The Folded Earth: A Novel (20 page)

thirteen

It was the last week of September before the next letter from Kundan Singh came, this time in an envelope. This was only the second time he had used an envelope, which cost much more than an inland letter. This time too, he used it to enclose a photograph. In the photograph Kundan wore an ironed white shirt and was frowning so hard at the camera that he looked cross-eyed. His hair had been oiled and flattened. Charu looked for a minute at the picture and then sandwiched it between her palms. She was too shy to look at it properly, not while I was there. She would take it to one of her hideouts and study every inch of it the minute she got a chance.

She sat down on her usual chair and waited for me to read her the letter but I had other things to do, which I finished while she waited, tapping a toe on the floor. I had already told her that I would not read the letters to her for much longer, thinking this was the only way she would work hard at her lessons again—she was tending to be lazy.

I was at home so little now that unpaid electricity and water bills had collected. My chairs staggered under the weight of clothes, and the morning’s milk would certainly go rancid if I did not put it to boil at once. I went about my chores and then, as I sat at my table writing checks for the bills, I became aware of a faint sound, almost no more than breathing: Charu’s voice. She was whispering in a low undertone. I could hear the hisses of the sibilants, the drawn-out vowels where she halted halfway through a word trying to complete it. I sat very still, pretending to be immersed in my bills, wondering if it could be true: Charu was reading by herself! At last, on the page and in her head, the alphabet had resolved itself into words she could make sense of. I stole a glance at her and saw her squinting at the letter, her lips moving as she mouthed the words. Her fingers traced the line she was on. The quietness of the room had deepened because of her whispers. Nothing stirred. Perhaps the birds outside.

I did not move a muscle and did not look at her again, willing her to carry on, to not stop trying, but suddenly the kettle’s lid began to rattle as the water for our tea started boiling. She sprang up, self-conscious. “Let me make the tea. You finish your work,” she said.

We sat down with our tea and the letter. As in each of his letters, here too Kundan asked about everyone’s health and informed Charu about Delhi’s weather. He wrote of things that had happened at the hotelier’s home, his visit to the Red Fort, an accident he had witnessed. It was only in the last page that we came to the nub of the letter. Kundan’s employers had for some time been looking for opportunities abroad. The hotel industry offered plenty. They were within reach of jobs in Singapore, where they would earn five times as much and lead a better life than in Delhi. They wanted Kundan to go with them. They had told him they did not want him to lose his livelihood. I knew Kundan’s employers actually wanted him because of his culinary skills; but surely it also meant that they thought him dependable and honest—a reassuring thought for me in relation to Charu. “They said many nice things to me,” Kundan wrote. “I felt very happy.” He too would earn a lot more, they had told him, and he would be able to pay off his father’s loan much quicker, and save for his sister’s wedding. He could come back once a year—it was not that far. They saw Singapore as something they would do for only a couple of years: we cannot dream of living away from India, they said. Singapore would give everyone some quick money and show them new sights. Kundan would never again have such an opportunity. He would fly on a plane. They would live by the sea. They would never feel hot, they had said, because Singapore was an air-conditioned city, which meant that even cooks lived air-conditioned.

This accounted for the photograph: it was clearly a duplicate of the one that would be stuck into his passport. Passports took a long time to be made, at least six months, so it was best to start the process right away, they had said. And of course he was free to decide not to go. He was twenty, a grown-up.

The letter did not say much more. Nothing about what he had decided or was thinking. Nothing about Charu. There were no lines of longing for the hills of Ranikhet, there was no yearning for the scent of pinewood fires or cut grass. Kundan sounded different, as if he were turning into a pragmatic, city-smart young man. It was more than half a year since they had last met.

As I read the letter, I saw Charu’s face withdrawing into the expressionless immobility in which she took refuge when she was upset. She stopped me twice, to ask what a flyover was and where Singapore was. Was it as far as Jaipur or Rampur? After I finished, she got up to leave. Her head hung low and she stumbled on a rug, not looking where she was going. I had to remind her to take her letter from me. She came back for it, but as she walked away I saw her crumpling it in her fist, along with the photograph.

*  *  *

That night I lay awake, thinking about dreams.

I thought about Kundan’s bosses’ dreams of more money, change, travel, the sea; that their dreams had the power to alter Kundan’s own. His family would have better lives if he earned more money. Yet his new ambitions would dash Charu’s hopes.

