The Folded Earth

18


One week later, what Miss Wilson and the whole school feared came to pass. Umed Singh had come back to campaign and had begun in the market, at the marquee where the Baba now held court several days a week. Many of the politician’s henchmen spoke before him. Bhajans were sung, set to the tune of popular movie songs. When the main man stood up to speak, all chatter stopped. He began with municipal issues, then went on to the environment, and then to religion: “Why doesn’t the government subsidise pilgrimages to Deo Bhoomi to help the hill economy? These hills are the abode of Hindu gods, and India is the Hindus’ last refuge in a new world order dominated by Islamic terrorism and Christian missionaries. There is soft war and there is hard war.” Here Umed Singh paused for a long while before continuing, “While the Taliban plans attacks on our cities with bombs and guns, the pure, untouched tribal parts of India are being bombed by Bibles.” From there Umed Singh went on to the threats Hindus faced worldwide. They were in danger of being wiped out, decimated, outnumbered, converted. From this to the conversions at St Hilda’s was but a step. “The threat is here, in this very town. It has to be investigated.”

They rushed to their motorbikes and cars and roared off in a procession. The politician had told the crowds that there were deaf-mute students whom the school had converted into Christian dancing girls, and they played hymns at the factory all day: “We must find out for ourselves what the truth about all this is.”

The cavalcade went to the school in the bazaar first, but it was a holiday. Without students, it was no more than a hill cottage with bright red tin roofs and ochre walls, all its blue doors and windows locked. It stood on a patch of earth drummed by children’s feet into a square of dust, which was being swept by our chowkidar, who gaped speechless at the campaigners’ cavalcade. The politician and his henchmen turned away disappointed. Then they remembered the factory. Their cars and motorbikes sped away towards the cantonment.

From up the hill, one of the girls working in the factory heard the noise of the motorbikes and ran out to see what was happening. I was sitting at a desk in the inner room, punching numbers into a calculator, with half an ear towards the Hindi version of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, which had just started playing on our tape recorder. I was adding up columns of expenses, trying to work on the figures so that they made sense for our annual report. In the outer room, half a dozen girls were fixing labels onto the hundreds of bottles of apricot, peach, and plum jam we had made that summer. The labels, which were printed in Delhi, had arrived late, and we were in a hurry now to get the bottles ready for despatch. I had asked for workers – anyone possible. Beena and Mitu came every day, and sat working for hours, getting up only to munch roasted peanuts at times, or to make tea and stretch aching shoulders.

I heard the music change and pushed my papers aside to get up and reprimand the girls. It was really too much, the way they flouted my authority. They had started a song from a film featuring a girl lost to promiscuity and drugs because of befriending hippies. Her brother in the film scoured the country for her and after many diversions, located her somewhere near Darjeeling, dancing with other hippies, to a song she sang through lips that were renowned for being the Sexiest of the Seventies. The song had a mesmeric, incantatory melody. It was an old song by the time even I came to it, but it still played at college parties Michael and I went to. Now it had been remixed and was pepped up with a thumping beat. I returned to my chair and sat down. My feet, which had travelled away to a dance floor of my memories, tapped in time to the rhythm of Dum Maro Dum. Michael’s hands were on my waist, he was whirling me round the room. I was saying, “You’re making me dizzy,” and he was saying, “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

Umed Singh and his cohorts reached the factory and found a roomful of girls hard at work. Beena and Mitu had just made tea and in a shy show of hospitality, were smiling and nodding to the visitors, pointing at the row of little glasses on their tray. I recognised Deepak in the group, and the man who was with him when Miss Wilson tried to get them to take their cars away from the school playground all those months ago. The second man was short and thickset, with a weightlifter’s shoulders. He kept his reflecting glasses on, even inside the room, and turned them towards the twins when one of them bent over him with the tea tray and the other brought around the glucose biscuits. The reflections on his glasses followed the girls about as they took the tray from person to person. The other girls did their Namastes and returned to work, suppressing giggles of complicity. The song continued to play. Its refrain was “Harey Krishna Harey Ram”. Umed Singh left disappointed. His henchmen followed, pretending they had come for a regular canvassing visit rather than to catch us out playing “missionary hymns”. Despite the drugged, seductive voice of the singer, they could not deny that the singer was chanting the names of two of the holiest Hindu gods.

That afternoon, when the jam was all bottled, labelled, and packed away in boxes, and the room’s floor empty, the girls put the song on again. The more daring among them danced to it, while the other village girls, screaming with laughter, joined in sometimes or hid behind dekchis and dupattas in embarrassment. When I entered the room, they tugged my hand, and begged me to join in. “You have to, Maya Mam, we do everything you tell us to. Now it’s your turn.”

