The Folded Earth: A Novel (16 page)

Diwan Sahib’s response took me by surprise. I had assumed that he would be happy about Veer and me, but he became curiously resentful. One afternoon, I went to get his newspaper from Negi’s shop, and the boy there said Diwan Sahib had relayed instructions that the paper was not to be given to me; it was to be delivered straight to him. I asked Diwan Sahib why he was changing such an old arrangement, and his face turned sulky. “Why not? When you forget to come every other day? I can live without your august company, but I do need my daily paper.” He started keeping tabs on me and noting how little time I was spending with him. If he saw me looking better dressed than usual he would say in sardonic tones, “Where’s the untidy hair, poked through with a pencil? You look like a society lady now, all shining and combed.” When I wore a new kurta one day, he said to Mr. Qureshi: “Our wild Himalayan rose is turning into a memsa’ab.” Another day, mellow after a long evening’s drinking, he said in a thoughtful tone, “If you went climbing, Maya, you would know: unknown territories need caution. One step at a time and lots of reconnaissance.”

Trekking and exploring suddenly featured a great deal in conversation. Veer said lightheartedly, when our murmurings on the rug in the forest edged toward the future: “Life’s a trek too, isn’t it? You meet people on the way that you like, spend days with them under tents, and then your time with them is over. But you don’t stop walking the route; you have to go on. Look at you, you’re the best example.”

What was he trying to tell me? I was not sure I wanted to know. We were too new and fragile, too skinless to be exposed to daylight just yet. What Veer’s life had been before me, I did not care about. I only knew that I could no longer do without him. Ama’s disapproval was a given, of course. But whatever had Diwan Sahib meant about trekking and caution? I had no idea if he himself knew, now that he was drinking himself insensible every day.

I could think of nothing but Veer: he was with me every minute.

I became more than usually distracted in my classes. One morning, Miss Wilson slammed a wooden blackboard duster down on my table and said, “This is too much, Maya! I told you twice yesterday to inform Mr. Chauhan that the school will not be used as a voting center. Don’t you hear a word I say? Now you go and handle him. He’s already come with some orderlies and he’s selecting classrooms.” Sometimes stirring a vat of jam at the factory I would go on and on stirring while my mind and body were far away, under the lacework of deodar in the forest, until one of the girls would say, “Maya Mam?” and take the long ladle from my hand.

I had to force myself not to barge into Veer’s working day, when he was immersed in his e-mails and his telephone, to suggest an expedition in his jeep. I waited for him to finish work and notice me. I waited every minute, when he was away, for him to come home.

Veer’s days were unpredictable. He worked from a room in the Light House. On some days he would lock himself away in it and, apart from the low hum of his voice on the telephone, there would be no sign of his presence. On other days he did no work at all and would sit in the veranda chatting with Diwan Sahib and Mr. Qureshi, or go down to the bazaar to pick up his mail, stock up food for an approaching trek, and idle with people he met. The wool shop owner’s son, who was a budding politician, had become a friend of his, and there was a hotelier in the bazaar who would buttonhole Veer to try to persuade him to bring his clients to his hotel for a few days of relaxation after their treks. Veer played along, pronouncing it a great idea, but he never did bring his clients to Ranikhet. Instead, he picked them up from the railhead at Kathgodam, from where they drove directly to wherever they would begin the trek. I had only the foggiest understanding of his work and if I asked questions about routes and clients, he would answer with a smile, “Were you thinking of signing up? The next trek is to the Pindari glacier. Leeches and high-quality instant noodles guaranteed.”

Sometimes it worried me that he could disappear for weeks, when no one had any way of telling, except in the most general sense, where he was. After one of his trips to Delhi in early July, when I went into his room for something or the other I found he had left his dirty clothes in a heap on the floor next to his bag. Out of a corner of my eye, I saw that one of the shirts was discolored. I looked closer at it. The shirt’s blue denim was smeared all over with blood. The large stains looked fresh, still red, perhaps still damp. I did not want to touch the shirt to find out, but I was so startled I sat on a chair in his room and studied it from a safe distance to make sure I was not mistaking ink or paint for blood.

