The Folded Earth

19


In winter the barbet calls all day from its lonely perch high in a leafless tree. Its plaintive, monotonous cry is the distillation of solitude and sadness. The tourists have gone, and the summer visitors with them. Only now does our town feel truly ours, as if it has been rescued from intruders and returned to us. The earth is hard with cold, the air stings ears and eyes and makes noses water. The tree-darkened roads looping the hillsides are deserted, there is no fear of tourists’ cars careering round the bends. The big old houses in the cantonment area are empty again. Waiters and cooks are playing cricket on the lawns of their hotels. They have planted three somewhat straight sticks as wickets. One of the waiters, Chandan, is teaching himself to ride a bicycle and he lurches dangerously as he lets go of the handlebars to join his palms and say, “Namaste, Maya Mam,” as he passes me. I taught him when he was a boy of twelve or fourteen. Another of my relative failures, but at least he mastered the alphabet, and he learned to add, though he never managed multiplying or dividing.

Mall Road in this season has a lazy air. In the morning when the sun bakes the other side of the road, every shopkeeper at the row of cupboard-sized shops below Meghdoot Hotel deserts his post, and customers have to seek them out on the opposite parapet. Men slurp tea at Negi’s shack. Next to the lamppost, people sit on their haunches at a charcoal brazier munching the warm peanuts roasted on it. Dogs amble around, occasionally snapping and snarling at each other. When the sun starts to go down, swallows knife through the air into their perches at the candle-lit grocery shop. A squad of monkeys clambers over the tin roof of Pandey-ji’s vegetable shop, dividing into ones and twos to attack the vegetable baskets from many fronts. Pandey-ji’s mother, a woman with gold nose studs and a large bun, chases them with a stick, screaming at the top of her voice. Two soldiers polish the already gleaming brass plate that says officers’ mess next to an imposing pair of gates, while dozens of cadets, hair shaven to their ears, file past to their barracks further down.

In winter, the air is clear enough to drink, and your eyes can travel many hundreds of miles until they reach the green of the near hills, the blue-grey beyond them, and then the snow peaks far away, which rise in the sky with the sun, and remain suspended there, higher than imaginable, changing colour and shape through the day. Every hour, they come closer, their massive flanks clearly visible, plumes of cloud smoking from their tips. After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.

These are secrets hidden from those who escape the Himalaya when it is at its bleakest: the mountains do not reveal themselves to people who come here merely to escape the heat of the plains. Through the summer they veil themselves in a haze. The peaks emerge for those devoted to them through the coldest of winters, the wettest of monsoons. The mountains, Diwan Sahib said in an uncharacteristic rush of sentimentality fuelled by a few drinks at his fireplace, believe that love must be tested by adversity.

It was more or less the last thing he said. He got up to poke the fire and go to the bathroom. “Fix me another drink please, Maya,” he said and half-stumbled to the door, from where he called in a voice too high to be his own, “Switch on the light, why is it so dark, I can’t see.” Before I could reach him, he had crumpled over the arm of a chair and was sliding to the floor. He had grown so thin that I thought I would be able to move him easily enough to his bed, but he was too heavy to shift, and I could see there was no need.

* * *

The night Diwan Sahib died, I realised that I had never experienced death at first hand. The two people closest to me had died far away: Michael’s death happened with a telephone call. My mother’s death too had reached me the same way – this time it was a call from my uncle. To prevent my rushing to Hyderabad for her funeral, my father had forbidden anyone from telling me until after she had been cremated.

I had no idea what to do. Ama and the protocols of death took over. She ordered everyone about, even Himmat Singh, who bathed Diwan Sahib’s body and laid him out on the living room floor dressed in formal clothes I had never seen before. They were too large for him and his arms disappeared into the sleeves, which the postman folded up so that his long-fingered, square-nailed hands could be seen. They stuffed balls of cotton wool into his nostrils. Someone covered him with a brown and maroon checked sheet and pulled the sheet over his face. Ama placed an incense holder on his chest, and lit half a dozen incense sticks. “Why can’t he stay in his bed till the morning?” I asked Ama, but she pronounced: “That is not how we do it here.”