I thought about Veer: was it only the success of his trekking company that he dreamed of—new routes, new groups to travel with, new peaks and glaciers? What did he think in the alone hours? Who did he wake up with in his head? I wondered if he ever thought of me when we were apart. He never phoned when he was away because, he said, “Once I’m on a climb, I like the sense of being on a different planet. I zone out.”

And what about Diwan Sahib? He had been in hospital for almost a month now. Some days the doctor was gloomy about his vital signs and asked me how soon Diwan Sahib’s relatives could reach his bedside; then he came back, wheezing, gurgling, coughing up yellow phlegm.

All the hours that he lay flat on his back the only things to look at were the cracks and cobwebs in the flaking blue and yellow ceiling of the hospital room. When he was well enough to be propped up, he stared from behind the gag of his oxygen mask out of the window that overlooked a green, serene valley. Kites and eagles wheeled around in the sky it framed.

Diwan Sahib had thrust away memories of past grandeur and lived a solitary life as the local eccentric. In his final attempt to assert authority he had been insulted by a constable who would have bowed and scraped before him in the days when he was diwan of Surajgarh. He had no children. He had burned his life’s work in a moment’s frenzy. Now gagged into silence by tubes and masks, he was in a zone more unreachable than Veer’s. When I sat by him and talked to him, his eyes sometimes changed expression, but often he shut them and turned away as if it was unbearable to be reminded of the world outside his cage. I thought of my mother in her last days with that knife under her pillow, when she had struggled with one last letter to me. The only thing she dreamed of now, she had said in the letter’s three dipping lines, was a glimpse of me, and after that, death.

I thought about Ama, who had been many times to see Diwan Sahib at the hospital. She walked the entire five miles because she wanted to save the six rupees the jeep ride would have cost. Once in the room, she perched as straight as a bamboo pole on the edge of a chair, as if sitting back comfortably would be an impropriety. She looked away when the nurse came in to turn Diwan Sahib over or attend to his oxygen mask. In that different setting, she was a stranger, a tall, bony village woman in her best going-out clothes, hair oiled and pulled back in a bun. Her expression was formal and distant. Unlike at home, she covered her head with a corner of her sari, and hardly spoke. Ama had scraped together an uncertain and tenuous living all these years, fiercely protecting her dignity and Charu’s virtue in the hope of eventual respectability through a son-in-law in a government job. There was no knowing what would happen when she found out about Kundan.

And I? How far I had come from my distant Deccan home! A bright-eyed, coffee-skinned, long-braided girl with flowers in her hair, practicing Bharatnatyam in a pink and yellow half sari, and learning to grind dosa batter from Beni Amma on a great stone pestle—just for fun, naturally. A girl from a family as wealthy as mine would never have to sweat over a pestle grinding anything. What had I dreamed of then? I could no longer remember. And after meeting Michael, the fantasies—first of just a few hours alone with him, then a day, then every hour of every day. The usual thoughts of children and pets and home and work, all of which disintegrated when he died. What did I dream of now, if anything? I was afraid to find out.

fourteen

There is only one way for people to leave Ranikhet: by road. Long-distance buses leave from two bus depots in the bazaar. The government bus depot has a cluster of shops around it: fruit shops, a barbershop, and small restaurants grimy from years of living close to badly sprung, rattling buses that spew out black, oily fumes. This is the more genteel bus stop, since the government bus staff do not feel the need to fight for custom: they get their salaries regardless of the number of passengers they pick up. At the other end of the market is the bus stop for private operators. This is loud, aggressive, sleazy. The staff there hustle people into their buses with all sorts of false promises: “Leaving in a minute! Haldwani, Rudrapur, Rampur, Moradabad, Delhi! Leaving in a minute!” Once you have bought your ticket and found a seat on the bus you might wait all the next hour while the driver yells out to passersby, asking them to hop in. Through that hour people harangue you to buy bananas and oranges for the journey and drunks lurch up and down demanding small change.

There are also phalanxes of jeeps and shared taxis to carry people to nearby hill towns. Charu had never traveled out of Ranikhet before, except once or twice to go to villages further into the mountains for weddings and festivals. She had never gone alone; the only town she knew was Ranikhet. How big was Delhi? she had asked Kundan Singh when he was about to leave. Was it like four or five Ranikhets put together?

At that time she had only been curious. Now it was a matter of survival. Kundan Singh’s last letter had made her understand that her daydreaming had to stop. It was time for action. If Kundan was doubtful about coming to Ranikhet before he left for Singapore, she had to go to him.

