The Folded Earth: A Novel (23 page)

I came back and told Diwan Sahib about my misfired attempts at helping Miss Wilson, and he said, “There you are, a man of many talents. If Corbett had picked Chauhan as his biographer the book would have been written and published many times over by now.”

Then he said, “I had a visitor too, while you were gone. The General—again. He hasn’t visited me as many times in all our past years combined.”

That afternoon, Diwan Sahib said, the General had come over and sent Himmat Singh off to make him tea. He had at last found Diwan Sahib free of minders: Veer had gone to Dehra Dun, Mr. Qureshi had not reappeared after his morning gins, and I was at Chauhan’s. He had waited for Himmat Singh to leave the room before speaking.

At first the conversation followed the beaten paths, Diwan Sahib said, the General giving news of the latest developments in Ranikhet’s elections, mourning the state of the country. It surprised him, Diwan Sahib said, that a man who earlier boasted he never read the newspaper beyond the headlines should have become so concerned about matters political. When Diwan Sahib had remarked on this, the General had explained in despairing tones that in the past months, watching the way the election campaign was degenerating, he had been overtaken by a sense of impending catastrophe. Something was very rotten in the state of India. In Rudrapur, down in the plains, not far away, a mullah had given a hate-filled speech, and then a pig had been slaughtered and thrown into the mosque. Now the town had curfew from dusk to dawn, in spite of which people were managing to kill each other. There had never been riots here in Ranikhet, but anything could happen now: hatred and anarchy were viruses that spread fast. The country was in the hands of immoral ruffians who would stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, for their own gain. The only worthwhile institution that remained in the country was the army. Did Diwan Sahib not agree?

The General grew more loquacious as he held forth. Ever more, he felt, it was the duty of the old guard—of whom the oldest in Ranikhet were he and Diwan Sahib—to do what they could for the nation. Nobody else was bothered. The nation relied on them.

For what, precisely? Diwan Sahib had asked him. What was he to do for the country, wheezing and coughing, just back from the dead—and perhaps not back for very long?

Social service had to begin close to home, the General said. They could start by giving over their own possessions, as in the glorious nationalist days. His old uniforms, those were museum pieces now. Old photographs. All his money of course, and his medals—he would bequeath them all to the army. After all, how many military men now alive had served under the British as well as under Nehru? He had much that would prove invaluable for military historians. Such things would be a worthy reminder of more idealistic times for the cynical youth of today.

“That’s a noble thought,” Diwan Sahib had said, and then waved his arm around his shabby living room. “Not much your brigadiers and generals would want for their museums among this shambles, you know.”

“But that is exactly where you’re wrong, Diwan Sahib!
”
The General had pounced in triumph. It was the Diwan, more than anyone else, who possessed what truly belonged to the entire nation. Historical documents. Letters to do with the accession of Surajgarh to India. Minutes of meetings between the Nawab of Surajgarh and officials of the Indian government. Diwan Sahib’s own old diaries, appointment books, and manuscripts. And of course, Nehru’s letters, and Edwina’s. The General had tacked this on almost as an afterthought, and hinted at the danger of such sensitive letters falling into the wrong hands—then being used to score grubby political points. It was the Diwan’s duty, the General said, to hand over what he had.

Hearing the word “duty,” Diwan Sahib confessed, he had lost his temper. “I told the General a thing or two. There was a time when I was important for the army, because they knew I had friends in high places. Even the General then—I recall him as a colonel, then a brigadier—was forever calling on me, pumping me for information, begging me to put in a word for him here and there. Now he’s back because he wants my papers. But in between? His army did not think it fit to trust me with anything. Maulana Bhashani was here for weeks on end and I had no idea. Apparently the ex–Diwan of Kashmir took refuge here for a time and I was never told. They forgot me as a has-been, an irrelevant old fool, and now they’re preaching at me to do my duty. I had to press my lips together to stop myself laughing at his continued peevishness over that same little thing. I frowned hard in an effort to appear as outraged as he was.

“Anyway, when I calmed down,” Diwan Sahib continued, “I was almost persuaded. Then he played his trump card. What a fool! Well-meaning, but a fool. Do you know what he hinted at after much humming and hawing? He had been
given to understand,
he said, by the
highest
authorities—not that he expected this would influence me
in the least—
that a gift of the letters might ease the way for renewing the Light House’s lease from the army.”

