The Folded Earth

9


Our town has two distinct parts. One part is the crowded Sadar Bazaar. In the other part, the cantonment, where the Light House is, most of the estates are at a distance from each other, and stretch for several acres across valleys and streams. The houses were built in the nineteenth century by the British, without architects or building plans. They made enormous stone mansions with chimneys and attics, fireplaces and mantelpieces, but also deep verandas and tin roofs. To the extent that it was possible in distant India, they recreated their remembered Scotland. Ever since, Ranikhet has been made up of memories and stories: of trees laden with peaches the size of tennis balls, of strawberry patches and watercress sandwiches, of the legendary eccentrics who lived here. There was the scholar-dancer who lived alone tended by a village man whom she had taught to recite Hamlet’s soliloquies. In her eighties she employed an impecunious artist to illustrate a book on dance and posed for him day after day in full Bharatnatyam costume, frail and bony, and relentlessly scathing about his ineptitude. He crept out one night, braving the darkness and his fear of wild animals, and escaped her and the town, leaving his sketches behind on his bed as a tidy heap of shredded paper. Then there was Angelina, the Goan visitor who fell in love with our retired General, who was old enough to be her father. He was smitten by her cropped, floppy hair, her careless beauty and her brisk disregard for propriety. They married, and she wandered the town in flamboyant dresses, flowers tucked behind her ear, intercepting tourists and telling them the Forest Lodge had ghouls that drank blood on particular nights.

Our town has a private history that is revealed only to those who live here, by others who have lived here longer. Ama had a daily story for me both about the dead and the living, talking in the same breath of Janaki on the next hill who made bhang and charas out of the marijuana plants that grew wild all over the hillsides, and of unmarried Missis Lily who had fallen pregnant forty years ago by the judge of the local court. When I went to the Christian cemetery, where I had buried Michael’s ashes, I recognised the names on the other tombstones from stories I had been told over the years. In the older part of the graveyard was Charlie Darling beneath a gravestone with winged angels. He had been dead since 1912, of syphilis, I had been told, after too many visits to Lal Kurti, where pretty Kumaoni women earned extra money from soldiers stationed in Ranikhet’s army barracks. The fiery Angelina was a few feet away, beneath a marble slab with carved roses. She never came out of anaesthesia after some minor surgery at the hospital. The General, now in his nineties, had been mourning her for decades. He came to her grave every week with Bozo, and if we met there, he gave me a ride home in his old Ambassador. Bozo would sit very straight in the front, staring solemnly ahead, while I had to make do with a corner in the back that I managed to free of clutter and dog-things. From behind, the big German Shepherd was a head taller than the General who – in his prime no taller than the Army’s mandatory five foot five inches – was shrinking every passing year. He held himself as high as his five remaining feet would allow and as he drove he alternated between humming songs from old Hollywood musicals and holding forth on the anarchy in the country. “It’s going to the dogs,” he would say and immediately apologise to Bozo: “Not you, dear boy, not you. You would rule with an iron paw … “ and in the same breath to me, “June Allyson, my girl, did you ever see June Allyson? No, of course not … too young – ”

These were the people I was telling Veer about one afternoon when he had fallen in step with me, as he often did these days when I was on my way back from the graveyard or when I took the shortcut through the woods and across the stream to the bazaar and St Hilda’s. Once he held out a hand to me on the steep bit in the forest path to the bazaar where tumbling boulders made footholds precarious. I had been so taken aback that I had taken his hand, forgetting that I clambered down those stones all by myself every day.

“But what about you?” I said. “You came here in your childhood, you probably know all this old gossip. Himmat says the house was full of people in those days, and parties. I can’t imagine Diwan Sahib throwing parties. He is such a solitary person.”

“Oh, the old man was very different then. He was very handsome, straight and tall and strong-looking. He had a romantic, heroic aura. People said that once he put his own life at risk to save one of those tribal lion-trackers. That long scar he has all the way down his left cheek? That’s from the mauling he got.”

“He told me it was barbed wire,” I said.

“Ah, he did, did he?” Veer said. “That’s strange, he used to boast about it when he was younger. Maybe … anyway, he had a famously glad eye – you should have seen his entourage and the adoring women – army wives and daughters, and all those summer visitors who arrived from upper-class Lucknow and Delhi. Virtually every year there would be a new – invariably very beautiful – woman who would be introduced as a friend of the family, but everyone knew she was the flavour of that year. I only came for holidays. So did he, because he lived in Surajgarh at that time, and came here for the summer. He travelled in one of those first-class carriages – the old ones – all teakwood and gilt mirrors – and his dogs travelled with him.”

I knew about the dogs because on one of the walls above the fireplace in Diwan Sahib’s drawing room was a black and white photograph of four fringe-tailed golden retrievers on an open field. Each dog was backlit, its coat glowing in white outline from the sunset. That line of light transformed them into ethereal beings with floppy ears and panting tongues. One of the dogs had a happy smile as it looked up at Diwan Sahib. His hand had intruded into a corner of the picture. A fine riding boot was visible too.