People came from everywhere: many I did not recognise, as well as Mr Qureshi, the General, Puran, Ramesh, even Mr and Mrs Chauhan. Ama took up a position right before Diwan Sahib’s body, where she sat utterly still, hooded in her sari, as mourner-in-chief. When someone new came in, where she would normally have erupted into a loud Namaste and a volley of questions, not the suggestion of a smile altered her expression of rigid solemnity. We sat in a gloomy circle around Diwan Sahib’s body all night, though the men took turns to go outside into the freezing garden, and stood swathed in shawls, warming their hands at a brazier, a fire-lit cabal that smoked, drank. Diwan Sahib would have joined them, I thought. He never did anything merely because it was expected of him. He would have cracked jokes. He would have finished a whole bottle of his rum.

Halfway through the night we heard a loud creaking, cracking, splintering, groaning sound like a giant’s death rattle, and then a huge falling. It was a rotted old tree that woodcutters had been sawing at for the past three days and the sudden gale that struck up after midnight had finally torn the trunk from its base. The men outside marvelled at the coincidence and said: “Diwan Sa’ab has taken a whole tree with him. The forest is mourning.”

After his cremation early the next day, I occupied myself clearing out Diwan Sahib’s room. The unused medicines I threw in a bin. There were empty rum and gin bottles behind curtains, under the table, under Diwan Sahib’s bed. Books towered by his bedside in piles that tottered when touched. Anthropology, the folklore of Kumaon, histories of India, hardbound volumes on the flora and fauna of the Himalaya, records of appointments in the princely state of Surajgarh. A set of cassettes with recorded birdcalls. No more performances from Diwan Sahib, the children at the school would have to settle for those tapes now. A tickertape of thoughts ran relentlessly through my head. His closest relative was probably Veer, but how would we get in touch with him when he was unreachable somewhere in the high Himalaya? In the absence of anyone else, I would have to deal with the pedantic after-death chores. I did not know if he had medical insurance or if he had left instructions for his bank accounts. I probably needed to write to someone about stopping his pension. And what about that lease for the house? It had not been renewed in the end. I would have to find Ama and Puran somewhere to live if the house had to be returned to the cantonment. And where would I live? My mind went over and over the same thoughts, but all of them were punctuated by one question as unending and softly insistent as the Scop’s Owl’s hooting: where was Diwan Sahib’s Rolls Royce cigarette case? Now that he was gone, it was imperative that I should have it. There was no other object I associated more closely with him. I needed to find it. I would turn the house inside out if I had to.

But first I had to finish with his room. I folded Diwan Sahib’s worn-out blankets and put them in a cupboard. Stripped the bed of its sheets. Busily I reached for his pillow. That was when I saw that it still held the hollow of his head and a few white strands of his hair.

I sat down on his sheetless bed. I had not lost my composure when he died, or at his cremation, despite the incongruous cascade of red roses at the cremation ground, and the thrush that insisted on whistling in accompaniment to Mr Qureshi’s noisy tears, or even when the blue-yellow-red paragliders performing for the Regimental Reunion floated past us over the smoke from Diwan Sahib’s pyre like two brilliantly-coloured birds. At the sight of that pillow and the strands of his hair, I became un-joined.

I left the house and went down to my cottage. A deadening inertia closed its fist around me. I began to feel sleepy all the time. I stopped going to work. I do not know what I did. Things rotted, dust settled, the alarm clock clanged every day at six in the morning, but I did not get out of bed, nor did I bother to change the clock’s setting to stop it ringing the next day. Maybe I slept. I think I ate at times. I had no memory of it, nor any recollection of crying, yet when I woke up at odd times in the middle of the day or night, my face was wet with tears. In my dreams, my mother, Michael and Diwan Sahib were trapped in unlikely, fear-freighted situations. We could not find each other at crowded stations. Someone was left behind on a boat at sea which had glided far out into the water. We were in different rooms of the same house, I called their names but nobody answered. An enormous bird with a curved beak and sharp talons came and sat on my arm in one of my dreams, making me wake up in a panic, rubbing my arm where its claws had been. Sometimes Veer was there, but we were in rooms filled with trekkers, rucksacks, strangers sending us off in two different directions. I heard Ama calling my name or Charu saying, “Did the postman come? Look, here is a letter for me, read it out,” but when I unglued my tight-shut eyes, I knew I had dreamed their voices.

