The Folded Earth: A Novel (15 page)

“Do you really have any of their letters?” I asked him. “Couldn’t I see them once?” I had had a hunch all along that he had made it up to amuse himself watching people like the woman from East Anglia pay him obeisance.

“Maybe I have them, maybe I don’t,” Diwan Sahib said. “Maybe, maybe not. You’ll find out.” He had shut his eyes again. “I should chop this house into firewood,” he said, his words slurring. “Too big for me, too big—”

He was drowsy now. He slouched in his big armchair, and in the dim light he looked shriveled, old and haggard, all bones and loose skin. Above him, the photograph of his dogs in silhouette was scarcely visible, but it made me think o
f
Veer’s stories of Diwan Sahib’s youth: his parties, his horses, the music, his women. He was receding before my eyes, fading out of reach.

I felt the need to do something to stop him disappearing from my life. I pulled a few pages from one of the old bundles on Corbett that had emerged a month ago and said, “Tonight I’m going to type up a few of these and we’ll go over them tomorrow. OK? We’ll start again. We’ll find out if we missed anything in the third draft.”

He did not answer. He was lost again in his own thoughts, staring into the sputtering flames.

*  *  *

That night, I sat up with his papers, and the sound of my typewriter clacked into the night. I typed page after page, overcome by a sense of loss, which, if it had not been overpowering, would have struck me as absurd. How had I missed knowing the man who wrote those words at the time he wrote them? And if his time was short, as he insisted more and more often these days, could I bring myself to look into the abyss of Diwan Sahib’s certain absence?

This is what I typed from Diwan Sahib’s manuscript that night: it was his statement of purpose, his optimistic, tongue-in-cheek plan for a biography—when he had not known the project would take him forty years and still remain incomplete.

Being petrified ever since birth of even the most minor forms of physical injury, it is conceptually difficult for me to grasp something as foolish as bravery. I can only gape in wonder at people who do not require wild horses to drag them onto a cricket pitch, at batsmen who face fast bowlers without being shackled by iron to the wicket. I am similarly bowled over by the idiocy of people who go walking of their own free will in forests where they might be eaten by bears or be clawed by tigers whose talons can sometimes be as sharp as those of certain women I have known. Next to schoolteachers, a tiger seems to me the most terrifying thing in the world, and its immediate extinction (or at least caged enclosure) is a wild inner desire that I have to keep suppressing, given that I am writing a book on Jim Corbett. One look at a tiger’s dental arrangements is sufficient to convince anyone that vegetarianism is not a notion likely to have been entertained even by its remote ancestors. In early youth I was regularly carted off into a forest by my employer, the Nawab of Surajgarh. I was informed by him that the object of these expeditions was to try and glimpse one of these beasts. After I had got over the feeling that either he was joking or lunatic, I transcended the condition of fright in which one merely sobs uncontrollably, and was restrained from the suicide I was attempting by jumping off the swaying pachyderm transporting us in the direction of Blakean fearful symmetry. The Nawab had a profound effect on my early predisposition toward being separated, via a stout iron cage, from all species of four-legged life larger than myself. In part, this accounts for my fascination with Jim Corbett, who seems to have been braver even than the Nawab of Pataudi when he captained our national cricket team. His life was years of shunting and hooting, then hunting and shooting—he was a railwayman before he became a celebrated shikari. By his own account Corbett voluntarily, even assiduously, did the very last thing I would ever do, namely “get in touch” (as he sweetly puts it) with man-eaters. As we know from his riveting tales, the man-eaters were not equally keen to get in touch with him. Once he was on their tails, so to speak, they found it hard to shake him off—which we can’t either, once we get hooked to his tales. Man-eaters of Kumaon looks to me like India’s third-greatest storybook, after the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. How did Corbett acquire the art of writing so brilliantly? He read James Fenimore Cooper; Jack London and Mark Twain may also have influenced him. He seems to have read fiction set in frontier territory, novels of exploration and adventure. In my book on Corbett, I want to model myself on Corbett’s tales, telling a sequence of stories that provide a picture of Corbett along with glimpses of his context. I want to give a sense of original, archival fact-finding. There will be entertaining digressions that show how Corbett’s immersion in wildlife was a substitute for the wilderness he suffered in relation to women because of a possessive and devoted sister. The chief source of information on Corbett is a sheaf of notes—thirteen pages dictated by the same sister (whose name was Maggie) to her friend in Kenya, Ruby Beyts, where she and Jim spent their last years. Maggie functioned for India’s greatest naturalist as a mother, sister, and wife, much as Dorothy did for Wordsworth. I am starting this book today—the thirteenth of September, 1967. I plan to finish the book in two years, at most three. But will anyone ever publish it?

five

Charu hovered at home around the time the postman made his rounds, pretending she had work to do there. She looked up each time she heard Bijli bark and subsided when she saw there was nobody in particular the dog was barking at. For a few days after a letter from Kundan Singh, I could hear her happy voice everywhere. She tripped down the shortcut through the forest to the bazaar with canisters of milk for regular customers, and when she returned, her face would be wreathed in smiles, although her shoulders were bent with the leaking sackfuls of rotting vegetables that she collected from the market for her cows and carried home on her head. Then as the days passed, and the gap between letters lengthened, her ebullience dwindled.

