The Folded Earth

21


I have that packet in my hand this afternoon as I lie in the sun and think about this soon-to-be-deserted house, which will keep its ghosts and stories for its next occupant. All the talk around me is of the future and of plans. I talk of neither. I no longer plan anything. I know nothing but the present, this day, this hour.

I open the thick packet. I have been through it many times these past few days. Now I know that Diwan Sahib was not playing a practical joke when he titillated scholars with rumours of love notes from the past. There they are: three sheets of yellowing paper, with a famous old handwriting that I recognise from signatures I have seen in print a hundred times.

The first letter is written on the back of the menu card at a banquet for a shikar party. Annotated with a “[EM to JLN]” in Diwan Sahib’s hand, it says:

We are 12 in our ladies’ carriage. It has sliding window panes and we had to climb in by a ladder. Does your hunting buggy have a ladder too? Do you know, mine has a secret chamber inside. One of the younger Begums tells me that in case of an animal attack, one must duck and slip into the chamber and make an emergency exit. But my only thought is that I should like to spend this entire shikar in a secret chamber with the one man in the world with whom I feel the deepest sense of peace and happiness.

The reply to it, marked “[JLN to EM]”, is on a sheet of paper which has a printed line saying, “FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1935”, above the handwritten lines in ink. This letter is on the back of the title page torn out from a book on the Himalaya.

Last evening, I was looking at you across the room, wanting nothing more than to talk to you but unable to be by your side, and I had a moment of piercing clarity about the days ahead, when you will leave India forever. You and Dickie, shaking the hands of a few thousand people, saying goodbye, going further and further away, and I, watching from a distance, and watching that distance grow until you are out of sight and I wander away.

There is a third note marked “[JLN to EM]”, saying only:

There is a dark red rose on the third bush beneath the window of your bedroom. It is so very fragrant, I thought you might want to come down to smell it for yourself tonight, after the banquet.

There is another sheaf of papers: manuscript pages from Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon, with editorial markings all over them. There is also a handful of typewritten papers: the notes Corbett’s sister Maggie dictated to her friend Ruby Beyts. These are the papers that Diwan Sahib promised me when he was alive, though I did not believe in their existence then.

There are three things still in the packet. I know what to expect, but even so I feel a hollow nausea as I pull them out. There is a photograph, a letter in an envelope, and Diwan Sahib’s will.

I have studied the photograph so many times that now I think I know each tiny square of it. It is a black and white photograph of a group. There are men and women dressed in styles popular in the 1960s. They are sitting on easy chairs somewhere in the open. Tennis racquets of the old world, glasses and bottles strewn on the grass. The sun in their eyes is making some of them squint. Diwan Sahib is not squinting: he is looking at the camera, and his chin is raised, his face has a kind of triumphant elation. His eyes have that sparkle I knew so well, but otherwise he looks quite different: no wrinkles and no beard, short hair brushed back in a widow’s peak: a clear-eyed, handsome, young face. He has a toddler in the crook of his arm and his other hand rests on the head of a large golden retriever.

There are three women in the group, all in fashionable chiffon saris and sleeveless blouses. One of three is not looking at the camera. She is looking at Diwan Sahib and the toddler with a hunger that leaps out from the picture even decades later.

I open the letter that is clipped to the picture. The envelope is addressed to Veer. It is in Diwan Sahib’s handwriting and I find it difficult to read despite knowing its words.

Dear Veer, my very dear Veer,

What I could not call you in my lifetime, I can say when wiped away by death: my son. I could not own you as my son. I tell myself there were reasons, and many times over these last years I have been on the brink of telling you and begging you, as an adult man, to understand why I did what I did. But I didn’t have the nerve – and after such crime, what forgiveness or reparation? Things happen and deeds are done in a long life for which there are no explanations that will satisfy anyone. Anything beyond is wasted words.

I ask your forgiveness nevertheless.

In grief,

Your father,

Suraj Singh

The will is clipped to the envelope. Diwan Sahib does not repeat his revelation about his son Veer in the will, but its intention is to make amends, to take a step towards healing with the gift of an ancestral home, his son’s rightful inheritance. The will is in Diwan Sahib’s handwriting, and the signatures of witnesses flow across the bottom of the page. It has a date, it has everything that makes it legally valid. It is brief and clear:

RAI BAHADUR SURAJ KISHAN SINGH, EX-DIWAN OF

SURAJGARH, HIS LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

NOW MAY IT BE NOTED AS FOLLOWS THAT

CONSEQUENT UPON MY DEATH:

1. Whatever alcohol is left over is to go to Najeeb Qureshi. He is also to get my Rolls Royce Silver Ghost cigarette case, an object he has longed for all the years we have known each other, and one that, as a lover of motorcars, he considers his by right.