One morning I heard a banging sound that went on and on, and struggled awake. I managed to sit up, understood that this time someone really was knocking. I stumbled to the door and found Ama there. She had been calling me for days, she said. “Today I was ready to bang the door down. I thought, ‘Teacher-ni will die of starvation if not grief.’ Look at yourself: thin as a stick and old, your head like a dry coconut. Why? Is it your father who has died, or your husband?” She stood over me while I washed my face and then thumped a steel plate down on my table. It had three fat, dark madua rotis soaked in ghee, a steaming spoonful of lai saag, the greens I loved, some raw onions and a green chilli. I ate without a word, as if I had never eaten before.

After I had finished eating, Ama and I sat in the veranda, where she settled at her favourite place on the stairs and said, “You were sleeping, but someone’s been very busy while you were dead to the world.” She tucked a wad of her chewing tobacco into her mouth to create the space for a dramatic pause. Diwan Sahib’s house was a mess, she said, every single trunk and cupboard was inside out, the pages between every book had been examined – by Veer. He had scarcely stopped for a minute’s rest, he was like a man possessed. He had ransacked the whole house, and then left in his jeep without explaining anything to anyone.

“How long was he here?” I asked her, startled. Did he come to my cottage? I wanted to ask her. Did he not try to find me? Did he ask Ama about me? How could he have left without a word to me? I did not dare ask her the questions I really wanted answers to.

“He came two days after the cremation, looking like something blown here by the wind. He didn’t want to know anything about how his uncle had passed away or who had done the cremation or any of that. He kept asking: has anyone been in this house? Has anyone been looking for anything? I told him you had been there, settling Diwan Sahib’s room, but for no more than half a day.”

“And then?”

“I told him you were down here. I said I had called many times, but you had not come out, so we were worried. But he? He has no time or ears for anything that is not about himself.

“Don’t look like that,” Ama said after a minute. “You are blinded, you can’t see. There he is, swearing love and care for his uncle, but who looked after the old man through his illnesses? Was he here? Oh no, he only turns up when it is all finished, to see what he can get. All these months, he kept leaving cigarettes all over the house, and getting Diwan Sa’ab drunk. Didn’t you notice how his health collapsed after his nephew came into his life again?”

“What do you mean? Have you gone off your head? Do you know what you’re saying?” I stood up in one violent movement, had to hold on to the chair to steady my spinning head.

Ama had hinted at her suspicions before, but they had been barbed suggestions. Now, with Diwan Sahib dead and Veer having come and gone without even seeing me, she spoke her mind and her words had the unmistakable colouring of the hostility she had long felt towards Veer. Himmat Singh never failed to relay to Ama anything of interest that he overheard in the Light House so she had known for years that Veer wanted her evicted. I wondered what else she knew. I lowered myself carefully into my chair again, still feeling wobbly.

“Look at you,” Ama said. “That’s what happens when you don’t eat for days. And I haven’t gone off my head, my head’s very clear. Who kept the old man supplied with so many bottles? Who bought all those packets of cigarettes that he found wherever his eyes fell? I had told you then, and I will tell you now, this apple of Diwan Sa’ab’s eye came back here only to send him to his death. There are many ways to finish people off, you know.”

She heard cowbells close by and hurried away to the edge of the hill to yell at Puran. “Arre O Puran, can’t you see Ratna is eating Sahu-ji’s beans? Donkey, good-for-nothing, fool! Lost in his own world and the cattle wander anywhere they please.” She was tender-faced as she sat down again. “Everyone says Puran’s a madman and he’s a crazy fool, there’s no doubt about that. See how he’s crooning over that pet owl these days. It’s like the sun rises when that owl opens its eyes at night. But if I had to trust my life to anyone it would be Puran, not that Veer Singh, who cares only for himself. Your teeth will break on a big black pebble when you eat that bowl of dal, take my word for it. I notice everything, nothing escapes me.”

She gave me a significant look and repeated, “I notice everything, make no mistake. People may not pay attention to what an old woman thinks. People who are educated and think they know it all.”

