The Folded Earth

17


Diwan Sahib came home from hospital at the end of October, after more than a month there. Veer, who had just come back from the Valley of Flowers, wrapped him in a thick blanket and carried him for the few steps Diwan Sahib would have had to walk to reach the jeep parked at the hospital’s entrance. And whereas it was Veer’s habit to drive on twisting hill roads as if he was on an arrow-straight highway, today he eased the jeep watchfully over every bump and pothole, and took the loops at a crawl.

Some of the joyousness of our earlier days was restored. Diwan Sahib was as fragile as a dry leaf, but revived enough to go back to a gin in the morning and his evening rum. He was hungry for all the news of the hillside. When he heard how Charu had eloped and married, he laughed until he coughed and laughed again, telling me I had done my life’s one good deed. He insisted on hearing the story from Ama as well, chuckling at her embellishments. His durbar and our newspaper sessions resumed. Mr Qureshi once more became a fixture at the Light House, cradling his steel glass, and shaking his head when he thought back to the day he had taken Diwan Sahib to hospital. “I never thought I would reach the hospital in time,” he said. “Truly, I thought Diwan Sahib would – ”

Diwan Sahib wanted us near him all the time as if he could not afford to lose a minute. “Why do you go home to that cottage of yours?” he would say to me. “Just colonise one of the bedrooms in this house.” Veer did not look up from his computer, but he added in an undertone: “Take mine.” Aloud, he said to Diwan Sahib: “The cantonment sent a notice that the lease for this house needs renewing. Let’s dig out the documents and I’ll get that done while I’m here. You might lose the house if we don’t get down to it now.”

“Such efficiency,” Diwan Sahib said, “You make me feel old and tired. Why would I need to renew the lease? There are still a few years left of it, and if I can prevent Qureshi carting me off to hospital again if I so much as cough, I hope I’ll never need to renew anything.”

The General now came to visit Diwan Sahib much more often than before. He said he had realised during Diwan Sahib’s illness that nobody else in Ranikhet was as close to him in years, although at a mere eighty-seven Diwan Sahib was but a stripling in the General’s eyes. “Still, Diwan Sahib,” he said, “who but you and I remember first-hand the accession of the princely states to India? The way Nehru wrested Junagadh, Hyderabad, Goa from the jaws of the enemy – all with the help of the Indian Army. How men of our generation have built this country, the sacrifices we have made. Only you and I know, Diwan Sahib.”

Reminiscing made the General gloomier than ever about the present and he poured out larger measures of rum than before. What he observed did not please him. “No, Sir, there is nothing to smile about,” he said of the elections that were now only a few weeks away. “On one side there is a boy still wet behind the ears. On the other an old rogue who thinks the only way to get votes is to make Hindus hate everyone else. There are no statesmen now. None that you or I would be willing to work for and die for, isn’t it, Diwan Sahib? I would have died willingly if Nehru had sent me off to fight. But now? What is the reason for this decay, Diwan Sahib? Tell me, what is the reason?” Bozo, lying at his feet, would whine as he heard the familiar enquiry and the General would pat him down murmuring, “Not you, my boy, you are my only hope.”

In the bazaar, Ankit Rawat walked around like a man who had already won. He spoke of the things he would do in his first hundred days in Parliament. It was clear from the adoring crowds his meetings mustered that there was a good chance of his defeating the Nainital veteran, who had never lost an election. Umed Singh’s party was trying everything to deflect attention from Ankit’s triumphal march towards Delhi and Parliament. It organised singing competitions. It set up a tent where food was being distributed free to the poor. It was giving away cheap sweaters to village children.

It was not long before someone from our neck of the woods got wind of that meal tent.

Charu’s childhood friends Beena and Mitu, the blue-eyed twins, had been charity students of our school. Their father was a drunk who could not pay their fees. Their deaf-mute mother barely managed two meals a day from cleaning houses and washing people’s clothes. Earlier that year, when the twins turned fifteen, they had been sent off at the Church’s cost to a convent in Varanasi, where destitute, disabled girls were schooled and trained in vocational skills. They had gone that March with three new sets of clothes, and new books, largely paid for by Diwan Sahib.

They had returned to Ranikhet for their first holidays that October. The girls had got used to more food at the convent and were hungry all the time at home, where there was one sparse morning meal and another at sundown. One Sunday, wandering in the bazaar, they smelt poori-aloo and followed the scent like a spell.

