The Folded Earth: A Novel (14 page)

three

Ama had left without looking at me again, as if conscious she had been tactless. The next day she sent across a bowl of kheer made from the milk of her cows. But I found myself dodging her and turning away from the skeptical look that said it knew everything there was to know. Her presence began to feel intrusive, even overbearing. And then, as if by malicious intent, the mail brought me two letters from college friends, both with reports of new babies, thriving families, holidays. “Busy, busy, busy,” said one of them, “I don’t know where the days go. And how are you?”

Charu sensed something was wrong, and wordlessly brought me gifts the whole week: first a white rose made out of crepe paper, followed by a lumpy papier-mâché Ganesha that a friend of hers had made, then a vase she had fashioned out of reeds. She cleaned my courtyard with rediscovered concentration. She brought water on her head from a far-off stream when my taps ran dry.

By now five letters had come. I realized I had begun to wait for the postman as expectantly as Charu and it seemed silly for me to keep up the pretense that I did not know who the letters were really from. After the third one came, I said to her in a casual tone, “There’s a letter from Kundan Singh for you.” A look passed between us, I turned to go and fetch the letter, and she knew she was safe. She never mentioned her friend “Sunita” again. She began to interrupt our lessons with unexpected nuggets about Kundan Singh: how he had been with her every night of her vigil when her cow was dying, how they used to meet every afternoon at the Dhobi Ghat, how they had once stolen away and gone to a fair at the army grounds together and he had bought her a bead necklace. She told me about his parents, his job. It was as if, by talking to me, she was reassuring herself that he was real.

I found myself thinking about them in the middle of my working day, creating sagas out of her stories. In my mind’s eye, I saw her and Kundan haloed in the sunlight of the forest clearing the time I had observed them unseen. From there it took only a minute for me to slide into that afternoon in Hyderabad’s forest reserve when Michael had kissed me and held me against a tamarind tree.

It was not all daydreaming; I was anxious too about Ama’s reaction. She was venomous without restraint about other transgressors, such as Janaki’s teenage daughter. “Shameless hussy!” she had spat. “Doesn’t care that everyone knows she’s carrying on with that boy at Liaquat’s medicine shop. He’s not just a different caste, no—he’s a
Muslim
!” What would she do when she came to know of the secret life her own granddaughter was leading?

I thought back to that fortnight when my father had virtually imprisoned me at home after he spotted me with my arms wrapped around Michael, as we drove past him on the motorbike. I was in the middle of laughing at something, my chin on Michael’s shoulder, my hair streaming behind me in the breeze, when I had noticed my father, limping from the opposite direction, stopping to stare when he noticed us, his head turning to track us as if following a ball at a tennis game where not a stroke could be missed. His eyes had locked into mine as I passed, and for that long moment we were tied together by a thread stretched more taut with each turn of the wheels, which snapped in half when he receded too far into the distance for me to see him any longer. I would never forget the horror on his face that day. Michael’s parents were second-generation Christians, and my father was contemptuous of all Christians—even though he was happy enough to send me to St. George’s Grammar School for Girls on the first rung of his grand plan to turn me into an industrial magnate. I had stopped early in life trying to make sense of my father’s paradoxes, as had my mother. He was the natural born lord of all he surveyed; he needed to explain nothing. He ruled over factories and fields and two younger brothers. He spoke little and to the point. He was a short square man, with a bald head that shone in the sun. His bad leg ensured that his silver-headed stick never left his side. It may have been this stick, or his lazy right eye that wandered so that you never knew precisely what he was looking at. They combined to create a subtle suggestion of violence, which nobody wanted to test. By the time I grew up, I was as afraid of him as his brothers were.

The summer nights grew warmer. I could not fall asleep however long I lay in bed, however tight I shut my eyes. I sat for long hours looking at the forest fires outside my window. They happened every summer and they could go on for weeks. When beaten down, they would go underground and travel unseen below the thick matting of pine needles, to spring out in another part of the forest. I could hear a faint crackling. At some distance down the slope, there was a glowing orange line as if someone had flung a long necklace of flames into the forest. Beyond it was another such ring and further away, another still. In the blackness beyond the arc of light from my table lamp, I could see the shadows of soldiers as they raked paths to stop the flames spreading. To the left I could see one of the fire-lines creeping up toward the clerk’s cottage.

