The Folded Earth

8


The principal of my school, Miss Wilson, had realised soon enough that I was not much good as a teacher. She thought my classes undisciplined and chaotic; I thought of it as a happy noise and could not bring myself to silence the children and impose the order that was required. Miss Wilson stormed in from time to time and imposed order with one bellowed “Quay-It!” and a stinging rap of her cane on the desk, after which the class and I stood in meek disgrace waiting for the angry speech that usually followed. Charu was not my only failure, there were others who had gone through my classes for two years or more, playing truant and then failing examinations. At staff meetings, looking pointedly in my direction, Miss Wilson said, “Some people think teaching is a job anyone can do. No, Madam, no, it needs dedication, discipline, love of Jesus Christ Our Lord.” She addressed me as “Madam” whenever she wanted take me down a peg or two.

Miss Wilson was a Catholic from Kerala. Somehow, any sari she wore became an untidy roll of cloth around her, making her an animated bundle. Her austerity was renowned: she ate only two brisk, salt-free meals every day and for jewellery wore just a silver crucifix. Her thick, black-framed glasses slid down her bump of a nose every few minutes and she was always pushing them back up with a stubby forefinger. During her First Communion and First Confession, she had “heard the voice of Jesus, as clearly as yours or mine”, she liked to say. In her teens, she joined a convent wanting nothing but to be a nun. She was sent for a year to teach in a church school, attend Mass, recite novenas. During the time there, she, along with other girls, was under observation: were they fit for the religious life? Miss Wilson was fervent enough, but in the end the church did not allow her to take orders. She would not say why, only hinting at convent politics, but this was the great tragedy of her life and she held the world responsible for it. Whenever someone annoyed her, she would say in her grating voice, “And it is for this, for this that the Lord sent me out to serve the world when I wanted to be His bride in prayer and solitude!”

It was a canny move for her to make me manage the modest jam-making cooperative the Church owned: the revenues from it went into the school’s coffers, and I ran it well, quickly expanding its operations. She nevertheless made it seem a favour. “You need not take the afternoon classes,” she said. “There are other teachers more experienced. You sit with the girls in the factory.” After a year or two the factory began to make good money, as well as acquiring a reputation for providing occasional employment to village girls and a ready market for the local fruit harvest. Miss Wilson took credit for it when visitors came to be shown around the factory, making sure not to introduce me to any of them.

In a way it was a grim irony. Miss Wilson pointedly made comments about how ungrateful, unloving progeny deserved the suffering that came to them; I just thought it coincidence that while my father owned several pickle factories I worked in one for a small salary. My father’s factories had never been planned. My father’s father, whom the entire neighbourhood called Thataiyya or grandpa, was a landowner who made a fortune out of growing rice and sugarcane along the Krishna river, renting out tenements, and selling arrack (though by my father’s time we were too genteel to admit to any of this). He built a big stone-flagged house, surrounded it with mango orchards, and trees of amla, tamarind, chikoo, and guava. By the time my father was a young man, the mango trees fruited, labourers were summoned to pick the fruit, and vast vats of pickle were made out of the green mangoes, which were a prized variety. The pickle and other fruit were distributed amongst the larger family – until my father sniffed a business opportunity, and began supplying a few shops. By the time I was twenty, and already cast out for marrying Michael, my father owned three factories across Andhra Pradesh, which pickled every conceivable thing from ginger to gongura, from lime to bitter gourd. The labels on the bottles said that they contained an ancient and secret mix of spices handed down the generations. I knew it had been concocted by Beni Amma, our plump, flirtatious, bright-saried cook, who had had a child by my middle uncle.

As a young girl I used to play at being shopkeeper. I weighed fallen fruit on a toy balance made of two tin plates and string, making my father’s workers buy hard green mangoes from me for ten paise each. It was much the same now, baskets and gunny bags of fruit all around me. Diwan Sahib said he could tell the month from the way I smelled when I came back from work every afternoon with his newspapers. “If you smell of oranges, it must be January,” he would say. “If it’s apricots, this must be June.”

* * *

Charu was one of our best workers. Like many of the other girls, she worked part-time, but unlike the others she was methodical and hard working. She was so good at solving problems and so decisive that when I saw her at work, I often wondered why she had been such a disappointment at school.