The General, who believed in first-hand reconnaissance of the enemy, was at the tent at that time, waiting for Umed Singh’s next speech. He observed the girls enter the tent and sit in a corner, eating in quick, single-minded gulps. “The way to a poor man’s heart,” he reported later to Diwan Sahib, “is through his hungry stomach, of course.” To those unused to them, they were a fascinating spectacle. They were immediately noticed in the crowd. People stared. The girls looked the same, and their facial expressions reflected each other’s. Plaits of almost identical length framed their faces. Their mixed parentage had given their skin a lighter tint than most, and their hair was more chestnut than black. And there were those bright blue eyes.

The politician noticed them too. He stopped to pat their heads and speak to them as they ate. He rejoiced when he found they could only smile or nod in reply or gesture in a way nobody in that tent understood. He would help them, he announced in his speech. It was precisely the cause of the helpless poor in rural areas that his party was devoted to. His voice echoed down the street from loudspeakers fixed to lamp posts. He commanded a worker to go and find the girls’ parents and bring them to his meal-tent. “We will let them know their worries are over. Victory or defeat, our good work will start right now, and carry on forever. We will take charge of them from this moment.” At that point, someone took him aside and told him in a hurried whisper about the convent in Varanasi.

In his next speech, Umed Singh said St Hilda’s was trying to convert two illiterate, disabled girls who could not know better. At worst, he hinted between portentous pauses, the school authorities were perhaps trafficking girls. “Who knows what these girls are being trained in?” the politician thundered. “Why are the children of Hindu parents being sent to convents far away where nobody knows if they are being used as servants or slaves or worse? They will become Christian converts – this is an international conspiracy. They must be rescued.”

Soon after that speech, we received a circular from Miss Wilson summoning us to an Extraordinary Staff Meeting. She stood at the head of the table and made a sign of the cross before she began. Her voice was low and grave. The time had come, she said, for us to be tested. It was our turn to prove how we would cope with the provocation and adversity we were facing. Her students and teachers were at risk of physical harm. She could not rest as long as this threat persisted. The school was her child, she said, and we were her family, she had given her life for the Lord and for us, we were all she cared for.

At this several of the teachers looked at each other in disbelief. Behind her back, the younger teachers called her the Great Dictator and someone had once painted a pink toothbrush moustache onto the portrait of Miss Wilson that hung on the staffroom wall next to a laminated poster of the Vatican’s Pietà. It had needed nailpolish remover to clear it from the glass. Her latest pet, Joyce, the senior school’s newest teacher, had begun to mimic the way she ticked us off for our lapses: “Don’t make ex-kewses! I accept no ex-kewse but death!”

For Joyce and for the other teachers at our school, Beena and Mitu were two among the numberless children who had passed through our classes. For Mrs Wilson it was a larger administrative anxiety. It was different for me. I remembered those desolate early years in Ranikhet when I would wait for them to arrive with Charu for our games of gitti, for the sound of their clinking pebbles to fill my empty house. The games always ended with Bisht Bakery’s cake or the tea and boiled eggs I made for them, which they finished in seconds, hardly pausing to chew or breathe for hunger. They would never again go through such hunger and deprivation. I was determined they would not.

The Brigadier was too high up in the pecking order for me to able to get an appointment with, so I went to see Mr Chauhan about it. Could he provide protection for the school until the elections were over? And could he ask the politician to tone down his speeches?

Mr Chauhan had given me a four o’clock appointment, but when I arrived, he was not there. I found his wife instead. She was a pretty woman, with a very straight back, neat plait, chiffon sari, and a fixed smile. She sat in her garden under a pergola of roses, at times shouting a reprimand to her two children who were playing nearby. Butterflies rose and fell from the flowers around us, and her maids, one of them a cowgirl I encountered on my walks, served us tea and chocolate cream biscuits. Mr Chauhan would be a little late, she said. “He is so busy these days. Today, he has gone out with the Brigadier. The Brigadier wants to see the work my husband has been getting done for the Regimental Reunion.” She reached for my hand. Hers felt as soft as a petal when it briefly cradled my own, hardened with work. “This gives us women a chance to talk in peace, doesn’t it?” she said with a mischievous smile. “I have a dull married woman’s life. You tell me about yours! So many things happen in it!”