“Parties, booze, love affairs, music on the lawn and singers he invited from Benares, meat slow-cooked on wood fires, machines for hand-churned ice cream that always tasted slightly of salt,” Veer was saying. “He had no time for grubby parentless boys parcelled out between relatives for boarding-school holidays. I was left to fend for myself. The only thing that made him take an interest in me was if I asked questions about wildlife. So I thought of something new every day. Why does the woodpecker peck a tree trunk? How does the magpie fly with such a long tail? Where did all the tigers of these hills go? And then he’d give me five minutes – undivided attention – whatever he was doing. Sometimes he would do those imitations of his: birdsong, tiger calls, barking deer. After that I would be alone again until I caught the train back. All I did was eat, ready to be the school’s fatso again when the holidays were over.”

The bitterness in his voice startled me. His face suddenly appeared thinner to me, worn out with remembered pain. He turned away as if he did not want me to see it. I knitted my fingers one into the other and held them behind my back so that I would not give in to my impulse to reach out for his hand. When Veer turned to me again it was with a smile, and a question about something inconsequential. We discussed his difficulties in setting up an e-mail connection and the hide and seek his mobile’s signal played. We did not mention Diwan Sahib again that day.

Veer had by now shifted base to Ranikhet. He was a climber, a professional whose work it was to take other people on climbs and treks. He was starting a new trekking company here and was busy setting up: laying in equipment, computers, looking out for an assistant to hire. When I saw the sophisticated, expensive things he came back with from trips to Delhi, I was wracked with compassion for Michael’s ill-equipped attempts, armed with little more than his passion for the mountains. Those thick-soled shoes, that plastic tent, his windproof jacket with its twice-repaired zip – they had seemed so invincible then, so flimsy, cheap and makeshift now. It would have been a natural point of conversation for Veer and me. Yet I could not bring myself to say a word. The contrast felt too painful, the comparison almost disloyal to Michael.

Veer was away so often I might not see him for days at a stretch. We had never talked about anything personal until that afternoon. Yet every encounter with him left me feeling as if I had swallowed five cups of strong coffee at one go. A swarm of bees took up residence inside me as soon as I saw him, and they buzzed crazily, knocking against each other. I was unable to sit still, even at the factory. I was restless, and confused about the reason for it. I knew I mentioned Veer in conversation far too much but could not stop myself. I had noticed Diwan Sahib raise his eyebrow at me when I did, with a “yet again” look on his face.

That afternoon was not the first time I had felt an overpowering need to touch Veer. Not long ago, at dinner at the Light House, he was seated opposite me, telling us about a trek he had taken his clients on the year before. It was a long story involving routes, tents, altitudes, and crevasses, and Diwan Sahib stopped him often for clarifications. I had heard barely a word. There was a trace of spinach clinging to Veer’s lower lip. I was mesmerised. I noticed the exact shape and line of his lips and the cleft in his chin. I tried looking away from it; could not. I had to sit on my hands to stop myself from reaching out to stroke the scrap away.

I stared into the bathroom mirror that night, clutching a comb, forgetting it was in my hand. I did not notice the icy breath from the tiles that was freezing my toes and travelling up my legs. I remembered another time before a different bathroom mirror, moments after news of Michael’s death reached me. Water was trickling off my face that day. There were no tears. I did not know why I was in the bathroom or why I had flung handfuls of water at myself. If my body had been turned inside out at that moment, there would have been fire and drought in place of veins and muscles. My face should have been ravaged, burned away. And yet it looked as it did every other day: the same bush of dark hair around the same coffee-coloured face, the same spectacles on the same pointed nose reflected in the same stained and cracked mirror that the bathroom had come with when Michael and I rented the place. We had never got around to replacing it. Parrots quarrelled over the fruit on the rain tree that overhung the terrace adjoining our two stuffy rooms. I was conscious of the birds’ screeches, of children in the house next door practising the song they did at this time, the echoing cry of late afternoon from the flower seller who circled those warm Hyderabad neighbourhoods on his jasmine-laden bicycle. Each daily sound had seemed heavy with a meaning I could not understand. The toothbrushes – two because Michael had left his behind – the soap dish, even the steel tap, looked as if they were more than ordinary, utilitarian objects. Two of his shirts hung in the cupboard unwashed. I had made him leave them that way so that I could bury my face in them to breathe in his smell while waiting for him to return. The new camera bag his office had given him for assignments lay on the bottom shelf of the cupboard, unused.

It had taken me all these years to claw my way back from that day to some kind of normality.

I had lost my taste for adventure, my impulsiveness. I wished Veer had never come, to fling a stone into my calm pond.