Charu had no inkling of what to expect or how to find Kundan Singh if she did reach Delhi. All she had were inland letters on the back of which he had written his address. She posted him a letter, the first she had ever written in her life, telling him only the date, October 12, that he should come to the bus stop in Delhi to get her. She had decided to leave on an evening when her grandmother was away, a regular occurrence now that Ama went so often to see Diwan Sahib at the hospital. Charu picked the Friday a week away. She would have to wait till Puran was asleep, and then she would take a night bus out of town.

Every night, as Ama snored next to her and Bijli whimpered in his sleep, she lay awake, eyes open in the dark, thinking of ways to slip away unnoticed. The bus stop was a problem. Because she delivered milk in the bazaar every day, and one of her customers was Nanda Devi Sweets near the government bus depot, they knew her there. At the private depot end, there was Bimla, the Nepalese vegetable seller, from whose shop Charu collected spoiled stock every day for her cows. To dodge these inquisitive acquaintances, she had to avoid the bazaar and both bus stops.

The minute Ama left for the hospital on October 11, Charu began to look around their rooms for what she needed. She put some things from her grandmother’s box into a cloth pouch that she then tied round her neck and slipped inside her kurta. Into the cloth bag that she used on her trips to the market she put the few stale rotis kept aside for the cows. She added some batashas and lumps of jaggery, a change of clothes, and a comb. She slipped in the rubber-banded bunch of Kundan’s letters. As an afterthought, she put in the smaller of her two sickles. She wore her everyday clothes and her plastic slippers.

As she was getting ready to leave she noticed Bijli, bright-eyed with curiosity, wagging his tail in anticipation of a late-hour romp through the forest. He got up and gave himself a full-body shake that made his ears flap, and stood at the door, ready. Charu said, “Not now, later.” She gathered a clump of his fur in her hands. She felt as if she would not be able to let go. Quickly, she locked him in. She crept up the path that led away from their house to the cow shed to breathe in their smell and to touch their wet noses one last time. In a far corner she could see the huddled, sleeping form of her uncle, Puran. Tears sprang to her eyes. Who would look after him now? How would Ama milk Ratna? Ratna only let Charu touch her, nobody else. Before Ratna looked toward her, she slipped out of the shed and ran up the slope away from the Light House and its grounds.

She kept to the forested hillsides, meeting the roads only occasionally to cross them and hop onto the next slope. In order to avoid Mall Road, where she might be seen, though it provided the shortest, safest route to the highway, she had to walk away from it in the opposite direction, past the Jhoola Devi temple, from where she could cut through the forest, down the western ridge, to the highway. She had decided it might be best if she caught a bus outside town: she would walk down the highway to Uprari, the hamlet seven kilometers away, where buses stopped to pick up passengers.

Dusk was falling. Window squares glowed in the houses above and below her, and tube lights stuttered to life on street corners. Across the airy space of the big valley, one, two, then twenty lights began to twinkle on a distant hill misted over by the fading of daylight. The roads were deserted; the evenings had grown chilly and most people were indoors by this time. Charu drew her shawl around her head and half covered her face to avoid recognition. Only a few danger spots remained: in the marigold-yellow house she was passing lived one of the girls who also worked at the jam factory; further down, where a woman was shouting for a dog, Charu knew the daughter. They had sometimes found their cows mingling as they grazed.

Soon she had left the houses behind. She began to hurry, breaking into a run. She ran past the Jhoola Devi temple, then turned superstitiously back. The tea shack next to it was shut; no one was around. She tore a thin strip off her dupatta and tied it to the railings in a knot. She could see the dimly illuminated image of the goddess through the little doorway of the temple. She touched her head to the cold steps that led inside and said, “Jhoola Devi, I have no bell I can tie, but please look after me.”

She struck a match and lit a pine branch to act as a torch to guide her descent through the forest beyond the temple. It was a craggy, steep hillside beyond all habitation. Charu had never been there before and felt as if she was stepping into a land so primeval it was as if no human feet had stepped on those stony slopes. Hillock-sized boulders leaned over her. Cacti and stunted pines struggled out through their cracks. She recalled people saying they had seen animals—leopards, of course, but also jackal cubs—basking on the rocks. Somewhere on that slope, she knew, was Diwan Sahib’s old blue car, home to foxes now.

Charu found the narrow trail through the forest and began sliding, slipping downhill, feet unsteady on gravel and pine needles, trees and bushes catching at her shawl and hair. She heard rustling sounds. A pair of foxes stopped and looked at her without fear, then went on their way. Her shawl fell off her head. She heard her own breathing, harsh and loud. She hoped her slippers would hold.

