The Folded Earth

16


The next morning, Charu woke in one of the corridors of a Nainital hospital. She had spent the night there, finding nowhere else to wait for the morning bus to Delhi. The stench of urine and disinfectant had done away with her hunger pangs and throughout the night she had stayed awake listening to ill people groaning and mumbling in the open-windowed general ward. At night her worries turned into spectres. What if she never found Kundan? Had she enough money if it took time to locate him? What if he said he no longer wanted her? Why had he written so uncaringly in his last letter? What would happen to her if she had to return to Ranikhet after a failed journey? Ama would throw her out of the house with the same ruthlessness she had shown Charu’s father. Ama did not forgive people; she remembered wrongdoing for years. Maybe Maya Mam would fight for her. She would shelter her for a few days. She too had married out of caste – and religion – and she had lost her family.

She closed her eyes and tried to lull herself with thoughts of Kundan. How astonished he would be to see her tomorrow. She could not make herself believe that she would truly see him again, touch him, smell the scent of his skin again, feel his lips – in a mere day, a few hours. What were a few hours after all the months they had spent apart? But these last few hours seemed to stretch longer than weeks and months.

Early next morning, as she walked by the Nainital lake soon after dawn, she noticed that you could see bubbles in the water where underground springs fed it. It did not seem right that she was at the lake without him, he should have been showing it to her. All around her was water, more than she had ever seen. She thought that the ocean on the way to Singapore could not be much bigger. There were dozens of boats moored at the waterside, bobbing in the morning breeze. “We will go right to middle of the lake in a boat,” Kundan had promised her once, after a visit to Nainital with his employer, when he had seen the lake for the first time. He had kissed the soft, tender bit behind her ears and whispered as his hands travelled over her breasts: “There will be nobody but you and me in that boat.” Charu looked out across the water and imagined she and Kundan were at the centre of it, on a red and blue boat with long white oars.

The sun was inching up the sky. Charu had lost sense of the time as she gazed at the water. She had no watch. Panic overtook her. She ran from the lakeside to the bus stop, losing her way, frantically asking one of the pony men leading out a mangy horse where the bus stop was, then scampering in the direction he pointed. Her bag thumped her hips. Her shawl flew off her head. Her breath came and went in shudders.

She reached the entrance to the bus stop. The conductor and driver had only just arrived. They were standing by the bus, exchanging notes, smoking. The early travellers had come, and were waiting for the buses to be cleaned. She ran up to the driver and asked, just to be sure there was no mistake, “Is this the six o’clock bus to Delhi?”

“Yes”, they said. “The doors open after a while.”

She went a little distance off and waited, eyeing the men and the bus watchfully, taking no chances. At five minutes to six, she was first at the door. Other people were now straggling in with suitcases and bags, looking drowsy. She climbed in and got herself a window seat in the second row. The windows were cracked and some of them had the remnants of blue curtains thick with dirt. Charu bunched her curtain away for a last look at the lake. She plumped her bag on her lap. She would comb her hair when she reached Delhi, and before she saw him she would try to find a place to change into the prettier salwar kurta she had packed. She would wash her face and put some fresh kohl in her eyes. She smiled her secret smile, twisting her silver nose stud to settle it better. She took out a stale roti and lump of jaggery and munched on them for her breakfast.

* * *

The journey from Nainital to Delhi takes about eight hours by road. For the first part, the bus drops down from the hills on a narrow, spiral-staired road, with jungle on either side. At times the forest breaks, and when it did Charu saw snow peaks through the gaps. The same mountains she saw in Ranikhet, here too! She leaned her head against the rattling window of the bus and let her thoughts wander.

The bus charged onward, taking the bends at a speed that made her queasy. The driver had a feverish air and a face like a skull, and he flung his shoulders this way and that as he wrestled with his wheel. He thrust his head out of the window to yell to truckers coming the opposite way: “Arre Ustad, is there a jam ahead?” “Is the road open, should I go on?” Otherwise he laughed and sang. When he sang folksongs his voice was swaggering and loud. With romantic film songs it became a high squeak from which he emerged at abrupt intervals to yell curses at cars in his way: “Arre Saala, Privaaate!” He swerved towards big cars to give them a fright.

