The Folded Earth: A Novel (22 page)

She was standing there wondering what to do, when a man came up to her, narrow waisted, barrel chested, in black shiny trousers and a belt with studs. His shirt buttons were undone to his navel and concentric circles of shiny chains roped his neck. His hair was a puff on his head; on his wrist was a large, square, plastic watch. He looked at it, and said, “Thirty minutes. You have been here half an hour. Waiting for someone?”

She turned away. Her letter had probably got lost, she thought, and Kundan had not come. She needed to find her way to his house.

“How much?” he said.

She looked at him, startled. His lips were blackish red, the teeth smiling through them were yellow, and she could smell gutka on him. She was confused, and repeated, “‘How much’? What do you mean, ‘How much’?”

“Ah,” he said, “I see.” Then he seemed to think a little and said, “I have a scooter, and I can take you for a short distance. Not too much, not too far, but if you want to go a little way, I can drop you where you want.”

Something rang an alarm bell inside her and she began to walk away from him. He followed her, saying, “What’s the matter? All I am offering is a good ride!”

She half ran, and still he followed her, toward the line of autos that stood at the entrance to the bus stand. She approached the auto rank. The drivers, all in gray shirts and trousers, as if they were an army, were standing around waiting for customers. When she came up they went silent. The man following her had fallen away. The driver near the first auto asked her: “Where to?”

Charu extracted one of Kundan’s letters from the rubber-banded bundle for the address. She held it out and said, “The address is here.”

The man took the letter and said, “Hey, who can read this?”

The driver next to him said, “Give it here . . . Sundar Nagar.”

A few of them whistled. “Rich woman,” one of them said. “How much will you give? It’s not cheap, you know, Sundar Nagar. It’s far away.”

“Whatever is to be paid,” Charu replied, not knowing what to say.

“Whatever is to be paid, she says!” the man laughed, slapping his thighs. All the men had gathered around her. They looked her up and down and said to each other, “Whose is she? Who’ll take her for a ride?”

In her confusion, Charu had not held tight to her cloth bag. She felt a tug and her bag leaving her shoulder. She screamed in panic and leaped in the direction she saw the bag going. A rough hand grabbed hers and pulled her away from the crowd. Before she knew what was happening, her bag had been flung into an auto, and she had been pushed in after it. The driver bent and yanked its starter. It would not start. Two of the other auto drivers ran toward him and shouted, “Sisterfucker, bastard, she’s ours.”

The man who had grabbed Charu yanked the engine handle again. This time the engine held and he swiveled the auto in a sharp circle and accelerated, charging past the men still yelling after him. Charu cowered in the seat, rigid with terror. She clutched her bag and began to pray in a fast mumble to Jhoola Devi. “I will tie a bell if you keep me safe,” she said, again and again. “I’ll tie a big fifty-rupee bell.”

When they were well away from the bus terminus and on a wide road, a traffic light forced them to stop at an intersection. Small children ran from car to car, begging for change. Charu turned away, afraid they would demand money from her when she had nothing to give them. She studied the rough black hair on the back of the auto driver’s head, and noticed that his ears were pierced. On the panel above his head were three words in Hindi, painted in red. She stared at the line and tried, letter by letter, to see what the phrase added up to. “Ga,” she mouthed, “Oh-lah Uuh” She understood at length that the letters made up the words:“Jai Golu Devta.” All hill drivers prayed to Golu Devta for safe journeys. She began to feel a flutter of hope. The man driving her turned around. As soon as she saw his face, relief surged through her. But still, she could not be absolutely sure.

She asked him, “Are you a Pahari?” She could see from his facial features that he might be from the hills.

“What did you think? That I run to rescue every girl those guys harass this way?”

She said nothing, but could not stop a radiant smile. So he said, “Why alone? They would have made you vanish and robbed you before you knew what was happening.”

“I am visiting a relative,” she said. And partly to change the subject, and partly out of curiosity, added, “Where are you from? Kumaon or Garhwal?”

The light turned green and the auto tooted and puttered through the huge din of moving cars, buses, Tempos, scooters. Charu shrank behind its fluttering window shades each time a car tore past them as if it would run them over if the flimsy little three-wheeler dared stand in its way. Buses towered over them, honking at their slowness. With the breeze sweeping through the two open sides of the auto and the noise from the road, she could hardly hear one word in ten of what the man was saying, but his reply, which he shouted, was: “I’m from a village near Almora. And you? Where are you from?”