As the summer wore on, the air turned heavy with smoke. It gave everyone colds and coughs and Diwan Sahib’s breathing made a sound like rustling leaves. A chir tree near my house had been burning for three days. Flames leaped out from a hollow halfway up its long straight trunk. Its resin oozed down the trunk and made the fire burn more fiercely. There was no water with which to douse it.

I stayed up those nights correcting school homework. I circled words in the grubby exercise book before me: “Ashu was quite,” Guddu had written. “It was quiet cold”; “The mouse in the house sat very quite.” He got it wrong each time. In the next exercise book, Anil had flipped every single S, B, and P to face the wrong way, as he always did. I pushed the books aside. My head sank between my hands onto the table.

In the dark hours my thoughts took a form I would not have recognized in the daytime. If I slept at all, I woke from contorted dreams in which, night after night, Veer held me till I slept, or insistently kissed me awake, or crushed me to bloodied pulp with his jeep, or drove away saying not a word. Sometimes Charu appeared, and sometimes even Kundan Singh. But never Michael. If I shut my eyes and tried to visualize Michael, the elements of his face refused to coalesce into anything recognizable. I discovered I could no longer hear his voice in my ears, or the sound of his laugh, or the way he cleared his throat every few sentences when speaking.

I sifted through my mind for whatever I could retrieve of him, reconstructing our years together: the way I pretended to sleep so that he would bring tea to our bed each morning, tugging a tuft of my hair to wake me. How we would eat omelettes day after day because we had failed somehow to shop or cook.

I longed for the simple joy of being married to him, and to have him there to confirm my memories—was our cupboard black or brown? Did the neighbors really have a dog called Simona? Where was that bouldered and scrubby place we went to, the day his motorbike was delivered after weeks of waiting? He had driven very fast and we were wildly gleeful, like children who had escaped school.

I had been told that if you put your ear to a railway track, you could feel the vibration of a train many miles distant. Could Michael, wherever he was, hear me if I called out to him? I dreamed myself back to Hyderabad’s long-ago summer afternoons, birds and mosquitoes falling exhausted in the scorched air, the heat-dead stillness churned by the creak of our ceiling fan. We lay on the bare, cool floor sometimes, and sometimes in the narrowness of our single bed, pillows, sheets, and floor slipping away as we tore at each other as if after days of starvation. I had to touch Michael all the time, to make sure he was next to me when I slept and was still there when I awoke. When the monsoon came that first year it had rained as it never had before. We could hear nothing but the shout of rain on the roof, on and on all night, as we slept and woke and murmured to each other and slept and woke again, as if the night itself were something fluid we were swimming through, pausing for breath, then swimming again. I would memorize Michael’s face with my fingers as he slept so that I could travel its ridges and valleys through the hours of his absences: lines had been made on it by thoughts I would never know. I was jealous beyond reason of his past. If I had my way, I would not have shared his shadow with anyone else. “Was it the same for you?” I wanted to ask him now.

I was nineteen when we married, still at college. I returned to classes a week after our wedding. I would stare at the neem tree by my classroom window, and in the middle of a lecture on the Delhi sultanate I would lose myself in daydreams until at length the professor’s voice once again became audible, hammering at me from somewhere far-off: “Can you repeat the assessment I just made of Qutb-ud-din-Aibak and the Slave Dynasty? I’m speaking to you. To you, Maya.”

Michael used to grumble about the size of our two rooms. “It’s a shed,” he said, “they must have built it as a garage.
”
The place did look smaller with him in it. The ceiling was low, the bathroom was a little box where your elbow knocked painfully against a tap if you turned. He was tall and somewhat clumsy, so he tended to bang into things. I would lie back in bed and watch him, filled with adoration as he puzzled his way through making coffee in our new kitchen, on our new gas stove. Mostly he gave up, and walked back toward our tousled bed, his eyes on me with a look of yearning so distilled, so intense, that I had to turn away for fear of its strength.

In those days in Hyderabad, if Michael tossed and turned, I got up to sprinkle water on our sheets to cool the room. If the electricity went, I would sit up, fanning us both with a newspaper. He slept through it all, exhausted by his long day at work rushing through the burning summer air on his motorbike, wherever his newspaper sent him to take pictures. I would look at his helpless, sleeping face and though he could not hear me, I whispered endearments so tender that they would have curled away and died if exposed to the light of day.

