fell off her head. She heard her own breathing, harsh and loud. She hoped her slippers would hold.

Her burning pine branch smelt of cosy evenings at home and for an instant she considered abandoning her wild enterprise and heading back. She had not ventured very far and would not yet have been missed. But then she spotted bobbing flames further down the path: villagers taking a short cut through the forest after a day’s work in Ranikhet. She raced after them, trying to keep the fire of her pine branch away from hair and clothes. She would walk down the hill at a discreet distance behind them. She pulled her shawl over her face again.

It must have been half an hour later, though it felt much longer, a lifetime, when she spotted tarmac snaking some thirty feet below her. The narrow highway corkscrews around the hillsides on its way down until it flattens out, straightens, and broadens where it eventually finds the plains. Like all roads in the hills, it does not have width enough to be divided into lanes. Charu could see the strong beams of a large vehicle’s headlights cutting through the centre of the road’s blackness. The beams came from the Ranikhet end of the road and pointed in the direction of the plains. She ran down the hill, past the two villagers. Where was the bus going? She had no idea, but the highway looked so dark and so lonely, she did not think she could walk all the way to Uprari after all. She ran helter-skelter, stopping herself at the wheels of the bus, waving it down with her flaming pine branch.

Its brakes screeched. But it was not a bus. It was a truck.

She fell back in disappointment, the pine branch dropping from her hand. The truck driver smiled, revealing a mouthful of brown teeth, and said, “Get in, wherever it is, I will take you.” His helper laughed. “Ah! We get people to places they never thought of !” Their faces were half-visible, bluish-red in the light of the dials on the dashboard of the truck. They looked like plains people. Their radio played a loud, screeching song. She pulled her shawl further over her face and said, “Wait a few minutes. My father and brother want a ride also.” The driver scowled. “We didn’t say we would take three passengers,” he said, revving his engine, and drove off.

The pine branch had gone out when it fell from her hand and she had lost the matches somewhere on the way down. Nothing was visible in the aftermath of the headlights. She closed her eyes to get used to the dark again and in a while discovered that the light of the half-moon and stars was enough for her to see where she was going.

She began walking towards Uprari. “Put one foot before another, and you will get there,” she told herself. “Wild animals eat dogs, not humans.” The smooth, level tarmac was a relief after her scramble through the forest. She hummed under her breath, songs from the radio at the jam factory. She changed shoulders when the bag she was carrying started to feel heavy. Her stomach began to rumble with hunger, but she put away thoughts of food, not knowing how long the rotis and jaggery would have to last. To her left, the narrow road rose into a sheer granite cliff overgrown with dry grasses and bent trees. To the right, it fell away into a valley, on the other side of which were faraway villages whose names she did not know. There was not a glimmer of light on the road. At times, cars and motorbikes charged past her, tearing the road in half with their headlights, noise, and fumes, too fast to notice anyone walking. No buses appeared.

At eight, she reached Pilkholi and sat down at the tea stall exhausted, no longer bothered that someone she knew would see her. “How much is a tea?” she asked, and was told, “Three rupees for you, four for anyone else.” She asked for a glass of water, ate a lump of her jaggery with it, and then began to walk again.

Half an hour further on towards Uprari, large headlight beams once again swept towards her. Once again she stopped and wildly waved her arms, hoping that the glare of the headlights this time hid a bus and not a truck.

It was a bus, and the conductor leaped out in fury. “What do you think you are doing? Standing in the middle of the road like a cow! Who do you think will go to jail if you get killed?”

“Where is it going?” she asked, in a voice trembling with tears.

“Wherever it is going, it’s not taking you. Mad girl! And there’s no space.”

“I can sit on the floor,” she said. “I can stand.” Her shoulders drooped from the weight of her small bag.

“Not in my bus,” the conductor said. He put a foot on the lowest step of the bus and held the handrail to haul himself in. He slammed the body of the bus twice with the flat of his palm to tell the driver to drive on. Then as the bus revved its engines, he banged the wall of the bus again.

“What the hell are you doing? Do we go or stop?” screamed the driver.

The conductor’s tone was bad-tempered and grudging, but he said, “Get in. And be quick. And pay for the ticket – no free rides on this bus.”

Charu got in. The bus was going to Nainital, two hours away. They gave her a seat right at the back, and the man next to her, at the window, retched out of it all through the journey as the bus swung round the twisting and reeling and swinging and swirling hill roads.