Diwan Sahib’s laughter made him choke on his rum and I ran to him to thump his shoulders. “Whatever next? Maybe they’ll offer me a full military funeral too as a reward. A twenty-one-gun salute when I join Corbett in his happy hunting grounds, provided I hand over his papers too?” he wheezed, smiling through his spasms. “Some people can’t wait for that to happen. But you have to admire the man’s sense of public purpose. At his age, soldiering on to serve the army still! Would you care, Maya, in your early hundreds? I don’t give a damn even at my youthful eighty-seven what happens to the nation. As long as the nation leaves me in peace, that ass Chauhan can destroy it at leisure for all I care.”

eighteen

One week later, what Miss Wilson and the whole school feared came to pass. Umed Singh had come back to campaign and had begun in the market, at the marquee where the Baba now held court several days a week. Many of the politician’s henchmen spoke before him. Bhajans were sung, set to the tune of popular movie songs. When the main man stood up to speak, all chatter stopped. He began with municipal issues, then went on to the environment, and then to religion: “Why doesn’t the government subsidize pilgrimages to Deo Bhoomi to help the hill economy? These hills are the abode of Hindu gods, and India is the Hindus’ last refuge in a new world order dominated by Islamic terrorism and Christian missionaries. There is soft war and there is hard war.” Here Umed Singh paused for a long while before continuing, “While the Taliban plans attacks on our cities with bombs and guns, the pure, untouched tribal parts of India are being bombed by Bibles.” From there Umed Singh went on to the threats Hindus faced worldwide. They were in danger of being wiped out, decimated, outnumbered, converted. From this to the conversions at St. Hilda’s was but a step. “The threat is here, in this very town. It has to be investigated.”

They rushed to their motorbikes and cars and roared off in a procession. The politician had told the crowds that there were deaf-mute students whom the school had converted into Christian dancing girls, and they played hymns at the factory all day: “We must find out for ourselves what the truth about all this is.”

The cavalcade went to the school in the bazaar first, but it was a holiday. Without students, it was no more than a hill cottage with bright red tin roofs and ocher walls, all its blue doors and windows locked. It stood on a patch of earth drummed by children’s feet into a square of dust, which was being swept by our chowkidar, who gaped speechless at the campaigners’ cavalcade. The politician and his henchmen turned away disappointed. Then they remembered the factory. Their cars and motorbikes sped away toward the cantonment.

From up the hill, one of the girls working in the factory heard the noise of the motorbikes and ran out to see what was happening. I was sitting at a desk in the inner room, punching numbers into a calculator, with half an ear toward the Hindi version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which had just started playing on our tape recorder. I was adding up columns of expenses, trying to work on the figures so that they made sense for our annual report. In the outer room, half a dozen girls were fixing labels onto the hundreds of bottles of apricot, peach, and plum jam we had made that summer. The labels, which were printed in Delhi, had arrived late, and we were in a hurry now to get the bottles ready for dispatch. I had asked for workers—anyone possible. Beena and Mitu came every day, and sat working for hours, getting up only to munch roasted peanuts at times, or to make tea and stretch aching shoulders.

I heard the music change and pushed my papers aside to get up and reprimand the girls. It was really too much, the way they flouted my authority. They had started a song from a film featuring a girl lost to promiscuity and drugs because of befriending hippies. Her brother in the film scoured the country for her and, after many diversions, located her somewhere near Darjeeling, dancing with other hippies, to a song she sang through lips that were renowned for being the sexiest of the seventies. The song had a mesmeric, incantatory melody. It was an old song by the time even I came to it, but it still played at college parties Michael and I went to. Now it had been remixed and was pepped up with a thumping beat. I returned to my chair and sat down. My feet, which had traveled away to a dance floor of my memories, tapped in time to the rhythm o
f
“Dum Maro Dum.” Michael’s hands were on my waist, he was whirling me round the room. I was saying, “You’re making me dizzy,” and he was saying, “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

Umed Singh and his cohorts reached the factory and found a roomful of girls hard at work. Beena and Mitu had just made tea and, in a shy show of hospitality, were smiling and nodding to the visitors, pointing at the row of little glasses on their tray. I recognized Deepak in the group, and the man who was with him when Miss Wilson tried to get them to take their cars away from the school playground all those months ago. The second man was short and thickset, with a weightlifter’s shoulders. He kept his reflecting glasses on, even inside the room, and turned them toward the twins when one of them bent over him with the tea tray and the other brought around the glucose cookies. The reflections on his glasses followed the girls about as they took the tray from person to person. The other girls did their namastes and returned to work, suppressing giggles of complicity. The song continued to play. Its refrain was “Harey Krishna Harey Ram.” Umed Singh left disappointed. His henchmen followed, pretending they had come for a regular canvassing visit rather than to catch us out playing “missionary hymns.” Despite the drugged, seductive voice of the singer, they could not deny that the singer was chanting the names of two of the holiest Hindu gods.