“I couldn’t say them to you then, but I wish you knew,” I said now, and tried to hear his voice replying. But all I heard was foxes calling to each other and pine needles sprinkling down on the tin roof, making a sound like rain.

four

In colonial times, the summer months in Ranikhet meant horse races and moonlit picnics, and even now we have a “season” when the town is crowded with people who come up from the plains to escape the heat. They are everywhere for a few weeks: tourists, summer residents, day-trippers. Scholars would turn up to see Diwan Sahib. Trekkers heading for the high Himalaya paused in Ranikhet en route; all kinds of people wandered in and out of the Light House as if it were a public monument. If they found Diwan Sahib in the garden they stopped to pump him for information about the hills or to photograph him as a relic of the Raj, a bona fide old Indian nobleman. Sometimes supplies would arrive for one o
f
Veer’s trekking groups, or middlemen tasked with requisitioning porters in the Ranikhet bazaar would come and stay for hours, poring over details. There was a young assistant Veer had employed, who was stationed at the house from time to time. He hovered all day, appearing to do nothing more substantial at all.

Ever since Veer had taken up residence at the Light House, Diwan Sahib’s writing had barely progressed. If I asked him for new chapters to type, he waved his hand at whoever happened to be visiting and said, “I can’t write when there are so many people. I’ll wait till the season ends and then we’ll finish chapter seven. I’ll get the book done this year, that’s a promise. I don’t have much more time. That Welsh poet, what was his name? We learned his poem in school—‘Job Davies, eighty-five / Winters old and still alive / After the slow poison / And treachery of the seasons’—did you have to learn it too?”

“No,” I said.

“You should. Good poem. I’m like Mr. Davies—worse—I’m eighty-seven! Every morning I wake up and tell myself, ‘What, still alive?’ I truly don’t have long.”

“You don’t want to write anymore,” I said. “There’s too much else to do.” I pointed to the bottle on the table next to him. Now that Veer kept him supplied with superior alcohol, Diwan Sahib’s durbar began soon after breakfast and went on long into the afternoon. He would keep postponing lunch, pouring himself yet another drink, waving Himmat Singh away each time he said, “Shall I serve lunch, Sa’ab?” Mr. Qureshi too was under the spruce tree nursing his steel glass on most days. He seemed to have abandoned his workshop to his son.

“Maybe if you wrote for an hour or so in the morning before starting on the gin?”

“What nonsense,” Diwan Sahib said, and poured himself another large measure. “Don’t be such a schoolteacher. My taste buds feel as if they’ve come back to life after twenty years dormant.” He turned to Mr. Qureshi and said, “You were going to tell me something. This girl interrupted you.”

“Yes, yes, Diwan Sahib, as I was saying, mysterious are the ways of man.” Mr. Qureshi smiled, round faced, and red nosed, already a little tipsy. “Do you know, Maya, a car came in for servicing yesterday—a Honda City, belongs to that new doctor at the nursing home, what’s his name? Sharma or Verma. Anyway, the boys started work on the car. They’re strapping young fellows, foul mouthed and stoned half the time. When they opened the trunk to get the spare tire, right there, one of them almost fell over with fright. There was a head in the trunk. Long hair and all.”

“A human head?” I said. “You mean a dead body?”

“Aha, Maya!” Mr. Qureshi chuckled. “Scared you, didn’t I? No, when they looked again they realized it was a plastic head, a stand for a wig. There was a wig on it: long curling red hair. Even had two blue hairclips. So what do we do then? Of course we phone the doctor and we say, ‘Sir, you left a wig in your car.’ And the doctor shouts, ‘What wig? What do you take me for? Are you trying to insult me? I have a full head of hair and it’s my own, I’ll come to your workshop and you can pull it if you like and see if it comes off,’ he says, and bangs the phone down, so angry. There is no explanation. None, Diwan Sahib. Correct me if I am wrong, but mysterious are the ways of mankind. I have kept the head in the showroom of the workshop. Maya, you can come and see it if you don’t believe me. What was it doing in the trunk? No idea.”

Diwan Sahib said, “Why won’t we believe you? Stranger things than this happened in Surajgarh in my time. Now let me tell you . . .”