* * *

That night I again had the nightmare that had visited me from time to time, each time subtly altered.

This time I was speaking to someone whose breath I could hear only inches from my ears: wheeze and gurgle, wheeze and gurgle. It was a man – who could not hear me. I could not see his face for the hood of his anorak, but I knew who it was.

“Stop,” I cried in my dream with a terrible urgency:

Come back. Where are you going?

You force foot after foot. You slide downward even as you move up. The slope shifts. The rock that seemed firm slides and falls a soundless distance away into the black gorge. Your feet are wet and warm. With your own blood – though why should that be when you’ve left the leeches behind? You look down at your boots. Blood is spilling over their rims. You stop at last, and so does the man with you, who says, You were always a worrier, come on.

Look this way, to the left! Can’t you see me begging you to turn back? Why can’t you hear me?

Your feet start up the slope again and your heart booms like a drum keeping time. The air is cold and dry, scouring your nostrils. You are pausing every few steps, drooping with weariness. The other man prods the small of your back to urge you on. Around us, all is grey: grey rocks, dirty grey snow, low grey sky. The binocular strap around your neck is a resting noose.

I would scoop you up like a baby and carry you away to safety if I could. I would zip us into a single sleeping bag and wrap myself around you all night so that the warmth of my legs could thaw your legs. I would press your hands into the warmest part of me to unfreeze your fingers.

Just a little further, the other man says.

I strain to see his face. I think I have heard his voice before. Your blood-filled boots ooze into the grey snow. They drip slick red onto stones. Can you feel anything but the sticky wetness of your feet? Only exhaustion. What can you hear? The binoculars knocking against your chest. The wind like an ocean wave.

We come to the top. It is not the level top of a plateau or the crest of a hill. It is the rim of a cavernous grey-white bowl within which the wind is swirling, shifting snow dust, tiny pebbles. Far below, at the base of the bowl, we can see water reflecting sky, slabs of ice breaking the reflection into irregular geometries. Steep sides of grey scree slide away from us into the bowl.

The other man says, Have you seen anything like that? Look through your binoculars.

The voice is from far away, the sound of sand scraped with a spade. I have heard this voice before, in another place and time. He puts a hand on your shoulder and it is missing a finger.

You raise the binoculars to your eyes and see what I knew was waiting. The edges of the lake are populated. Human skeletons and bones. Clavicles, skulls. Tibia, fibula, femur. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. Some skeletons almost intact, frozen into the bed of the lake, others clinging to the slope, trying to claw a way out. A skull floats on the liquid part of the lake.

This is it, you say, hearing your own voice for the first time. Where we all end. A smile of sorts cracks your face, painful in the cold air.

You get no answer. You look to your left, there is no-one. Nobody to your right, or behind, or further away, or down towards the lake. You shout a name. I try to reach it, cannot snatch a syllable of it from the wind. Your boots are heavy with blood, you can barely lift them for the weight. A drop falls, and then another, of ice-melt from the low sky. You step back from the rim of the lake and your bloodied feet, now inexplicably bare, lose their grip.

You see the water in the lake and the skeletons in it, the ice and the cloud-heavy sky in the water, rushing towards you. You feel a vast weightlessness and vertigo as you fly down through the emptiness.

You cry out, but it is not your friend’s name. You are calling, “Maya, Maya.”

Maya, illusion, a woman’s name, mine.

I woke up with my own name in my ears. Through the uncurtained windows the eastern slopes of Nanda Devi and Trishul, suspended between night and day, were icy blue. It was going to be a clear morning, with beautiful views, but I wanted to run away: push aside the forest, escape the oaks and the darkness of deodars, clear a path to the plains, run down and away from the cold, the damp, the rain and snow, the calls of owls at night. I wanted the mango trees of my childhood, the visible heat of the afternoon sun, the creamy flesh of young green coconuts and their spring-sweet water.