In the rear-view mirror, his eyes gleamed. When Charu inadvertently looked towards the mirror, she met his eyes, which he narrowed and winked. She quickly looked away, towards the woman on the next seat, who nodded at her over the toddler in her arms. The child gave Charu a wide, three-tooth smile. He put out a dimpled hand and clutched a fistful of her hair, pulling with all his might. Charu gasped. The woman gave the child a sharp slap and said, “I’ve told him, and told him, and told him, don’t pull hair, but does he listen?” Her shrill voice rose above the noise of the wheezing bus. “What a wicked child. Not mine, or I would have taught him a thing or two; my sister-in-law’s, you know, she’ll ruin him with her love, a boy after three girls, so what can one do?” She pinched the child on its arm and ordered, “Say Namaste to Didi, you wicked boy.”

Charu looked out of her window and saw they were passing a waterfall. She wished she could wash her feet in its sparkle. The woman resumed: “Sometimes he vomits because he feels sick on these hill roads. If you give him the window seat, we will all be at peace.” The child bawled, as if on cue. “He just wants to look out of the window.” This time the woman sounded as if she was accusing Charu of making him cry.

Charu said, “I am used to crying babies. It makes no difference to me.” She turned away. She could sense the woman’s peevish looks but she was inured to such things. She leaned her head on the window rails and shut her eyes.

The bus stopped at two points for people to buy food, drink tea, and use the bushes. Charu rushed in and out of the bus at those stops, afraid of losing her seat. She ate the last of her roti and jaggery and spent two rupees buying a glass of tea. It came in a tiny plastic cup. She could hardly hold it for the heat, but the tea was thick and sweet and she felt revived by the few sips the cup contained.

Once the bus left the hills behind, it began to hurtle at high speed. The roads were wider, though still bumpy, and there were fields on either side as far as the eye could see. Charu had never seen land so flat and endless. You might walk the whole day and never have to go up or down a slope. She wondered how that would feel.

When the bus went through one of the many small towns on the way, she saw no fields, only white dust, and the sun felt as if it would burn through her skin. Every house was a grim square of concrete. Drains on the road’s sides brimmed with an oily sludge. It was dirtier and poorer than the dirtiest and poorest part of Ranikhet’s bazaar. How did people live like that, she wondered? Fat flies buzzed over mounds of bright orange jalebis and samosas on handcarts selling food. Dust and piss everywhere; the bus churning up black mud as it bludgeoned its way through the crowds.

Once or twice they drove through market fairs, and Charu’s eyes tore at whatever they could as the bus swayed between rows of vendors who had laid out their goods on squares of sacking at the road’s edge: heaps of dry red chillies, cascading mounds of tomatoes, T-shirts in a hundred colours, glittering saris, dried turmeric sticks, stacks of bottle gourd, plastic shoes. They passed tractors filled with the sugarcane harvest, bullocks being sold at a cattle fair, mangled cars and trucks left over from recent accidents, their wheels still pointing to the sky. They stopped at toll-gates where boys came up to the window to sell plastic pouches of water, fried papad, roasted gram, sliced cucumbers, and coconut. Charu fished out another two of her precious rupees and bought a hot, sour packet of the gram sprinkled with raw onions and tomatoes. For some time she sat holding it, letting its aroma come to her, feeling her mouth water. The woman next to her picked some of the gram out from the packet, and tossed it into her mouth. “Good,” she said. “It’s good.” Charu was outraged. The packet was tiny, and now a whole mouthful was gone. Before the woman took more, Charu tucked her packet out of reach, hiding it between herself and the window, surreptitiously picking out one grain at a time to suck on.

They went over bridges and through traffic jams. When they crossed the Ganga at Garh Mukteshwar, the bus slowed, then came to a stop in a traffic jam. Many passengers clamoured for it to remain on the bridge so they could run down and throw coins into the holy water, but the driver threatened, “Anyone who gets off will be left behind.” The woman next to Charu leaned right across her to the window, bowed her head, bumped it against the window grille again and again and murmured, “Hari Om, Hari Om.” Charu could smell the woman’s stale nylon sweat. Nobody smelled like that in the hills.