After a pause in which I discovered nothing to say about myself, she began to speak again.

Her husband remained preoccupied, she said. He had much to do: the entire administration of the cantonment. Had I noticed how much better the power supply and water supply had become? That was all because of Mr Chauhan’s untiring efforts to make our town the Switzerland of India. He was getting roads re-laid and parapets painted – oh, all sorts of things – and there was this terrible deadline of the Reunion, about which the Brigadier was so anxious. To top it all, the sign painters kept making spelling mistakes. The Brigadier had noticed one the other day which said “Streaking Route”. Actually, said Mrs Chauhan, the sign painter had written “Trekking” as “Treaking”, and then some mischief-maker – ”who likes to see another man succeed, tell me?” – had gone and added the “S”. Still Mr Chauhan worked on, writing improving slogans, thinking up new ways to better people’s lives. “Just like Mr Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, my husband tells me. He says Lee Kuan Yew is an Asian Hero.”

It was difficult, she said, living with a writer. Mornings, Mr Chauhan remained closeted in his room. If the gardener came in to ask, “Sa’ab, should I order more manure?” Mr Chauhan waved him away, not replying, and the gardener’s work came to a halt. Sometimes the telephone rang, and Mr Chauhan snapped a surly “Yes?” into it, not even bothering to find out who it was at the other end. Once it was the Brigadier and he had been offended at Mr Chauhan’s tone, not aware that Mr Chauhan was in the grip of inspiration at that moment. The Brigadier had said in a curt voice that he wanted his fences painted and orange trees planted at the back. “Order some saplings, I believe this is the right time,” he had said, and hung up. Mr Chauhan had had to call back to explain.

My mind was wandering. I stared at Mrs Chauhan’s face in an effort to focus on her words, and instead began to imagine her head topped by the mysterious wig Mr Qureshi had found in the boot of a car. There she sat, in a daring frock of the kind the General’s late wife had favoured, in that curling red-haired wig with its two blue clips. She was smoking a cigarette. She had a thin moustache. At times she gargled with a gulp of hot rum that she drank from a teacup.

Mrs Chauhan noticed my faraway look and laughed, “Maya-ji, where have you wandered off to, lost in your thoughts? Tell me too?”

“Oh no, I was listening,” I said. “You were saying the Brigadier keeps interrupting Mr Chauhan’s writing?”

Her husband was infuriated by interruptions, but how was Mrs Chauhan to know they had taken place? When she had called him for lunch a little after the Brigadier’s telephone call, he had been curt with her. “Can’t you see I’m writing? Can’t a writer get some peace in this house?” Alongside the signs he was working on a book. “His Memories,” said Mrs Chauhan, lowering her voice. This took up a lot of his time. Mrs Chauhan waited, the servants idled, the food went cold. “So you must not take it wrong, Maya, that he is late today,” she said, reaching out for my hand again. “He makes me wait also,” she said with her smile. “Maybe that is a woman’s fate!”

Forty long minutes had passed before he came down for lunch that day, and found Mrs Chauhan at the table, surrounded by congealing food, steel plates, bowls, tablespoons, and red napkins. She had not eaten either. “I cannot eat before him,” she said. “Unless he is out of town.” He took her out for a drive to the Golf Course that evening to watch the sun set and make up. “People say I am very lucky,” she smiled. “He is still romantic after all these years, and two children.”

She came to an abrupt halt as if realising the impropriety of discussing conjugal happiness with a widow. She stood up, restless all of a sudden, and said, “Maybe you can tell me what you came to discuss with him. I don’t think he’ll have the time to see you in the next weeks, when he has so much work. Or you can write an application and I will send it to his office.”

I came back and told Diwan Sahib about my misfired attempts at helping Miss Wilson, and he said, “There you are, a man of many talents. If Corbett had picked Chauhan as his biographer the book would have been written and published many times over by now.”

Then he said, “I had a visitor too, while you were gone. The General – again. He hasn’t visited me as many times in all our past years combined.”

That afternoon, Diwan Sahib said, the General had come over and sent Himmat Singh off to make him tea. He had at last found Diwan Sahib free of minders: Veer had gone to Dehra Dun, Mr Qureshi had not reappeared after his morning gins, and I was at Chauhan’s. He had waited for Himmat Singh to leave the room before speaking.