That afternoon, when the jam was all bottled, labeled, and packed away in boxes, and the room’s floor empty, the girls put the song on again. The more daring among them danced to it, while the other village girls, screaming with laughter, joined in sometimes or hid behind dekchis and dupattas in embarrassment. When I entered the room, they tugged my hand, and begged me to join in. “You have to, Maya Mam, we do everything you tell us to. Now it’s your turn.”

I tied my dupatta in a knot at my hips, and danced too. It had been five years or more since I had felt as lighthearted. Diwan Sahib was well again, Charu was united with Kundan, we had bottled our jam in time, and the goons had gone away without doing us any harm. My loose bun came undone and my hair flew around my face. Someone came and plucked my glasses off and threw them aside. The girls exclaimed, “Without her glasses, Maya Mam looks exactly like a film star!” Beena and Mitu gestured with their hands to show me the steps, teaching me how to dance the way they did—shoulder shrugs, hip wiggles, hands that sliced the air like blades. Our clothes were drenched in sweat by the time we stopped, and I was breathless and buzzing with happiness.

It was only a few hours later that Beena tore up from the valley below to the clearing outside their hut, which I could see from my house. Her teeth were bared and her mouth gaped in a silent scream. Her clothes were half ripped off her shoulders, revealing yellow, frayed bra straps. Her mother, scrubbing a pan with sand outside their hut, looked up, and Mitu started up from the stairs on which she had been sitting and daydreaming. Beena squatted in the middle of the courtyard speaking with her hands to her mother and sister, too fast and frantic for me to try making sense of it. Her talk was mute shadow play, her cries more terrifying for being noiseless. When she had finished, the mother swooped at Beena and pulled her head by a handful of her hair. She slapped her again and again, on her face, or wherever her hands could reach. Mitu tried to prise them apart, but her mother was too strong for her. Beena managed to bend, picked up a handful of dust, and flung it into her mother’s eyes, then scrambled away as her mother’s face warped with pain and her hands flew to her streaming eyes.

I had no way of reading their gestures and could not tell what was wrong, but as I looked on in horror, I heard Ama’s voice at my ear. “Beena says she was coming back from the bazaar through the forest, and a man molested her. She says it was one of the men from Nainital who came to the factory today. He had been ogling her in the afternoon also, she says, when she was serving them tea. Her mother says it’s her fault, she wears tight clothes and goes wandering in the market, and giggles at boys.”

Ama turned back to the spectacle with a grin, and said, “That Beena’s a wildcat. Just look how they’re fighting, mother and daughter.” She cackled and stuffed some tobacco into her mouth. “It’s like watching a TV with the sound off. Whenever they fight, I run out to see.”

She noticed the disgust on my face and said, “Why are you so worried? Nothing happened to the girl. She’s very tough. She bit his cheek, and kicked him in the stomach and he ran away. And the mother is a loose woman anyway, she doesn’t care, really.”

“I’m going to take her to the police,” I said. “She has to report it right away. They can catch the man before he disappears.”

“Teacher-ni,” Ama said in a resigned voice, “Lati will never let you take her daughter to the police, and Beena won’t go. It’ll just add to their troubles. The less this news travels, the better for the girl.” She assumed her knowing expression and said, “There is so much I don’t talk about. If I revealed all the secrets I’ve digested and stored in my stomach, half this hillside’s people would have to go and drown themselves in a pail of water.” She gave me a long, pregnant look.

*  *  *

That night I dreamed my familiar dream of the dead lake at Roopkund, only this time, Beena’s and Mitu’s heads had joined the other skulls and they were scratching with their dead nails at an ice floe, trying to escape the water. I woke in a sweat and saw that the branch of a tree had stooped so close to one of my windows that I could see its black claws tapping the glass pane as the wind gathered and buffeted the trees. The house creaked and muttered, and the first drops of rain quickly turned into a steady drumming on the roof. The wind chime I had hung on my peach tree tinkled with such insistence that I wanted to run out into the rain and pull it off to stop the noise. All the happiness of the afternoon had disappeared, as if it had never been.

I curled my body into a tight ball of aloneness. Diwan Sahib had been world-weary when I told him I wanted to go to the police about Beena. “Nothing’s ever going to change,” he had said. “No policeman will be interested, no new politician, no elections, nothing will ever make a difference.” He had slumped into his chair and dozed off after a while as he often did nowadays, even midway through conversations. Veer was in Dehra Dun, from where he would leave on another long trek with a new lot of clients. We had not been able to find the space or time for days to be together. He had not appeared remotely regretful at our parting, and when I had announced with blithe nonchalance that I would go to Dehra Dun with him, we had had another quarrel. “You in Dehra Dun with me? Forget it,” he had said. “I’ll be at work. It’s not a vacation for me.” He had shoved things into his rucksack, hoisted it into his jeep, and driven off without a proper good-bye. He had not telephoned since.