The river, though very wide, looked shallow. There were people in it, and the water came only up to their waists. Low steps led away from the water to the banks, which had rows of temples as far as her eye could see. The steps were crowded with sadhus, priests, people praying. One of the temples had a clock in a tall tower, its hands stalled at five-twenty. The river water below it was still as well.

“Water in the hills flows very fast,” Charu said, almost to herself. “You can be washed away in it.”

The woman moved away and said, “This is our mighty Ganga-ji, not a little river in the hills.” Then she repeated, “Hari OM!”

In the late afternoon, after crawling through two traffic jams, they were in Delhi.

* * *

Charu had thought she would be awed by a big city, but already, along the journey, before they had quite reached Delhi, she had got used to tall buildings and roads that were like five rivers of cars joined into one. She felt a sense of familiarity. She had seen such roads on T.V. She realised she knew big cities from films and pictures in magazines.

What she was not prepared for was the stench. It smelt of putrid things, filthy drains, sewage, burning rubber, and smoke from factories. The stench came in through the windows of the bus, it was all around and she could hardly draw breath without coughing. She had not been prepared for the sky. She had thought skies were blue everywhere, as grass was green or red roses red; but here the sky was the slate grey colour of village roofs, only dirtier. You could not see far at all, just till the next few towering pillars of buildings, which stood close together like walls with square holes. They all looked the same, and as if they would fall any moment. Beyond, there was a haze of smoke. What kind of house did Kundan live in? she wondered. One of those?

The woman sitting next to her had told her they were getting off at a place called Anand Vihar Bus Terminus. “Where do you have to go?” the woman had asked her, but Charu had ignored the question, not trusting a stranger. She kept feeling the place on her chest where her cloth bag nestled under her dupatta, with the bulk of her money and her mother’s nose ring. She was now more apprehensive than she had been at any point in her entire journey. As the bus drew into the terminus, the strangeness of the new city became terrifyingly real.

Crowds of people bore down on the slowing bus. They were running alongside the bus, banging it with their hands, shouting. Some hauled themselves up by the window rods, and hung from them, pressing their faces to the windows. One face said, “Auto, auto,” the other face said, “Rickshaw? Tempo? Where to?” Her eyes scoured what little she could see beyond the crowds of men at the windows and doors. The bus stop was a vast cemented area, with bay after bay for buses from various states. All the hills buses came into Bay 12, and Charu’s bus too headed for it. Any minute now, she thought, she would see that loved, familiar face. He would appear, pick up her bundle, and take her home. He would hold her hand in the auto.

She got off the bus, too confused to say yes or no to the autowallahs sidling up to her with, “Share Auto? Where to?” She stumbled about, trying to find a slightly empty spot where she could stand and wait for Kundan. Nearby, a transvestite in a shimmering green-gold sari and long earrings went from person to person nudging and flirting to make them give her money. She poked Charu in the waist and said, “Setting up shop?” Charu leaped backward in alarm. An old man snatched her out of the way of a reversing bus and shouted, “Are you blind?”

Charu scanned the crowd for a face that looked kinder than the others, but nobody had time to stop. All the people around her were in a hurry, either getting on buses or off them or hunting for autos, or looking for relatives or buying tickets from hectoring touts. Everyone else knew what to do and where to go. She plucked up courage and asked a woman, “Could you tell me … “, but the woman pushed her aside to run after a bus that was revving its engine and leaving. There was so much noise: a vast confused mingling of horns, voices, vendors’ shouts, engines. All the faces from her own bus, that had grown familiar to Charu over the eight hours they had travelled together, had melted away. She felt alone as she never had on the most deserted hillside or deepest forest.

She was standing there wondering what to do, when a man came up to her, narrow-waisted, barrel-chested, in black shiny trousers and a belt with studs. His shirt buttons were undone to his navel and concentric circles of shiny chains roped his neck. His hair was a puff on his head, on his wrist was a large, square, plastic watch. He looked at it, and said, “Thirty minutes. You have been here half an hour. Waiting for someone?”

She turned away. Her letter had probably got lost, she thought, and Kundan had not come. She needed to find her way to his house.

“How much?” he said.