Veer had only returned that morning and was out in the veranda. He had changed into clean jeans and a loose gray T-shirt and sat on a low chair with a tea mug beside him. His feet were bare; he was whistling “Hey Jude” and staring at the screen of his laptop. When I went out and asked, “What’s all that blood on your shirt?” his face became such a mask of annoyance that I winced. Then his expression changed to one of amused tenderness. He gave me the half smile that I found irresistible and said, “I have something to confess. Will you forgive me? I killed someone.” He looked around to see if there was anyone watching, then gave my cheek a quick pinch. “Look at your face: did you believe me? No, something else happened,” he said. “I overnighted in a hotel in Kaladhungi. Weird place: all night they kept shifting metal furniture across the floor of the room upstairs and walking up and down, knocking a walking stick or something like that on the floor above my head. Total silence in between and then the sounds again. The dead of night in the middle of jungle—I wondered if there were ghosts upstairs. Then someone began to sing songs, very beautifully—old folksongs—but that was the last straw, I couldn’t sleep at all. So I left at three in the morning. And you know that deep forest you have to drive through? You feel as if tigers will spring out of the bush anytime. Some guys were standing there in the dark, in the middle of the road, with a flashlight and a dead man on the ground—they had put a tree branch across the road to make cars stop. I thought I was going to be robbed and killed, but they just wanted my help to take the man to hospital. He was unconscious it turned out, not dead. A huge Sardar, bleeding all over. I managed to spread a rug over the backseat, but in the process of hauling the man in, my shirt . . . mustn’t give it to Gappu Dhobi, he’ll imagine the worst.” He paused and added, “As you did.”

I could not tell where the thought came from and I could not stop the words when I heard myself saying, “Where was it you rushed off to when those helicopters were circling Ranikhet? Remember? You saw me on the road, but you didn’t stop. You didn’t come back for weeks. Nobody knew where you were.”

“What are you talking about?” Veer said. He seemed mystified by the question.

“I mean that time in May, when there were choppers in the sky all day, and you got a call on your phone and left without a word to anyone. What was that about?”

“Why do you sound so aggressive? I can’t tell you everything. That doesn’t mean I’m up to something fishy. What do you think I do anyway? Don’t you trust me?”

“You might trust me too, and tell me what that was all about. Most of the time I have no idea where you go, what you do, who you see—nothing.”

Until the moment I asked him, I had not even been aware that my suspicions about that morning were still gnawing at me. But now that I had begun, each thing I said stoked my rage.

Veer said nothing. When he clamped his lips shut the way he was doing now, and sucked in his cheeks, his face grew thinner still and grimmer, locked away. He looked at his computer screen, not at me, and said in a voice that was clipped and cold, “It was to help the army with a search they needed to do. I know that area well, and I’ve done chopper searches before. Which is why they called me in.” He did not look up from the screen, and said nothing more.

I did not know what to say. I fiddled with a banksia creeper by the door. I looked at a goat chewing on a young plant in the garden. It had rained that morning and now every leaf gleamed in the clear, washed light. Water plopped from a rainwater pipe into a tin drum. The grass had turned a tender green, but I knew it now hid black threads that bloated into blood-gorged leeches where they found warm skin. I could feel one on my ankle and bent to pluck it off. The scab would itch for days. Bijli appeared from somewhere and wagged his tail at us and gave a few short barks to suggest a walk. I patted him and said I would take him.

I turned to go, paused, trying to form the words for an apology, but could not. As I left the veranda my footsteps slowed and I came back. “Sorry,” I said, “it came out wrong.” I knew I still sounded grudging, and I was filled with regret for starting a quarrel and ruining a beautiful day, especially when he had just returned after a long journey.

I waited for him to say something forgiving, but he did not look up from his typing.