Each time a letter came, I asked her if she wanted me to write a reply and she shook her head. One day she said, “I’ll write when I can write by myself.” She was improving. She no longer forgot spellings from one day to the next. To begin with I was teaching her words like “hum,” “tum,” and “theek” that I thought would most quickly help her frame her first independent letter. Meanwhile she made me write Kundan’s address on stamped envelopes once in a while and she posted him things—leaves, pine needles, pressed flowers—that I came to know about when he mentioned them in his replies.

“It is very hot here,” the letter I read to her that June said.

You will never be able to imagine how hot. In the afternoon I can see flies falling dead out of the air. When I come back to my room my bed has dead flies on it. There are dust storms here instead of rain. The wind picks up dust from the ground and blows it around. It looks dark with the dust as if it’s very cloudy. It stings your eyes. It is very hard to cook in this heat. The kitchen is as hot as a pot on the fire. The water in the tap is hot enough for tea. Yesterday I went to a fair after work. There were dancers like in movies. It had bright lights and a giant wheel like we had seen once in the army grounds. But I remembered that wheel and did not want to climb into this one alone for a ride. I walked around and thought of walking in the mountains. I bought earrings with red stones. They are pretty, but not as pretty as the one I have, with a green stone. I will write again.

Your Loving Friend.

Kundan Singh’s large-lettered scrawl covered all three sides of his inland letters, and all the space on the flaps, as if he were determined not to waste a millimeter. His letters were in simple language, and crowded with vivid details from his days. The landscape of his life became clearer with each blue inland that arrived. He described his room: it was a small one over the garage. From it, he could sometimes hear a lion roar at night—the house was close to Delhi’s zoo. Not far from the house was Purana Quila, the ruins of an ancient fortress. He had never been on the boats that sailed around in the fortress’s moat, but he dreamed of doing so one day, with his “dear friend in Ranikhet.”

Kundan Singh was originally from Nepal, and had a sister, for whose dowry he was saving. His family lived on the outskirts of Siliguri, a town in the plains at the eastern end of the Himalaya. His father made a sort of living as a gardener, odd-job man, and chowkidar. He had struggled all his life and dreamed that someday his son would get a government job. But Kundan Singh had skipped school and joined a local hotel instead, as a helper, from where he had progressed to his present job.

His employers appeared to be fond of him. The woman (whom he had nicknamed Jhadu because she was very thin and particular about cleanliness) often bought him clothes and gave him extra money to send home. Their house had a deep veranda shaded by chiks made of khus. I had to explain to Charu that chiks were blinds made of a kind of grass, khus, which became fragrant when dampened. The other servants sprinkled the khus with water before guests arrived. They filled tall vases with scented white tuberoses and dusted the pictures. On summer evenings, Kundan’s employers and their friends sat in the veranda looking into the large old trees that shaded the lawn, with a big cooler whirring at them. The tables around them began filling with empty bottles and glasses as the evening passed. One of the frequent visitors was a woman who dressed in very short skirts and long earrings; she drank the most, and also smoked long cigarettes. “She looks like a Nepali,” Kundan had written to Charu, “but she may be Chinese. She wears strange clothes. You can see her legs from top to bottom. She drinks five or six bottles of beer in one evening.”

The short-skirted woman wanted one day to learn how to make mutton the way hill people cooked it. She had demanded a lesson and Jhadu had told him to be ready. Kundan, who had seen cookery shows on television, placed all the ingredients he would need—chopped, diced, ground, or powdered—ready in a line of little bowls. He had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly and cleared all the surfaces so that it looked as much like TV kitchens as he could make it. But when the guests arrived, he felt shy. “I did not want to teach anyone anything,” he wrote in his letter. “I stayed in my room. Then Jhadu sent for me.”