She could have cried or danced with joy. Almora! The town closest to her own, where so many people she knew had been. To which she had often been told she would be taken. The Almora whose famous Singhori sweets she had eaten, the ones that came individually wrapped in fresh green leaves.

“Ranikhet,” she breathed, her voice caressing the familiar name. “I am from Ranikhet.”

seventeen

Diwan Sahib came home from hospital at the end of October, after more than a month there. Veer, who had just come back from the Valley of Flowers, wrapped him in a thick blanket and carried him for the few steps Diwan Sahib would have had to walk to reach the jeep parked at the hospital’s entrance. And whereas it was Veer’s habit to drive on twisting hill roads as if he was on an arrow-straight highway, today he eased the jeep watchfully over every bump and pothole, and took the loops at a crawl.

Some of the joyousness of our earlier days was restored. Diwan Sahib was as fragile as a dry leaf, but revived enough to go back to a gin in the morning and his evening rum. He was hungry for all the news of the hillside. When he heard how Charu had eloped and married, he laughed until he coughed and laughed again, telling me I had done my life’s one good deed. He insisted on hearing the story from Ama as well, chuckling at her embellishments. His durbar and our newspaper sessions resumed. Mr. Qureshi once more became a fixture at the Light House, cradling his steel glass, and shaking his head when he thought back to the day he had taken Diwan Sahib to the hospital. “I never thought I would reach the hospital in time,” he said. “Truly, I thought Diwan Sahib would—”

Diwan Sahib wanted us near him all the time as if he could not afford to lose a minute. “Why do you go home to that cottage of yours?” he would say to me. “Just colonize one of the bedrooms in this house.” Veer did not look up from his computer, but he added in an undertone: “Take mine.” Aloud, he said to Diwan Sahib: “The cantonment sent a notice that the lease for this house needs renewing. Let’s dig out the documents and I’ll get that done while I’m here. You might lose the house if we don’t get down to it now.”

“Such efficiency,” Diwan Sahib said. “You make me feel old and tired. Why would I need to renew the lease? There are still a few years left of it, and if I can prevent Qureshi carting me off to the hospital again if I so much as cough, I hope I’ll never need to renew anything.”

The General now came to visit Diwan Sahib much more often than before. He said he had realized during Diwan Sahib’s illness that nobody else in Ranikhet was as close to him in years, although at a mere eighty-seven Diwan Sahib was but a stripling in the General’s eyes. “Still, Diwan Sahib,” he said, “who but you and I remember firsthand the accession of the princely states to India? The way Nehru wrested Junagadh, Hyderabad, Goa from the jaws of the enemy—all with the help of the Indian army. How men of our generation have built this country, the sacrifices we have made. Only you and I know, Diwan Sahib.”

Reminiscing made the General gloomier than ever about the present and he poured out larger measures of rum than before. What he observed did not please him. “No, sir, there is nothing to smile about,” he said of the elections that were now only a few weeks away. “On one side there is a boy still wet behind the ears. On the other an old rogue who thinks the only way to get votes is to make Hindus hate everyone else. There are no statesmen now. None that you or I would be willing to work for and die for, isn’t it, Diwan Sahib? I would have died willingly if Nehru had sent me off to fight. But now? What is the reason for this decay, Diwan Sahib? Tell me, what is the
reason
?” Bozo, lying at his feet, would whine as he heard the familiar inquiry and the General would pat him down murmuring, “Not you, my boy, you are my only hope.”

In the bazaar, Ankit Rawat walked around like a man who had already won. He spoke of the things he would do in his first hundred days in parliament. It was clear from the adoring crowds his meetings mustered that there was a good chance of his defeating the Nainital veteran, who had never lost an election. Umed Singh’s party was trying everything to deflect attention from Ankit’s triumphal march toward Delhi and parliament. It organized singing competitions. It set up a tent where food was being distributed free to the poor. It was giving away cheap sweaters to village children.

It was not long before someone from our neck of the woods got wind of that meal tent.