One afternoon soon after, I stood looking at the mountains, which had risen out of the monsoon sky. Clouds were piled high at their base so that they floated in midair, detached from everything earthly. Something in the quality of the light made the peaks appear translucent, as if the molten silver sky were visible through them. In the next few moments, I saw an extraordinary cloud form out of nothing, gather over the peaks, and grow larger and larger, spreading a black cloak as it traveled toward me, seemingly at the speed of a rocket. In no more than a minute it reached our hills and turned afternoon into twilight. Then the rain came sheeting down.

I ran inside, and as I shook my hair dry I wondered if I should interpret the cloud as an omen. I looked around for something to do to drive the thought away. I began to pull books out of the shelves and pile them on the floor. Silverfish scuttled out from between their pages. The books needed dusting and sunning. I pulled out shelf after shelf of books, possessed with energy and purpose. I would arrange them alphabetically—or maybe by genre. I would give away the thrillers I would never read again and all those books I had bought and kept thinking I would read the next month. Why did I have multiple copies of
Man-eaters of Kumaon
? And where had this book on the arts and architecture of ancient Greece come from?

In a while, I was exhausted. I sat on the floor, and looked in despair at the tumbling heaps of books around me. I would never get them back on their shelves now.

I began to look through the ones close enough to reach without getting up: a murder mystery, a book on hill plants,
Sàlim Ali’s Indian Hill Birds
. And then, between the pages of a fat collection of short stories, the old copy o
f
T. S. Eliot’s millimeter-thin
Practical Cats
that Michael had given me long ago. His angular handwriting rode a diagonal across one of the blank pages: “To my own perverse, pigheaded Rum Tum Tugger.”

I pulled a cushion to me and lay on the rug, tenting my face in the opened pages of the book, breathing in its antique smell.

I would not look into the future. My life had been too cruelly overturned once before for me to think of anything but the present moment. I would negotiate each day as if I were riding a leaf in a flowing stream: enough to stay afloat. I would not ask for more.

seven

The monsoon in our hills is a time of thunder, lightning, water, and wind so endless that it has been known to push people into fits of rage. One day, not a month into the monsoon, the tae kwon do teacher at one of the other schools punched two boys senseless because he suspected them of stealing his camera. He had come upon them peddling a similar camera in Babita Studio. He wrecked the shop too, shattering framed photographs of just-married couples with a hammer he had bought from the shop next door. The combined strength of three taxi drivers and a policeman was needed for him to be handcuffed and taken to the police station. By then the boys were bleeding, while Babita Studio was in shards—and who was going to pay for the damage? Better to occupy yourself with gossip than break each other’s bones—and that is how most people spent the time, watching the rain, drinking tea, and gossiping.

When the clouds came lower and lower, to rest on our hills, they wiped away the mountains on the other side of the valley and bleached the distant trees of color, turning them into charcoaled lines on the gray-white sky. Houses felt furry with fungus and damp. Dripping umbrellas spoked pools of water before every front door. The hills were a lush, brilliant green, and wild gladioli drooped everywhere in the rain. The forest was carpeted with pretty, mauve, orchid-like flowers. Roads were reclaimed by nature as landslides buried them and waterfalls drowned them, the wind felled trees, electricity failed, and telephones died, cutting off our town. Some days, the clouds gave way to lurid sunsets, and then the curtains closed again.

That August, I wanted nothing more than for our rain-soaked town to remain untouched, cocooned and cut off from the boiling world below. Instead, the newspaper came in two-day-old bunches, the pages stuck together with damp; when I peeled them apart, they were filled with news from Orissa, every day something more brutal: churches burned; missionaries hounded; Christians driven out of their villages into refugee camps; a young woman raped, thrown into a fire, and burned alive.