2. My newspaper clippings file must go to General Bisht, so that he begins to read, at whatever age.



3. My tenant, Ms Maya Secuira, is to inherit the papers pertaining to Edward James Corbett. She is also to have the enclosed letters of Edwina Mountbatten and J. L. Nehru.



4. The money in my bank account is to be divided equally between Himmat Singh and Puran Singh, Charu and Dharma Devi.



5. All my household goods and clothes are to go to Himmat Singh, to sell, dispose of, or keep, as he pleases.



6. The house and all its grounds are to go to Ranveer Singh Rathore, provided he undertakes to allow lifelong rent-free cottages on the estate to Dharma Devi, her son Puran Singh, and her grand-daughter Charu Devi; and also allow Maya Secuira to occupy her cottage as long as she pleases. The original deed is enclosed, showing the boundaries of the estate Ranveer Singh Rathore is to inherit from me.



Signed and witnessed.



I hold the will and letter up to shade my eyes and look at the jumbled shadows of the words through the sunlight. I think back to those early conversations with Veer when he told me in bitter tones about the way he was sent from the house of one relative to another as a child, parcelled out between them on school holidays. How none of them ever had time for him. How he grew attached to one or two of them, and hoped they would announce all of a sudden that they were his parents. How, by magic, he would know where he belonged and would have a real home. How Diwan Sahib had imitated leopards and thrushes for him sometimes, but returned in five minutes to his gin and his women. How Veer had hungered for affection and never found any.

I put the papers down. How I had yearned to comfort Veer in his loneliness then!

I lie very still and listen to the barbets calling. They sit on the dahlia trees snapping the large flower buds between their beaks, like nuts they are cracking open as a snack. There are big yellow lemons warming and ripening on their stems. Unless the will is made known to the world, all of this – the house, the stream, my cottage, my garden, the spruce, oaks, rhododendron and deodars – all these will go to a stranger, some Brigadier or Colonel we do not know, after being in Diwan Sahib’s family for two generations.

But that is how it is with houses, and I have lost too much to care. I will find another and make it a home again.

I read the will once more.

I am balanced on the edge of a knife. I am the knife. I can do harm.

Diwan Sahib’s face appears before me, his white hair a mess, his beard overgrown, and he says, “Go on, what are you waiting for? You know what I’d do. Revenge is a kind of wild justice.”

I remember him at his fireplace, thrusting the pages of his manuscript into it, then throwing the photograph of his dogs into the flames, watching his life burn.

I think of Michael with his broken ankle, on a frozen slope by a lake filled with skulls, watching his friend being whited-out in a blizzard, seeing him recede into the distance, calling him back, begging his help, losing his strength with every shout, knowing all the while that there is nothing ahead for him but a slow dying.

Slivers of ice clink in the corners of my heart. If I were turned inside out now, there would be frost and hailstones where blood and muscle were.

I hold the will and Diwan Sahib’s letter to Veer tight in both hands, and I rip the pages in half, and then the halves into quarters. The sound of tearing paper lacerates me. I notice the portion that has the words, “Ranveer Singh Rathore, provided he undertakes … “ and rip it into tinier and tinier pieces, until not an alphabet can be distinguished of the name.

I throw the pieces of paper in the air. The shreds that drift over me are almost indistinguishable from the white butterflies dipping over the wild flowers in this garden gone to seed.

The eagles are still watching me from the mile-high crook of a deodar tree. Around them the afternoon has begun its rapid wintertime decline and the sun’s long rays slide gently now, and give no warmth. I will need to get up from the grass before the chill seeps into my bones.

The eagles feel the change in air and light. The first of them flexes its talons like an athlete, spreads its wings and leaves its branch. The other is still looking in my direction. Eventually it turns its basilisk gaze away and follows its mate. The day is over, they have to hunt for a perch to sleep on now. They are lifted higher and higher by air currents as they wheel and arc and sail towards the last hill of the world.