When he came into the kitchen, still reluctant, the woman laughed and said, “What, you don’t want to teach me your secrets?” She stood by him and watched and took notes as he cooked the meat. She kept dipping in a spoon, blowing on it and tasting the gravy. One of the other friends took pictures of them cooking. They gave Kundan copies of the photographs, one of which he sent to Charu. It was the first photograph he had ever sent her.

I looked at it before giving it to her. The kitchen in the picture was shiny and new, like something from a magazine. The friend, a pretty young woman with slanting eyes and high cheekbones, was in a slate-gray miniskirt, very chic. Earrings dangled to her shoulders and a long silver necklace slid down the center of the low-cut, ivory-colored top she wore. She was smiling at the camera, a lovely smile. Kundan too was smiling from over the steam in his cooking pot, which had made his face shine. His mop of hair had grown and the brass amulet at his neck blazed in the light of the camera’s flash.

When Charu looked at the picture she did not smile
.
And for the first time, she did not spring about light-footed, humming and chattering, as she usually did after receiving a letter. The next few days she went to the market with her canisters of milk banging sullenly against her legs, and on her way back with the sack of rotting vegetables on her head, she slashed at every bush she passed with her stick.

six

The long summer turned the hillsides to tinder, the rains would not come, and there had been no letter from Kundan since the one with his photograph. Charu was too anxious for anything beyond the mechanical performance of her chores. In earlier times she had always kept a caring eye out for Puran. She was adept at stealing grain from Ama’s stores for his deer and because she knew he fed much of his own food to the animals he made friends with, she made a few extra rotis smeared with salt and ghee to give him when Ama was not looking. Now, more often than not, she forgot and Puran began to go hungry.

He did not ask anyone at home for food. Food had a way of coming to him, he had discovered, if he went up to Negi’s tea stall on Mall Road. That was where Mr. Chauhan caught sight of him every other day, and then his long-nursed rage against Puran took on an inexplicable intensity. “This beggar and all these dogs! Just wait, Mam, and you will see what I mean,” he said to me in a hiss one evening when I encountered him on Mall Road. At that moment, Puran was sitting on Negi’s crooked bench, looking innocuous enough. At the road’s edge, boys were arguing over a carrom board, and another group was cheering a volleyball game in the vacant lot next to Meghdoot Hotel. Girls in their brightest, tightest clothes walked up and down in pairs, casting sidelong glances at the boys, who stood around slapping each other’s shoulders, running fingers through their hair, laughing and talking louder when the girls passed. A jeep drew up from the bazaar, roof loaded with sacks and bundles, spilling out people and goat kids and black diesel smoke. Mr. Chauhan covered his nose with a white, ironed handkerchief.

The younger Negi came to Puran with an expression of exaggerated patience. “Back again?” he said, and handed him a glass of tea and four fat slices of bread. Puran scurried away with his tea and bread across to the low parapet that ran all the way down the western edge of Mall Road, and sat on it eating in a hurry as if the bread was in danger of being snatched away from him. A ring of woolly dogs formed around him, looking up with pleading eyes and drooling tongues. Puran dropped them scraps and the dogs snarled and yelped as they fought over the food.

Mr. Chauhan turned to me in triumph and said, “See? See what I mean? Yesterday I told my secretary—we were in the car—please make a note, I said, too many stray dogs. I would like a list—all dogs’ descriptions and names in one column and owners’ names in the second column. Any dog that does not have a license must go. We will draw up regulations for licensing dogs and this . . . beggar? There should be no beggars in an army cantonment. We must be an example for the rest of India. I’ll fix this man. That is what I said.”

He returned to the door of his white Gypsy, whose bright red beacon had been spinning like an angry top all through our conversation. The car roared to life and took him away down Mall Road. Puran sat on the parapet oblivious. The stray dogs lolled at his feet, contented after their snack. The darkening mountains behind him began to swallow the blood-red sun as it turned from a disk to a sliver, slowly disappearing from view.

*  *  *

That night, I sat at my window in a trance gazing at the fires in the forest. What would happen to the animals that lived in the undergrowth if a wind were to fan those slow fires into a blaze? They were always in danger. One year Puran had run into the flames in the middle of the night and come back with a singed fox cub; another year he had rescued a baby monkey from the burning forest and the next morning a whole family of monkeys had appeared on our doorstep, agitating for its release in angry screeches and chatters.

I was lost in worried thoughts about Puran and Mr. Chauhan’s threats to “fix” him when I heard a faint knock on my door downstairs. It was past ten o’clock; the neighbors were asleep. My light was the only one on; I was supposed to be correcting the English class test. At first I thought the knock was a figment of my imagination and applied myself to the exercise book I was working on. And then I heard it again.