I tied my dupatta in a knot at my hips, and danced too. It had been five years or more since I had felt as light-hearted. Diwan Sahib was well again, Charu was united with Kundan, we had bottled our jam in time, and the goons had gone away without doing us any harm. My loose bun came undone and my hair flew around my face. Someone came and plucked my glasses off and threw them aside. The girls exclaimed, “Without her glasses, Maya Mam looks exactly like a film star!” Beena and Mitu gestured with their hands to show me the steps, teaching me how to dance the way they did – shoulder shrugs, hip wiggles, hands that sliced the air like blades. Our clothes were drenched in sweat by the time we stopped, and I was breathless and buzzing with happiness.

It was only a few hours later that Beena tore up from the valley below to the clearing outside their hut, which I could see from my house. Her teeth were bared and her mouth gaped in a silent scream. Her clothes were half-ripped off her shoulders, revealing yellow, frayed bra-straps. Her mother, scrubbing a pan with sand outside their hut, looked up, and Mitu started up from the stairs on which she had been sitting and day-dreaming. Beena squatted in the middle of the courtyard speaking with her hands to her mother and sister, too fast and frantic for me to try making sense of it. Her talk was mute shadow play, her cries more terrifying for being noiseless. When she had finished, the mother swooped at Beena and pulled her head by a handful of her hair. She slapped her again and again, on her face, or wherever her hands could reach. Mitu tried to prise them apart, but her mother was too strong for her. Beena managed to bend, picked up a handful of dust and flung it into her mother’s eyes, then scrambled away as her mother’s face warped with pain and her hands flew to her streaming eyes.

I had no way of reading their gestures and could not tell what was wrong, but as I looked on in horror, I heard Ama’s voice at my ear. “Beena says she was coming back from the bazaar through the forest, and a man molested her. She says it was one of the men from Nainital who came to the factory today. He had been ogling her in the afternoon also, she says, when she was serving them tea. Her mother says it’s her fault, she wears tight clothes and goes wandering in the market, and giggles at boys.”

Ama turned back to the spectacle with a grin, and said, “That Beena’s a wildcat. Just look how they’re fighting, mother and daughter.” She cackled and stuffed some tobacco into her mouth. “It’s like watching a T.V. with the sound off. Whenever they fight, I run out to see.”

She noticed the disgust on my face and said, “Why are you so worried? Nothing happened to the girl. She’s very tough. She bit his cheek, and kicked him in the stomach and he ran away. And the mother is a loose woman anyway, she doesn’t care, really.”

“I’m going to take her to the police,” I said. “She has to report it right away. They can catch the man before he disappears.”

“Teacher-ni,” Ama said in a resigned voice. “Lati will never let you take her daughter to the police, and Beena won’t go. It’ll just add to their troubles. The less this news travels, the better for the girl.” She assumed her knowing expression and said, “There is so much I don’t talk about. If I revealed all the secrets I’ve digested and stored in my stomach, half this hillside’s people would have to go and drown themselves in a pail of water.” She gave me a long, pregnant look.

* * *

That night I dreamed my familiar dream of the dead lake at Roopkund; only this time, Beena’s and Mitu’s heads had joined the other skulls and they were scratching with their dead nails at an ice floe, trying to escape the water. I woke in a sweat and saw that the branch of a tree had stooped so close to one of my windows that I could see its black claws tapping the glass pane as the wind gathered and buffeted the trees. The house creaked and muttered, and the first drops of rain quickly turned into a steady drumming on the roof. The wind-chime I had hung on my peach tree tinkled with such insistence that I wanted to run out into the rain and pull it off to stop the noise. All the happiness of the afternoon had disappeared, as if it had never been.

I curled my body into a tight ball of aloneness. Diwan Sahib had been world-weary when I told him I wanted to go to the police about Beena. “Nothing’s ever going to change,” he had said. “No policeman will be interested, no new politician, no elections, nothing will ever make a difference.” He had slumped into his chair and dozed off after a while as he often did nowadays, even midway through conversations. Veer was in Dehra Dun, from where he would leave on another long trek with a new lot of clients. We had not been able to find the space or time for days to be together. He had not appeared remotely regretful at our parting, and when I had announced with blithe nonchalance that I would go to Dehra Dun with him, we had had another quarrel. “You in Dehra Dun with me? Forget it,” he had said. “I’ll be at work. It’s not a holiday for me.” He had shoved things into his rucksack, hoisted it into his jeep and driven off without a proper goodbye. He had not telephoned since.