And Corbett was filed away for another day.

One afternoon, when I came to his lawn with the newspapers, I found Diwan Sahib smoking. I said nothing, but a look passed between us. He took a long, defiant drag and after a pause blew out a lungful of smoke. He tapped his Rolls-Royce cigarette case and displayed a neat row of filter tips. If he had been a child he might have stuck his tongue out at me. He had stopped smoking with great difficulty three years earlier. He had sworn then that he was free of the siren call of addiction, and that he would never put himself through stopping again.

I marched into the house and found Veer’s assistant there. He was a limp, shy young man from Dehra Dun, who spent most evenings pacing in the garden murmuring to his wife on a mobile. He was a follower of the Radha Soami sect and cooked his own vegetarian meals, minus even onion and garlic, on a separate gas stove that he had set up on a back veranda. If chicken or fish was cooked in the house, he lit incense sticks by the dozen and his face assumed a rigid expression of martyrdom. He regarded cigarette packets and bottles of gin as objects that had been planted in the house by the Devil in person. He looked horrified when I asked him how Diwan Sahib had laid his hands on cigarettes. “None of us smoke, Maya Mam,” he said. “Some visitor must have left the cigarettes in the house.” They happened to be Diwan Sahib’s old brand too. “What’s a couple of cigarettes after three years?” Diwan Sahib shouted toward us. “Do you think I have no self-control?”

That evening, when I told Ama about the cigarettes, she gave me her all-knowing look and said with a cackle of sarcastic laughter, “Life’s improved for Diwan Sa’ab ever since his nephew came back! So much more to drink, and now cigarettes! The nephew will kill his uncle with trying to make him happy, just you wait and see.” I pretended not to understand what she was implying and busied myself with other work. I did not want her to suppose I was encouraging malice. She had never liked or trusted Veer, and she had told me so in the early days, not thinking he would actually start living at the Light House or that he and I would become friends. She was too politic now to be open about her dislike, but sometimes the temptation was irresistible.

Diwan Sahib lost weight because of eating less and drinking more, and that made him look both younger and frailer. However his eyes, spiderwebbed with wrinkles, retained their wicked gleam. One afternoon, a buxom woman from somewhere in East Anglia arrived out of the blue, saying she was writing a love story based on the lives of Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. “It is vital to my project, sir, that I see the letters I believe to be in your possession. If you allow me a day’s access to the papers, I’m willing to share my royalties with you.” She came in a flowing silk sari that repeatedly slid off her shoulder to bare her cleavage, so that, Diwan Sahib later said, two roads converged in a low silk blouse, and he wished he could have traveled both.

When she met with no success the first day—she had installed herself at the Westview Hotel—she returned on each of the next two mornings. Her long black hair was in a bun crested by a red rose one day, a creamy magnolia the next. She sat very straight, adjusted the flower, and looked at Diwan Sahib, focusing her energies through her large pleading eyes. She gifted him a shawl from the local army widows’ cooperative, and, the next day, a bottle of rum.

She tried to talk about Nehru, but Diwan Sahib remorselessly steered the conversation to Corbett. “Did you know,” he said, “that he died the day before Einstein? Einstein stole his thunder. Was Corbett a lesser man than Einstein? If I were lost in the jungles here”—he waved a hand this way and that—“I hope you are careful when you walk around after dark? And that you know that a slow-moving snake that wriggles as it approaches is very likely a poisonous one? That is when you need Corbett with you, madam, and not Einstein—when you want someone to be able to tell from looking at scratch marks on rocks which animals have passed, how far they are from you, why the langur is calling from that tree, why the barking deer leaped away across the path. Do you follow me?”

The woman’s eyes had glazed over, but she nodded.

“But who remembers Corbett now, other than a few senile ancients like me?”

It was only on the afternoon the woman was leaving and had come to say good-bye that Diwan Sahib chose to relent. “Oh, I forgot,” he said, “Nehru came here to Ranikhet with the Mountbattens. He dropped in to see me too—that chair—your chair? He sat on that very chair with a gin and bitters in one hand and a cigarette in the other.”