Nobody visited this late in Ranikhet. My stomach gave a lurch. This was the call in the night I had known would come one day. Something had happened to Diwan Sahib and Himmat Singh had come to call me. I raced down the stairs and unlatched the front door in a panic.

It was Veer. His nose was peeling with sunburn and his face was thinner than usual from the weeks he had been away walking and climbing. His normally close-cropped hair had grown. That, and an unfamiliar beard, made him look a stranger. For a second my mind sprang to my last night with Michael when I had brushed my fingers over his clean-shaven cheeks in anticipation of the beard he came back with from every trek, when I had pinched the roll of fat around his stomach knowing he would lose it in the weeks away.

Veer was standing so close to me I could smell his sweat. His jeans were dirty and his shoes muddy. I was stabbed by a sudden, fierce need to bury my face in his shirt although it hung on him grimy with dirt. But I remembered the way he had driven away without a look at me. “You’re back,” I said. And then: “I’ve piles of work to finish.”

He took his shoes off at the door and brushed past me into my kitchen. He went to the shelf where I stacked old newspapers, and extracted one, which he laid on a corner of the kitchen floor. He placed his shoes on the precise center of the newspaper and said: “See how muddy they are? All your rugs would have been filthy.” He helped himself to water from the steel filter and drank it in gulps, saying in between, “Hot, hot. Monsoon delayed. But CNN’s predicted rain. It’ll come tonight. It’s so still. You can feel the thunder.”

He washed the glass and set it down with the same precision upon the kitchen counter, opened the fridge, and examined the jug of milk, cubes of cheese, and the aging lemon it contained, and shook his head saying, “Don’t you ever eat real food?” He wandered into my living room and paused before the framed picture. It was a photographic panorama of the peaks visible from Ranikhet, with their altitudes written alongside. Why was he examining a picture he must have seen in every house in these hills, I wondered? Was he planning to show me the places his climbs had taken him to? Now? At this hour?

Veer’s hands, resting on the back of a chair, were deep in the folds of a dusty-pink cardigan I had left draped on it. I noticed that his fingers were moving in the wool, kneading it. I knew then why he had come, even before he began to speak. “Every day on this trek I’ve been thinking that I’ve seen dozens of beautiful places in the world,” he said, “and most of its mountain ranges. And I know for sure that there’s nowhere else I would rather be than the Himalaya, and in the Himalaya, Ranikhet, and in Ranikhet, the corner of it that has you.” He turned away from the picture and toward me with a deep breath that he exhaled in a rush. His eyes shone, half-terrified, half-exultant, when unexpectedly, he pointed to his feet and laughed. “Look,” he said, “obviously you scare me more than the worst crevasse.” One of his socks was blue and the other dark green.

That night a cool, moist breeze began ruffling the trees, making a sound like the sea. Pinecones clattered onto the roof. The stars disappeared and thunder boomed. Sword-blades of brilliant white light sliced open the glowing red sky. The breeze grew into a wind that howled and banged. My little house on the edge of its spur became a tilting boat. The wind blew in sprays of rain through the open windows and we closed our eyes to the mist of water as if we were not in the mountains but on a wave-thudded beach. Far below, the still-smoldering, smoking forest began to calm at last.

*  *  *

Mindful that gossip was almost the only entertainment in a town as small as ours, we did our best to be discreet. Veer came rarely to my house. When he did, it was late at night and he left before dawn. He never left his shoes or umbrella outside my door. When we wanted to be together, we drove miles out of Ranikhet, to one of the isolated hillsides that surround the town. We put a rug on the pine-cushioned forest floor and lay there with nothing above us but the sky in its mesh of pine fronds. It felt as if we were the only two people in all of the jagged, wild, precipitous Himalaya—until we found a goat looking at us, soon followed by a curious goatherd. Sometimes children scampering between school and village through the jungle stopped and gawped at us until I felt ready to brandish a stick at them. But I still preferred this to Ama’s watchfulness, and to prevent anyone seeing us together when we returned, I got out of the jeep some distance from home and walked back by a different route, so that we arrived separately.

However foolproof our stratagems, the young widow’s liaison with her landlord’s relative very quickly became the talk of the hillside. Within days I felt gossip eddying around my ankles. One morning, from my window, I saw Ama in my garden, poking at the earth with her stick, apparently examining my plants. When I came outside she rambled on about the flowers on the cucumber vine, about how her beans were being eaten by pests, and about Puran’s deer, which had disappeared for two hours the day before, driving him to distraction. I was growing weary of waiting for her to come to the point, when she looked skyward as if she were going to talk about the rains and said, “Do you know about Gappu Dhobi’s younger bahu?”