I could not tell if Miss Wilson deliberately left the paper open to the page with news from Orissa. It stared at me when I sat opposite her for our daily staff meetings. The paper would be turned in my direction so I did not need to read upside-down. She began to say, “We Christians are used to sacrifices for the glory of Our Lord. We have made them since St. Thomas landed in Kerala soon after Our Lord’s Ascension. Who runs all of India’s good schools? Who cares for the poor?” She pronounced it as “pore” and then after a perfunctory pause, “We, Christians.”

Miss Wilson had a brother in Orissa who worked for a TV channel called DivineLite, which aimed to make Christianity more accessible through stories of everyday triumphs over greed, lust, envy, and suchlike. Recent converts who looked jubilant—and prosperous—explained how Jesus had transformed their lives and urged others to find the same sustenance and joy. Every program began and ended with a feature called “Prayer of the Day” during which the entire cast of DivineLite held hands, shut their eyes, and intoned a recently written prayer. For several days now, the prayer had been, “Let us put down the weapon of hatred and violence and put on the armor of love. Let us forgive one another and ask forgiveness from one another for the wrong we have done to each other and reach out in love to each other.”

One day, the TV channel’s office was picketed by a bunch of hoodlums shouting slogans calling for it to be shut down. Miss Wilson told us of the incident the next day. She had tried to reach her brother on the telephone, but he was too choked with fear to talk, she said. They had even been threatened with death. She looked preoccupied and worried and whispered urgently into her mobile phone now and then.

She did not come to the classes to rap tables with her cane and shout “
Quay-it.
” Nor did she realize that the school bells were often being rung late because the chowkidar was more stoned than usual these days. Whenever I came to speak to her in her room, she shuffled papers or fiddled with something on her desk so that she would not have to look at me.

As things got worse in Orissa, the something invisible and dangerous that Miss Wilson and I had tiptoed around all this time grew in size until it took up most of the space. Despite my marriage and the change in my surname, I had never converted to Christianity. Michael’s parents had said they would accept me if I converted, but Michael did not want me to, and neither did his priest. Only if it comes naturally, Father Joseph had said, only when the time is right. In the weeks after Michael’s death he had asked me a few times if I would meet Michael’s parents; this great grief could be a time for healing and forgiveness, he said. But I thought they might blame me more ferociously now for the years of Michael that they had lost. The time for friendship is over, I had told the father. The next week Father Joseph had relayed another request from them: they wanted something from Michael’s rucksack as a memento of their son’s last journey, a crumb from his final days. At that time, I was distraught enough to have handed them the entire rucksack, and all his other belongings, to stop them bothering me. But then too, Father Joseph had stopped me. “There is no hurry,” he had said. “Give them something later when you are able to look through his belongings. When it comes naturally. One day you’ll be ready, not now.”

Miss Wilson had none of Father Joseph’s wisdom. From the start she had made it clear that whereas I had a job, there were needy Christian teachers still unemployed. I was the undeserving beneficiary of Father Joseph’s influence in the church and she had no option but to put up with me. Now the world beyond was making matters between us too delicate and brittle to survive much stress. And as if there was a conspiracy, this was precisely the time when the election campaign in Ranikhet charged up enough for the political parties to look around for trouble-filled pots they could stir.

*  *  *

By the middle of August, the bazaar looked as if Diwali had come early. The narrow main street had acquired a glittering, latticed ceiling made of orange, green, silver, and gold tinsel. Party symbols hung from it. Every day the bunting grew more ragged in the rain and wind, and the posters on the walls peeled with the damp so that the candidates’ faces grew more and more lopsided.

This was a national election, especially significant for our town because it was the first time a local, Veer’s new friend, the son of the wool merchant, had decided to stand as a candidate. If he won, Ranikhet would no longer be a backwater; it would be pitchforked straight into the center of Uttarakhand politics; it would get grants and attention, public money would flow in. The wool merchant’s son was called Ankit Rawat. He had adopted a ball of red wool as his logo and his motto was:
“Santusth, Surakshit, aur Garam / Ankit Rawat ka hai Dharam”
(“Warm, Safe, Free of Need / This is Ankit Rawat’s Creed”).