That year, however, she was different. It was February, marmalade season, and where Charu’s slicing of the orange rinds was usually even and thin whether she had two kilos to do or ten, for no reason that we could determine she began slicing the rind too thick, or did not shave off enough of the pith. When adding the pulp, she let through so many seeds that the work had sometimes to be done all over again. She spoke less than usual, smiled to herself more, and when her friends asked why, she said it was a funny story she had just remembered.

“Come then, tell us the story.”

“No, this is time for work.” Her silver nose stud sparkled as she shook her head.

She started again on the orange rinds. She would not look up for a while. Then the secret smile returned to its lodging at the corner of her lips.

The room was scented with oranges and smoke from a brazier filled with pine cones and wood. Our windows overlooked the valley. Just outside was a small stone courtyard where village women sat sorting through great orange slopes of fruit. On these February days it rained often, sometimes with sleet and hail. A bitter wind blew over us from the north, rattling windows, blowing early blossom off the plum and peach trees, and chilling us to the bone. Then the women worked inside, close to the brazier and the gas stoves on which the marmalade boiled in giant pots. Their hands grew shrivelled and cold as they sorted, washed, cut fruit. Every hour they needed tea to keep them going. I made it thick and milky, with quantities of sugar and ginger, spiked with cardamom. I had a tape-recorder in the room, on which sometimes I played the news, sometimes hymns in Hindi. I was not Christian, but certain that Miss Wilson would disapprove, I would not allow frivolous music. I knew the girls switched to film music the minute I turned my back. Sound carries in the hills, especially on clear, birdless winter days, and from faraway slopes I could hear mournful songs of longing: “I have erased that name from the book of my mind, but I am still the prisoner of my love.”

Charu, who laughed at these songs before, now hummed them under her breath. It was so cold that the water in buckets left outside grew skins of ice overnight; yet she washed her hair every few days, and I frequently saw her sitting in the yard outside their house, drying it in the milky winter sunlight. It no longer went uncombed till evening. She began to tuck flowers into it: a small pink rose from a wild bush, an iridescent plastic carnation.

One afternoon, there was a cry of pain at our workshop and I ran in to see a chopping board bright red with blood. Orange rinds need sharp knives and Charu and the other girls who had the work of slicing were picked for being dexterous. Accidents were very rare. But this time the knife had gone deep into her ring finger. She was standing there, clutching it, looking dazed. The others had wrapped a dishcloth around the finger and one of them was exclaiming, “She’s in her own world these days, never looks where the knife’s going.” The blood dyed the white cloth red in seconds and by the time we stopped a passing jeep-taxi and got her to the Civil Hospital for stitches, she looked as if she was going to faint. The smell of blood was strong, metallic, and frightening.

The next day Ama insisted Charu stay at home and before she could utter a word of protest, Ama had yelled towards her son, “Enough idling. You take the cattle grazing alone today, Puran. And count them when you bring them back. If there’s one goat or cow missing I’ll smash your head into so many pieces you won’t find one bit of it again.” She shook her walking stick at Puran.

But Charu stole out in the afternoon when her grandmother dozed in a patch of sun near their radish patch, and went down to the Dhobi Ghat. She held up her finger like a trophy and unwrapped the bandage to show Kundan Singh the stitches. As expected, he took the finger into his hands and stroked it around the stitches. And although that tenderest of touches was agony for the swollen finger, she kept herself from wincing so that he would not stop.

Only two months had passed since Kundan Singh had come to Ranikhet, but his presence had become air, water, and food to Charu. She had to see him every day. If he was late she worried, if he left early she sulked. She hid keepsakes from their meetings in the cowshed: a blue and white feather from the long tail of a magpie, a stone from the Dhobi Ghat stream, a bead necklace he had bought her which she could not wear for fear of Ama’s questions. She could think of nothing but him all day and if he had asked her to come to the Dhobi Ghat at midnight to meet him, she would have run down the night-shadowed, leopard-smelling slopes without a thought.

What would happen when Ama and other people found out about them? Charu confided her fears, desires, and hopes only to Gouri Joshi when milking her each morning. With the rest of the world she was as secretive as was possible in a small town where everyone came to know everything, sooner or later.