I only knew Gappu, our local washerman. “You mean that pretty girl who grazes his cows with a baby strapped to her back in a shawl?” I said. I knew her more as a cowherd than as Gappu’s daughter-in-law.

“Yes, yes, the same one. That baby . . . now that baby is not by her husband. Her husband died years ago, when she was very young, just like you. Her child from that marriage is about twelve now. Just days after the husband died, this girl—everyone calls her Gudiya, because she looks like a glass doll—she took up with the fellow’s brother. That man had an eye on her even when the husband was alive, and when the husband died, the brother—they call him Vikki—he barely waited till the ashes had cooled when he began to seduce his sister-in-law. Before they could change the sheet, the next man was in her bed. I am not making this up, the older sister-in-law told me—you know that woman who is at the public water tap every day gossiping about the universe as though she’s got nothing else to do?”

“So it was good in the end, wasn’t it?” I said. “The girl seems happily married now.”

“Aah—but they are not married, you see!” Ama said with a cackling laugh. “No, no, Vikki is too shrewd for that. Gudiya’s husband was a peon in a Gormint office in Haldwani. When he died, Gudiya started getting a fat pension—I’ve heard it is two thousand rupees now. You think this Vikki would let himself lose that? Oh no. He knows only widows get the pension. So he just took Gudiya to a temple and told her, ‘Now before God we are married, but if any Gormint babu asks, you must say you are a widow.’ And every year she goes to State Bank and has to put her thumbprint on a paper to swear she has not married. Then they release her pension for the next year. Even the bank babus know it’s a lie, but what can they do?”

“So what?” I said. “Everyone breaks laws.”

“How do you trust a man so greedy he wants his wife to be called a widow? Now, you look at our Diwan Sahib. He’s old, he has that house and money, just wait and see, there’ll be vultures circling him till he dies. People who haven’t cared a bit for him. All these years, who looked after him? You did, I did, Himmat did. But you wait and see what happens. Old men without children start sprouting relatives faster than weeds after rain. It’s not easy knowing who to trust. And women alone? We never know when—did I tell you about that girl in our village? She put her hand into the tin to measure out rice like every other day and before you knew it she was screaming and writhing on the floor and there was a snake—as thick as my arm—who had her hand its mouth.”

Veer and Ama disliked each other equally, I realized. One evening a discussion about Puran’s deer exploded into a nasty argument when Veer insisted that Diwan Sahib get rid of Ama and her family. “What purpose does it serve,
”
Veer demanded to know, “to waste all that space for some peasants to turn it into a squalid slum and for their cattle to breed dirt and flies and destroy every inch of the garden?”

Later, when I tried to calm him down, he said, “You don’t know a thing about that woman and her damned family. I’ve seen them here since I was a kid. They were all over the place, as if they owned it. There was that drunk of a son. He bullied me when I came for vacations, he stole from my uncle, he beat his wife to death here—ten feet from your cottage—how would you have liked that? The police came, there was a real stink. My uncle almost got charged just for being the landlord even though he was nowhere near the house when it happened. I was hardly ten, but I’ve never forgotten the sound of that woman screaming. I’ve tried for years to make my uncle see reason and make them go. He could pay them off. But the old man is such a mule.”

When the poison ran so deep it was no use reasoning. I did not want Ama to be evicted any more than Diwan Sahib did, nor was I going to have an argument with Veer. “Speaking of mules,” I said, “did you ever find out if mules need shoes? And elephants and bullocks? And zebras and wildebeest? Maybe we could discuss this while you walk me home?” I slipped my fingers into his and wove them together.

*  *  *

Ama was not the only one with barbs to dispense: everyone was discussing Veer and me. Mrs. Chauhan gave me a knowing look when I met her on Mall Road one evening and said, “Arre, Maya Memsa’ab, you are looking ten years younger! Tell me the secret, and I will buy it too!”
Maya Memsa’ab
was the name of a Hindi film based on
Madame Bovary,
in which a bored wife entertains herself with a series of love affairs. Mrs. Chauhan nudged me toward a sign that her husband had just had nailed to a tree. It said, “Fighting Fire is Our Desire.” She read it aloud, gave my hand a conspiratorial squeeze, and left, suppressing giggles behind her palm. The General had a view as well. One morning, I went to the cemetery, to talk things over with Michael as I sometimes did. I sat by his headstone, chin resting on my knees, absentmindedly plucking at the grass by my feet, when the General, who had come to visit Angelina’s grave, came upon me. “Ah, Maya!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here anymore . . . it’s been long enough, you’re too young to be moping over the past. Move on, my girl, move on. High time.”