At first the conversation followed the beaten paths, Diwan Sahib said, the General giving news of the latest developments in Ranikhet’s elections, mourning the state of the country. It surprised him, Diwan Sahib said, that a man who earlier boasted he never read the newspaper beyond the headlines should have become so concerned about matters political. When Diwan Sahib had remarked on this, the General had explained in despairing tones that in the past months, watching the way the election campaign was degenerating, he had been overtaken by a sense of impending catastrophe. Something was very rotten in the state of India. In Rudrapur, down in the plains, not far away, a mullah had given a hate-filled speech, and then a pig had been slaughtered and thrown into the mosque. Now the town had curfew from dusk to dawn, in spite of which people were managing to kill each other. There had never been riots here in Ranikhet, but anything could happen now: hatred and anarchy were viruses that spread fast. The country was in the hands of immoral ruffians who would stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, for their own gain. The only worthwhile institution that remained in the country was the Army. Did Diwan Sahib not agree?

The General grew more loquacious as he held forth. Ever more, he felt, it was the duty of the old guard – of whom the oldest in Ranikhet were he and Diwan Sahib – to do what they could for the nation. Nobody else was bothered. The nation relied on them.

For what, precisely, Diwan Sahib had asked him? What was he to do for the country, wheezing and coughing, just back from the dead – and perhaps not back for very long?

Social service had to begin close to home, the General said. They could start by giving over their own possessions, as in the glorious nationalist days. His old uniforms, those were museum pieces now. Old photographs. All his money of course, and his medals – he would bequeath them all to the Army. After all, how many military men now alive had served under the British as well as under Nehru? He had much that would prove invaluable for military historians. Such things would be a worthy reminder of more idealistic times for the cynical youth of today.

“That’s a noble thought,” Diwan Sahib had said, and then waved his arm around his shabby living room. “Not much your brigadiers and generals would want for their museums among this shambles, you know.”

“But that is exactly where you’re wrong, Diwan Sahib!” The General had pounced in triumph. It was the Diwan, more than anyone else, who possessed what truly belonged to the entire nation. Historical documents. Letters to do with the accession of Surajgarh to India. Minutes of meetings between the Nawab of Surajgarh and officials of the Indian government. Diwan Sahib’s own old diaries, appointment books, and manuscripts. And of course, Nehru’s letters, and Edwina’s. The General had tacked this on almost as an afterthought, and hinted at the danger of such sensitive letters falling into the wrong hands – then being used to score grubby political points. It was the Diwan’s duty, the General said, to hand over what he had.

Hearing the word “duty”, Diwan Sahib confessed, he had lost his temper. “I told the General a thing or two. There was a time when I was important for the Army, because they knew I had friends in high places. Even the General then – I recall him as a Colonel, then a Brigadier – was forever calling on me, pumping me for information, begging me to put in a word for him here and there. Now he’s back because he wants my papers. But in between? His army did not think it fit to trust me with anything. Maulana Bhashani was here for weeks on end and I had no idea. Apparently the ex-Diwan of Kashmir took refuge here for a time and I was never told. They forgot me as a has-been, an irrelevant old fool, and now they’re preaching at me to do my duty. I had to press my lips together to stop myself laughing at his continued peevishness over that same little thing. I frowned hard in an effort to appear as outraged as he was.

“Anyway, when I calmed down,” Diwan Sahib continued, “I was almost persuaded. Then he played his trump card. What a fool! Well-meaning, but a fool. Do you know what he hinted at after much humming and hawing? He had been given to understand, he said, by the highest authorities – not that he expected this would influence me in the least – that a gift of the letters might ease the way for renewing the Light House’s lease from the Army.”

Diwan Sahib’s laughter made him choke on his rum and I ran to him to thump his shoulders. “Whatever next? Maybe they’ll offer me a full military funeral too as a reward. A twenty-one gun salute when I join Corbett in his happy hunting grounds, provided I hand over his papers too?” he wheezed, smiling through his spasms. “Some people can’t wait for that to happen. But you have to admire the man’s sense of public purpose. At his age, soldiering on to serve the Army still! Would you care, Maya, in your early hundreds? I don’t give a damn even at my youthful eighty-seven what happens to the nation. As long as the nation leaves me in peace, that ass Chauhan can destroy it at leisure for all I care.”