The Folded Earth

15


That first week in October, I thought I could hear the earth creaking on its tilted axis, moving a little further in the opposite direction each day, towards the cold months. Very slowly, but it did move, and the wet, grey, solid sky which had come down to live around houses and treetops through the months of rain thinned to uncover an airy concentration of blueness. Standing outside the house in the mornings, I luxuriated in the sunlight and heard nothing but the chirring of cicadas. At my feet, the meadow ended and slid away into limitless forests. Far below, the forest’s green was lit by bright points of autumnal red. Dinosaurs must have come up that slope once, crushing trees in their path, to sun themselves on the gigantic moss-greened granite boulders that were strewn over this part of the forest. The snow-peaks that ringed the horizon blazed: I could hardly raise my eyelids to let in their incandescence.

The golden light after the monsoon, the meadows pink with cosmos and wild lilies, and the clarity of the cool, dry air went through everyone like a live current. All around, people were whitewashing and painting and patching up their homes to undo the damage from the rains in time for Diwali. Mattresses were sunned after months of damp, women got down to the business of cutting grass to store for the winter months. In the bazaar, new election posters were plastered over the rain-sodden ones and new bunting went up everywhere. Road-works began, and smoking barrels of tar added their acrid stench to the scent of honeysuckle. Mr Chauhan’s men were everywhere, with cans of paint and tins of Brasso. The Reunion was a month away.

At the factory, we were in the middle of labelling the hundreds of bottles of jam we had made out of the summer fruit. This too had to be done before Diwali, so that the stock would reach Delhi in time for festival sales. The newspapers had forgotten Orissa’s Christians and moved on to something else; DivineLite T.V. had once more applied itself to saving souls. Miss Wilson had calmed down. When she once more stormed into my class to rap her cane on a table and call for silence, I knew life was back to normal. In the staffroom she told me after a particularly bad morning, “How long have you been teaching? Five years. Look at Joyce Mam. She only started three months ago and the students are like mice before her. Have you learnt to control the children at all? Is there any progress? No. Zero!” She liked to say “zero” as a mocking “Zee-row! Zed-ee-ar-oh, Zee-row!” She made a circle of her forefinger and thumb and placed it over her bespectacled eye as if she were looking at me through a monocle.

As the skies cleared, Diwan Sahib began to mend. He started asking for rum. He even wanted his Rolls Royce cigarette case beside him again. “Since I look like a Silver Ghost myself,” he explained. In a not very audible voice, interrupted by hacking coughs, he ticked off doctors and nurses, as well as me, for being too bossy. He asked for the newspaper and made me sit by him reading the oddments I knew would amuse him: that the Western Railways washed its blankets only once a month; that a Ukrainian bank robber had chosen to steal a police car for his getaway; that in Australia a pet camel had tried to mate with the woman who owned him and killed her in the attempt. His room in the hospital had turned by imperceptible degrees into an extension of the Light House. His familiar mess of bottles, books, pills and papers collected around him.

Mr Qureshi came every day, the General now and then. Himmat Singh lived there, and slept in Diwan Sahib’s room. He had made himself a home in a corner with his own mattress and blankets. Each time Diwan Sahib made a sound, Himmat Singh clambered to his feet to see what was needed; for the rest of the day he chatted with the new friends he had made, or dozed in the sun by the window. He had smuggled in a bottle of rum from which he took slugs when no-one was about; once I had caught him in the act of moving Diwan Sahib’s oxygen mask aside to give him a sip. I tried going there every day to prevent such efforts; Ama went to visit him at least twice a week and sometimes we came back together from the hospital in a jeep-taxi. Already the evenings were longer, darkness fell without warning. We would hurry back from the jeep drop-off point on Mall Road to the Light House, fearful of leopards behind every shadowed bush.

On the evening of 11 October, after we came back from the hospital, I had only just shut my door when Ama came out and shouted: “Is Charu over there?”

She was not. She was not in the cow-shed either. We searched all over the estate for her, torches and sticks in hand. “Where’s the girl? Has she fallen somewhere and broken a bone? Has a leopard mauled her?” Ama wailed. “When bad things start happening, they never stop.” She went into her rooms in confused agitation. Puran, who had been in his shed, staggered out drunk with sleep and added his shouts to ours, calling for Charu as he would for a lost cow. The clerk heard us and came out of his cottage. He looked up towards us and shouted, “What is it, Ama, why are you waking the birds again?”

Ama’s eyes fell on the wooden box that she stored valuables in. Nobody else was supposed to know where Ama hid the box or what was in it. But there it was, in plain view, its lid loose and the lock on it broken. Money was missing, as well as one piece of jewellery. This was Charu’s dead mother’s wedding nose ring: a bangle-sized gold hoop strung with pearls and gold beads, almost too heavy for a girl’s nostril to bear even on her wedding day, but nevertheless, a ring without which a hill girl’s wedding could not take place.

When Ama saw that the nose ring was gone, her finger went unconsciously to her own nostril, which a similar hoop had once pierced and left a sagging hole that was now empty of metal or stone. She rubbed it, as if in memory of all the rings and studs that had once pierced it. Slowly she put the box aside, shutting its lid so that the clerk and his wife, who had appeared by then as well, would be denied a look at the contents.

The clerk said, “I’ll get Lachhman, and we’ll go in his taxi to look around. She must be somewhere, maybe one of her animals has wandered and she’s searching for it. Arre O Puran, go and see: are all your cows and goats there in the sheds?”

Ama was looking straight at me, with a gaze so penetrating I could hardly meet her eyes. She said, “What do you say, Teacher-ni? Should we get a car?”

“She told me she might not do her lessons today because she had to go and see a friend who is getting married soon to a boy in Delhi.” I was stammering over the words. “I thought you knew.” Fear was making me feel weak. I needed to sit down. I held the door for support. Charu had no notion of big cities. What had made her do this without a word to me? If she got into trouble I would never forgive myself. Neither would Ama.

“And this boy is a good boy?” Ama said after a thought-filled pause. “After all, her friend’s mother would not marry her off to a rogue. In a far-off city. Eh, Teacher-ni?”

“He’s a good boy, Charu told me.” I tried to keep the tremble from my voice. I thought of setting off in pursuit of her. I had at least had the sense to write down Kundan’s address somewhere. She must have gone to him, where else would she have run to?

“From a good family?” Ama was saying. “This friend’s groom?”

“From a family which wanted nothing but the girl. No dowry, that is what Charu said. And he earns well, has a good, respectable job. His prospects are very good, he is going to travel even in foreign countries and earn five times what anyone here does.”

“Arre Ama,” the clerk said, “stop going on and on about Charu’s friend. She’ll marry who she’ll marry, what do we care? Should I get the taxi or not? I think we should go and look for Charu. It’ll get too late if we wait any longer.”

Ama said, “Let it be today. I think she’ll be back. I think she had told me too about going to this friend’s house, but I had forgotten. Our Teacher-ni, she always knows where Charu is.”