Charu’s childhood friends Beena and Mitu, the blue-eyed twins, had been charity students of our school. Their father was a drunk who could not pay their fees. Their deaf-mute mother barely managed two meals a day from cleaning houses and washing people’s clothes. Earlier that year, when the twins turned fifteen, they had been sent off at the church’s cost to a convent in Varanasi, where destitute, disabled girls were schooled and trained in vocational skills. They had gone that March with three new sets of clothes, and new books, largely paid for by Diwan Sahib.

They had returned to Ranikhet for their first vacation that October. The girls had got used to more food at the convent and were hungry all the time at home, where there was one sparse morning meal and another at sundown. One Sunday, wandering in the bazaar, they smelled poori-aloo and followed the scent like a spell.

The General, who believed in firsthand reconnaissance of the enemy, was at the tent at that time, waiting for Umed Singh’s next speech. He observed the girls enter the tent and sit in a corner, eating in quick, single-minded gulps. “The way to a poor man’s heart,” he reported later to Diwan Sahib, “is through his hungry stomach, of course.” To those unused to them, they were a fascinating spectacle. They were immediately noticed in the crowd. People stared. The girls looked the same, and their facial expressions reflected each other’s. Braids of almost identical length framed their faces. Their mixed parentage had given their skin a lighter tint than most, and their hair was more chestnut than black. And there were those bright blue eyes.

The politician noticed them too. He stopped to pat their heads and speak to them as they ate. He rejoiced when he found they could only smile or nod in reply or gesture in a way nobody in that tent understood. He would help them, he announced in his speech. It was precisely the cause of the helpless poor in rural areas that his party was devoted to. His voice echoed down the street from loudspeakers fixed to lampposts. He commanded a worker to go and find the girls’ parents and bring them to his meal tent. “We will let them know their worries are over. Victory or defeat, our good work will start right now, and carry on forever. We will take charge of them from this moment.” At that point, someone took him aside and told him in a hurried whisper about the convent in Varanasi.

In his next speech, Umed Singh said St. Hilda’s was trying to convert two illiterate, disabled girls who could not know better. At worst, he hinted between portentous pauses, the school authorities were perhaps trafficking girls. “Who knows what these girls are being trained in?” the politician thundered. “Why are the children of Hindu parents being sent to convents far away where nobody knows if they are being used as servants or slaves or worse? They will become Christian converts—this is an international conspiracy. They must be rescued.”

Soon after that speech, we received a circular from Miss Wilson summoning us to an extraordinary staff meeting. She stood at the head of the table and made a sign of the cross before she began. Her voice was low and grave. The time had come, she said, for us to be tested. It was our turn to prove how we would cope with the provocation and adversity we were facing. Her students and teachers were at risk of physical harm. She could not rest as long as this threat persisted. The school was her child, she said, and we were her family, she had given her life for the Lord and for us, we were all she cared for.

At this several of the teachers looked at each other in disbelief. Behind her back, the younger teachers called her the Great Dictator, and someone had once painted a mustache onto the portrait of Miss Wilson that hung on the staff room wall next to a laminated poster of the Vatican’s Pietà. It had needed nail polish remover to clear it from the glass. Her latest pet, Joyce, the senior school’s newest teacher, had begun to mimic the way she ticked us off for our lapses: “Don’t make
ex-kewses
! I accept no
ex-kewse
but
death
!”

For Joyce and for the other teachers at our school, Beena and Mitu were two among the numberless children who had passed through our classes. For Miss Wilson it was a larger administrative anxiety. It was different for me. I remembered those desolate early years in Ranikhet when I would wait for them to arrive with Charu for our games of gitti, for the sound of their clinking pebbles to fill my empty house. The games always ended with Bisht Bakery’s cake or the tea and boiled eggs I made for them, which they finished in seconds, hardly pausing to chew or breathe for hunger. They would never again go through such hunger and deprivation. I was determined they would not. The Brigadier was too high up in the pecking order for me to be able to get an appointment with, so I went to see Mr. Chauhan about it. Could he provide protection for the school until the elections were over? And could he ask the politician to tone down his speeches?