She looked at him, startled. His lips were blackish red, the teeth smiling through them were yellow, and she could smell gutka on him. She was confused, and repeated, “ ‘How much?’ What do you mean, ‘How much?’”

“Ah,” he said, “I see.” Then he seemed to think a little and said, “I have a scooter, and I can take you for a short distance. Not too much, not too far, but if you want to go a little way, I can drop you where you want.”

Something rang an alarm bell inside her and she began to walk away from him. He followed her, saying, “What’s the matter? All I am offering is a good ride!”

She half-ran, and still he followed her, towards the line of autos that stood at the entrance to the bus stand. She approached the auto rank. The drivers, all in grey shirts and trousers, as if they were an army, were standing around waiting for customers. When she came up they went silent. The man following her had fallen away. The driver near the first auto asked her: “Where to?”

Charu extracted one of Kundan’s letters from the rubber-banded bundle for the address. She held it out and said, “The address is here.”

The man took the letter and said, “Hey, who can read this?”

The driver next to him said, “Give it here … Sundar Nagar.”

A few of them whistled. “Rich woman,” one of them said. “How much will you give? It’s not cheap, you know, Sundar Nagar. It’s far away.”

“Whatever is to be paid,” Charu replied, not knowing what to say.

“Whatever is to be paid, she says!” the man laughed, slapping his thighs. All the men had gathered around her. They looked her up and down and said to each other, “Whose is she? Who’ll take her for a ride?”

In her confusion, Charu had not held tight to her cloth bag. She felt a tug and her bag leaving her shoulder. She screamed in panic and leaped in the direction she saw the bag going. A rough hand grabbed hers and pulled her away from the crowd. Before she knew what was happening, her bag had been flung into an auto, and she had been pushed in after it. The driver bent and yanked its starter. It would not start. Two of the other auto drivers ran towards him and shouted, “Sister-f*cker, bastard, she’s ours.”

The man who had grabbed Charu yanked the engine handle again. This time the engine held and he swivelled the auto in a sharp circle and accelerated, charging past the men still yelling after him. Charu cowered in the seat, rigid with terror. She clutched her bag and began to pray in a fast mumble to Jhoola Devi. “I will tie a bell if you keep me safe,” she said, again and again. “I’ll tie a big fifty-rupee bell.”

When they were well away from the bus terminus and on a wide road, a traffic-light forced them to stop at an intersection. Small children ran from car to car, begging for change. Charu turned away, afraid they would demand money from her when she had nothing to give them. She studied the rough black hair on the back of the auto driver’s head, and noticed that his ears were pierced. On the panel above his head, were three words in Hindi, painted in red. She stared at the line and tried, letter by letter, to see what the phrase added up to. “Ga,” she mouthed, “Oh-lah-Uuh” She understood at length that the letters made up the words: “Jai Golu Devta”. All hill drivers prayed to Golu Devta for safe journeys. She began to feel a flutter of hope. The man driving her turned around. As soon as she saw his face, relief surged through her. But still, she could not be absolutely sure.

She asked him, “Are you a Pahari?” She could see from his facial features that he might be from the hills.

“What did you think? That I run to rescue every girl those guys harass this way?”

She said nothing, but could not stop a radiant smile. So he said, “Why alone? They would have made you vanish and robbed you before you knew what was happening.”

“I am visiting a relative,” she said. And partly to change the subject, and partly out of curiosity, added, “Where are you from? Kumaon or Garhwal?”

The light turned green and the auto tooted and puttered through the huge din of moving cars, buses, tempos, scooters. Charu shrank behind its fluttering window shades each time a car tore past them as if it would run them over if the flimsy little three-wheeler dared stand in its way. Buses towered over them, honking at their slowness. With the breeze sweeping through the two open sides of the auto and the noise from the road, she could hardly hear one word in ten of what the man was saying, but his reply, which he shouted, was: “I’m from a village near Almora. And you? Where are you from?”

She could have cried or danced with joy. Almora! The town closest to her own, where so many people she knew had been. To which she had often been told she would be taken. The Almora whose famous Singhori sweets she had eaten, the ones that came individually wrapped in fresh green leaves.

“Ranikhet,” she breathed, her voice caressing the familiar name. “I am from Ranikhet.”