The woman jumped from her chair, stared at it in disbelief, and scrabbled in her handbag for her camera as Diwan Sahib continued, “Why don’t you drive down to Holm Farm? They have a framed picture there, of Edwina, Dickie, Nehru, and Mr. Upadhyaya, who presided over the place.” He returned placidly to his newspaper while she gave him a look that combined excitement, impatience, and irritation in equal measure, before rushing off to her driver to consult him about the practicalities of a detour to the Holm Farm Hotel on her way to the station.

Diwan Sahib watched the car disappear into a cloud of dust, then went inside. He poured us both a rum and we sank into our usual chairs. For a while, exhausted with talk, we did not speak. Above the fireplace was a tall vase filled with half-dead pink roses into which Himmat Singh had stuck a few blood-red Aztec lilies. It was so quiet that I thought I could hear when, from time to time, the decaying rose petals dropped onto the mantelpiece. Flames ate at a small log in the fireplace. A fire was lit in that room every day, even on the hottest summer evenings, to kill the damp and protect the books from silverfish.

“The prime minister of a newly independent country,” Diwan Sahib said after a long spell of silence. “Devoted to the wife of his departing viceroy. Is it a surprise that this woman wants to turn it into a lurid romance?” He emptied half his glass in one gulp. He sighed, tilted his head back on his chair, and shut his eyes.

When after a long pause he began to speak, it was half to himself. His eyes were still shut and his voice so low that I had to lean forward to catch his words. It was a strange relationship, he said. They began to feel a closeness to each other at the end of Edwina’s time in India, on the brink of her departure, and after that they could hardly bear to be parted for a single moment. Some of their letters were written when they were both in the same room, some were written moments after they had left each other; there was one scribbled across an official banquet’s menu card. In the years to follow, they were rarely alone together, and saw each other only for brief snatches when one of them visited on the way to somewhere else. They were constantly among other people. Yet they wrote to each other every day for several years. The letters came and went by diplomatic bag. Each one was numbered because they were afraid the letters might fall into the wrong hands. And why should they not have feared that eventuality? So much in those letters was dangerous for people in public life. Nehru had called his friendship with Edwina a battle between convention and chemistry in which chemistry had won—more or less. It could not be allowed to win entirely. Public life is relentless, it is unforgiving, it is held together by conventions and the fear of any threat to them. “I should know,” Diwan Sahib said.

His voice took on the tones of someone reciting a poem: “I lose myself in a dreamland, which is very unbecoming in a prime minister. But then I am only incidentally a prime minister.” A man willingly imprisoned by his political destiny, said Diwan Sahib, separated from the woman he loved by duty, distance, necessity, even instinct. If either of them abandoned their own orbits, Nehru had told Edwina, they would both be terribly unhappy. The impossibility of their love was also what sustained it.

Diwan Sahib’s brow remained furrowed in thought. He stared at the fire as if reading from it. I hardly dared say a word, never having seen him so lost to the world around him. He had not once sounded like this talking about Corbett. I could not understand it. The story was startling, of course, but surely so well-known and often repeated that it had lost its power to move anyone, especially someone as unsentimental as Diwan Sahib. You are starting to sound like a romance writer too, I would have said, if he had not looked so unlike himself.

“There were letters in which Nehru said he felt Edwina’s presence like a fragrance in the air,” Diwan Sahib murmured on. “She said she felt a sense of peace and happiness with him as she did with no one else. He sent her things to remind her of the country she had left: birch bark from Kashmir, leaves, stones. Edwina had even given him a ring before leaving India. When she died in her sleep, alone in Borneo, Nehru’s letters were by her bed. She traveled with them everywhere. It was what she read before she slept every night.”

“Why didn’t you write a book on this instead of on Corbett?” I said, when his next pause grew too long.

He blinked as if he had been asleep. His face was etched with pain, but he rearranged it into an imitation of his usual half-seriousness. “Because of Edwina’s dog, entirely because of her dog,” he said. Edwina had a dog called Mizzen. She did not know what to do with it when the time came to leave India. Given England’s quarantine rules, the dog would have had to be isolated for several months before being allowed to reenter the country. Edwina consulted Nehru and they agreed it was better to put it down than make it suffer quarantine; the dog was too old to survive it, they thought. “That did it for me,” Diwan Sahib said. “All those gardens at his prime-ministerial doorstep and the man didn’t offer to adopt it and let it live out its remaining years in peace? How do you think an old dog like me feels about
that
? You won’t put me down, will you, if I become inconvenient?”