Mr. Chauhan had given me a four o’clock appointment, but when I arrived, he was not there. I found his wife instead. She was a pretty woman, with a very straight back, neat braid, chiffon sari, and fixed smile. She sat in her garden under a pergola of roses, at times shouting a reprimand to her two children, who were playing nearby. Butterflies rose and fell from the flowers around us, and her maids, one of them a cowgirl I encountered on my walks, served us tea and chocolate cream biscuits. Mr. Chauhan would be a little late, she said. “He is so busy these days. Today, he has gone out with the Brigadier. The Brigadier wants to see the work my husband has been getting done for the Regimental Reunion.” She reached for my hand. Hers felt as soft as a petal when it briefly cradled my own, hardened with work. “This gives us women a chance to talk in peace, doesn’t it?” she said with a mischievous smile. “I have a dull married woman’s life. You tell me about yours! So many things happen in it!”

After a pause in which I discovered nothing to say about myself, she began to speak again.

Her husband remained preoccupied, she said. He had much to do: the entire administration of the cantonment. Had I noticed how much better the power supply and water supply had become? That was all because of Mr. Chauhan’s untiring efforts to make our town the Switzerland of India. He was getting roads relaid and parapets painted—oh, all sorts of things—and there was this terrible deadline of the reunion, about which the Brigadier was so anxious. To top it all, the sign painters kept making spelling mistakes. The Brigadier had noticed one the other day that said “Streaking Route.” Actually, said Mrs. Chauhan, the sign painter had written “Trekking” as “Treaking,” and then some mischief-maker—“who likes to see another man succeed, tell me?”—had gone and added the “S.” Still Mr. Chauhan worked on, writing improving slogans, thinking up new ways to better people’s lives. “Just like Mr. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, my husband tells me. He says Lee Kuan Yew is an Asian hero.”

It was difficult, she said, living with a writer. Mornings, Mr. Chauhan remained closeted in his room. If the gardener came in to ask, “Sa’ab, should I order more manure?” Mr. Chauhan waved him away, not replying, and the gardener’s work came to a halt. Sometimes the telephone rang, and Mr. Chauhan snapped a surly “Yes?” into it, not even bothering to find out who it was at the other end. Once it was the Brigadier and he had been offended at Mr. Chauhan’s tone, not aware that Mr. Chauhan was in the grip of inspiration at that moment. The Brigadier had said in a curt voice that he wanted his fences painted and orange trees planted at the back. “Order some saplings, I believe this is the right time,” he had said, and hung up. Mr. Chauhan had had to call back to explain.

My mind was wandering. I stared at Mrs. Chauhan’s face in an effort to focus on her words, and instead began to imagine her head topped by the mysterious wig Mr. Qureshi had found in the trunk of a car. There she sat, in a daring frock of the kind the General’s late wife had favored, in that curling red-haired wig with its two blue clips. She was smoking a cigarette. She had a thin mustache. At times she gargled with a gulp of hot rum that she drank from a teacup.

Mrs. Chauhan noticed my faraway look and laughed, “Maya-ji, where have you wandered off to, lost in your thoughts? Tell me too?”

“Oh no, I was listening,” I said. “You were saying the Brigadier keeps interrupting Mr. Chauhan’s writing?”

Her husband was infuriated by interruptions, but how was Mrs. Chauhan to know they had taken place? When she had called him for lunch a little after the Brigadier’s telephone call, he had been curt with her. “Can’t you see I’m writing? Can’t a writer get some peace in this house?” Alongside the signs he was working on a book. “His memories,” said Mrs. Chauhan, lowering her voice. This took up a lot of his time. Mrs. Chauhan waited, the servants idled, the food went cold. “So you must not take it wrong, Maya, that he is late today,” she said, reaching out for my hand again. “He makes me wait also,” she said with her smile. “Maybe that is a woman’s fate!”

Forty long minutes had passed before he came down for lunch that day, and found Mrs. Chauhan at the table, surrounded by congealing food, steel plates, bowls, tablespoons, and red napkins. She had not eaten either. “I cannot eat before him,” she said. “Unless he is out of town.” He took her out for a drive to the golf course that evening to watch the sun set and make up. “People say I am very lucky.” She smiled. “He is still romantic after all these years, and two children.”

She came to an abrupt halt as if realizing the impropriety of discussing conjugal happiness with a widow. She stood up, restless all of a sudden, and said, “Maybe you can tell me what you came to discuss with him. I don’t think he’ll have the time to see you in the next weeks, when he has so much work. Or you can write an application and I will send it to his office.”