Her burning pine branch smelled of cozy evenings at home and for an instant she considered abandoning her wild enterprise and heading back. She had not ventured very far and would not yet have been missed. But then she spotted bobbing flames further down the path: villagers taking a shortcut through the forest after a day’s work in Ranikhet. She raced after them, trying to keep the fire of her pine branch away from hair and clothes. She would walk down the hill at a discreet distance behind them. She pulled her shawl over her face again.

It must have been half an hour later, though it felt much longer, a lifetime, when she spotted tarmac snaking some thirty feet below her. The narrow highway corkscrews around the hillsides on its way down until it flattens out, straightens, and broadens where it eventually finds the plains. Like all roads in the hills, it does not have width enough to be divided into lanes. Charu could see the strong beams of a large vehicle’s headlights cutting through the center of the road’s blackness. The beams came from the Ranikhet end of the road and pointed in the direction of the plains. She ran down the hill, past the two villagers.

Where was the bus going? She had no idea, but the highway looked so dark and so lonely, she did not think she could walk all the way to Uprari after all. She ran helter-skelter, stopping herself at the wheels of the bus, waving it down with her flaming pine branch.

Its brakes screeched. But it was not a bus. It was a truck.

She fell back in disappointment, the pine branch dropping from her hand. The truck driver smiled, revealing a mouthful of brown teeth, and said, “Get in; wherever it is, I will take you.” His helper laughed. “Ah! We get people to places they never thought o
f
!” Their faces were half-visible, bluish-red in the light of the dials on the dashboard of the truck. They looked like plains people. Their radio played a loud, screeching song. She pulled her shawl further over her face and said, “Wait a few minutes. My father and brother want a ride also.” The driver scowled. “We didn’t say we would take three passengers,” he said, revving his engine, and drove off.

The pine branch had gone out when it fell from her hand and she had lost the matches somewhere on the way down. Nothing was visible in the aftermath of the headlights. She closed her eyes to get used to the dark again and in a while discovered that the light of the half-moon and stars was enough for her to see where she was going.

She began walking toward Uprari. “Put one foot before another, and you will get there,” she told herself. “Wild animals eat dogs, not humans.” The smooth, level tarmac was a relief after her scramble through the forest. She hummed under her breath, songs from the radio at the jam factory. She changed shoulders when the bag she was carrying started to feel heavy. Her stomach began to rumble with hunger, but she put away thoughts of food, not knowing how long the rotis and jaggery would have to last. To her left, the narrow road rose into a sheer granite cliff overgrown with dry grasses and bent trees. To the right, it fell away into a valley, on the other side of which were faraway villages whose names she did not know. There was not a glimmer of light on the road. At times, cars and motorbikes charged past her, tearing the road in half with their headlights, noise, and fumes, too fast to notice anyone walking. No buses appeared.

At eight, she reached Pilkholi and sat down at the tea stall exhausted, no longer bothered that someone she knew would see her. “How much is a tea?” she asked, and was told, “Three rupees for you, four for anyone else.” She asked for a glass of water, ate a lump of her jaggery with it, and then began to walk again.

Half an hour further on toward Uprari, large headlight beams once again swept toward her. Once again she stopped and wildly waved her arms, hoping that the glare of the headlights this time hid a bus and not a truck.

It was a bus, and the conductor leaped out in fury. “What do you think you are doing? Standing in the middle of the road like a cow! Who do you think will go to jail if you get killed?”

“Where is it going?” she asked, in a voice trembling with tears.

“Wherever it is going, it’s not taking you. Mad girl! And there’s no space.”

“I can sit on the floor,” she said. “I can stand.” Her shoulders drooped from the weight of her small bag.

“Not in my bus,” the conductor said. He put a foot on the lowest step of the bus and held the handrail to haul himself in. He slammed the body of the bus twice with the flat of his palm to tell the driver to drive on. Then as the bus revved its engines, he banged the wall of the bus again.

“What the hell are you doing? Do we go or stop?” screamed the driver.

The conductor’s tone was bad-tempered and grudging, but he said, “Get in. And be quick. And pay for the ticket—no free rides on this bus.”

Charu got in. The bus was going to Nainital, two hours away. They gave her a seat right at the back, and the man next to her, at the window, retched out of it all through the journey as the bus swung round the twisting and reeling and swinging and swirling hill roads.