I flung away my mass of blankets and sprang out of bed. I wriggled under it to where I stored things I might never need: suitcases, bags, cartons of books. I dragged a suitcase out and prised at its catches. It would not open. My hair streamed over my face. The dream was still vivid, my heart thudded with the certainty of knowledge. I ran down and brought up my box of old keys which I tipped onto the floor. Rummaged through the jumble of metal and tried key after key in the rusted locks of the long-unopened suitcase. I flung aside the wrong keys not caring where they fell. I found my hammer and smashed it against the locks: once, twice, three times, until the locks broke.

I opened the creaking lid of the dusty suitcase and pulled out the heavy, plastic-covered bundle inside it: Michael’s rucksack. It had been delivered a week after his death and I had never looked through it. Today, when I opened it, there was the generations-old smell of mildew. I pulled out the sweatshirts – the blue one with the dolphin that I had bought him days before he left, a red one with John Lennon’s face; other clothes that I recognised tumbled out, crushed into tight balls in these five years of storage. And then a carefully-folded packet in which I could see a book, a Tibetan good luck charm, and a letter that I had written and sent by courier to wait for him in Dehra Dun as a surprise before he started the trek.

I opened the packet and saw that there were other papers too that Michael had placed in it for safekeeping: a few pages torn from a first-aid manual, two maps, a few typewritten, official-looking sheets from the mountaineering institute with details of the trek: the list of things the trekkers needed to carry, meeting points, train connections. On a separate sheet, there were the names and phone numbers of the trekkers. Three names, as Michael had said – he and two others – one of them an experienced mountaineer, he had told me that night before he left, the other a porter.

I closed my eyes. I was certain I knew what I would see.

The names on the typewritten sheet were:


Michael Secuira

Ranveer Singh Rathore

Shamsher Bahadur Gurung



I went back to a time when I had woken from one of my nightmares gasping for breath. Veer had calmed me with slow whispered reassurances. I had talked to him until the night paled into dawn, about Michael’s death, about everything I had gone through that year – things I had never talked about to anyone. Veer had held me close, not once interrupting me. When I finished, he had described the terrain to me with a cartographer’s accuracy. But said nothing to suggest he had been Michael’s last trekking companion. He did not mull over what might have gone wrong. He did not list the many horrific possibilities – death by frostbite, death by falling, by injury, by brain damage, by pulmonary oedema. And not suspecting what his silences hid, I had been grateful for all that he had left unsaid.

He had not told me he even knew of Michael’s mountaineering institute.

He had not told me Michael had broken his ankle.

He had not told me he had left Michael to fend for himself in a snowstorm with a broken ankle when they both knew it meant certain death.

I sat on the floor holding the papers, fragments of Michael strewn around me. The bugle at the army barracks trumpeted to wake the cadets as on every morning. Window-squares lit up one by one and smoke rose from fires for the morning’s hot water. Birds sang to each other across trees and forests. The daily business of mornings that usually made me uncurl from my quilt with a smile now hammered nails into my heart. I felt utterly, absolutely alone. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I held myself as my body shook with sobs. I wept as if Michael had died the day before. I picked up thing after thing from his rucksack and flung them across the room in a rage. How easy to be dead! Everyone had marvelled at the way I had made myself a new life in a faraway town after my husband’s death. What unnatural composure, what a swift recovery, they had said. Today it was as if I had torn off a dried-up scab with my fingernails and exposed the wound oozing for years beneath.

I had grieved for Michael’s death before. Now I would torment myself to the end of my days for my intimacy with the man who had walked away from him when he most needed help. How had I allowed it to happen? When had Veer dropped his last name and shortened his first? Even Diwan Sahib had never called him anything but Veer, and sometimes “Mr Singh”, or, when in a bad temper, “The Great Climber, Mr Singh”.

Where had the Rathore part of his name gone?

Perhaps Veer never used that last name except in formal documents. That was possible, even normal, as was the abbreviation of his first name.

Or maybe he had chosen to lose pieces of his names in the snow after abandoning Michael to his death.

I wanted to scour off my soiled skin with a rough stone. I wanted to tear out the long hair Veer had murmured endearments and promises into, playing on my sympathies with his bitter stories of childhood suffering and homelessness, the search for his identity. I had been held in thrall by the quietness of him – his enigmatic, troubling aura of unknowability. Now I knew his silence was no more than a shroud in which he had tried to bury his connection with Michael’s death.