The older Mr. Rawat, who had a shop in the bazaar, had hung a red woolen globe at the entrance to it; it was as large as several footballs and tall people tended to bump their heads against it on their way into the shop. All over town, there were soggy posters with Ankit Rawat’s purposeful young face beaming from the center of a ball of red wool. I had only encountered him before across the counter at his father’s shop, when he had sold me thermal undershirts, socks, and cardigans. “Now I will have to employ an assistant,” his father said in jovial tones. “My son will be too grand for my shop.” He gestured toward the sacred red circle of kumkum and rice grains on his forehead. “All God’s grace, all His wish.”

Ankit Rawat’s supporters, mostly young friends from his college days, tore through the market and Mall Road on motorbikes, shouting his election slogan into megaphones and telling people when and where to vote. “Send your son to Delhi! Uttarakhand needs a man from Ranikhet at the center,” they urged, to cheers and jokes from the shopkeepers and the people in the streets. Ankit switched from his jeans and jackets to long white kurtas and a red chadar that billowed from his neck when he thundered past with his motorbike cavalcade. Surrounded at all times by his cohorts, he acquired a pop star aura that made people want to be noticed by him. He was clean featured and tall, and when he posed next to toothless old village women or porters and farmers hunched by years of bending, people said he looked like a prince. He happened to pass by Ama’s cottage one evening at the end of his monthly Ranikhet darshan, when he would meet common folk and discuss their problems. “He sat on that stool in the courtyard outside our hut, just like an ordinary man,” Ama said later, to anyone who would listen. “I had nothing in the house but some batashas and tea. Mud all over me because I had just come from the fields. He told me he had never drunk such sweet tea. He promised double water supply. And the electricity will never go off.”

Ankit’s opponent was a man from Nainital who had won election after election promising to serve the Hindu cause. Umed Singh was said to be a battle-hardened, canny politician, and had taken to calling Ankit “chota bachha”—“little child.” “Mind you, every child should be encouraged,” he said, to a Nainital journalist who used the comment as a headline. “Children need to learn the ropes.” Umed Singh had not yet come to campaign in Ranikhet; in the past he had never needed to. This year was different.

The Baba who had taken up residence at the temple near my favorite tea shack caused a flutter one day when he appeared in the market, where an orange and red marquee had been set up. He was greeted by singers who were bleary eyed and hoarse voiced from singing songs all night that were broadcast across the valley on loudspeakers. The occasion was Umed Singh’s first campaign visit to Ranikhet. The Baba blessed them, and he blessed Umed Singh’s campaign. One of his assistants read women’s palms and handed out amulets that guaranteed offspring to childless women so that Hindus were not outnumbered in the coming years by those who were allowed four wives.

Umed Singh appeared next onstage. For long minutes he did not speak, letting the crowd settle and expectation build. When he began, he spoke in a ponderous voice, with measured pauses during which he gauged the temper of his audience while it held its breath for his next aphorism. He said it was time the hills were released forever from foreign imperialists who had taken them over in British times and replaced ancient temples with churches and mosques. Everywhere, he said, Hindus were being falsely accused of violence when all they wanted was to preserve their way of life against terrorism and against their own people being converted to other religions. It was time to redress the balance. This was not a task that could be left to children who had sold wool the previous week and now on a whim had set out to turn the world upside-down.

“Now what?” I said to Diwan Sahib. “Do you still think the graveyard was vandalized by boys who’d drunk too much—and not by this lot? If Umed Singh wants to, he can make lots of trouble for Agnes W. Just to add some spice to his campaign.”

“It’s ‘Agnes W’ now, is it, behind her back? To her face it’s, ‘Yes, Miss Wilson,’ and ‘No, Miss Wilson,’ ” Diwan Sahib said. “Your beloved principal! Be a little respectful. What do you call me when I’m out of earshot?”