The Folded Earth: A Novel (24 page)

nineteen

In winter the barbet calls all day from its lonely perch high in a leafless tree. Its plaintive, monotonous cry is the distillation of solitude and sadness. The tourists have gone, and the summer visitors with them. Only now does our town feel truly ours, as if it has been rescued from intruders and returned to us. The earth is hard with cold; the air stings ears and eyes and makes noses water. The tree-darkened roads looping the hillsides are deserted; there is no fear of tourists’ cars careering round the bends. The big old houses in the cantonment area are empty again. Waiters and cooks are playing cricket on the lawns of their hotels. They have planted three somewhat straight sticks as wickets. One of the waiters, Chandan, is teaching himself to ride a bicycle and he lurches dangerously as he lets go of the handlebars to join his palms and say, “Namaste, Maya Mam,” as he passes me. I taught him when he was a boy of twelve or fourteen. Another of my relative failures, but at least he mastered the alphabet, and he learned to add, though he never managed multiplying or dividing.

Mall Road in this season has a lazy air. In the morning when the sun bakes the other side of the road, every shopkeeper at the row of cupboard-sized shops below Meghdoot Hotel deserts his post, and customers have to seek them out on the opposite parapet. Men slurp tea at Negi’s shack. Next to the lamppost, people sit on their haunches at a charcoal brazier munching the warm peanuts roasted on it. Dogs amble around, occasionally snapping and snarling at each other. When the sun starts to go down, swallows knife through the air into their perches at the candlelit grocery shop. A squad of monkeys clambers over the tin roof of Pandey-ji’s vegetable shop, dividing into ones and twos to attack the vegetable baskets from many fronts. Pandey-ji’s mother, a woman with gold nose studs and a large bun, chases them with a stick, screaming at the top of her voice. Two soldiers polish the already gleaming brass plate that says “Officers’ Mess” next to an imposing pair of gates, while dozens of cadets, hair shaved to their ears, file past to their barracks further down.

In winter, the air is clear enough to drink, and your eyes can travel many hundreds of miles until they reach the green of the near hills, the blue-gray beyond them, and then the snow peaks far away, which rise in the sky with the sun, and remain suspended there, higher than imaginable, changing color and shape through the day. Every hour, they come closer, their massive flanks clearly visible, plumes of cloud smoking from their tips. After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.

These are secrets hidden from those who escape the Himalaya when it is at its bleakest: the mountains do not reveal themselves to people who come here merely to escape the heat of the plains. Through the summer they veil themselves in a haze. The peaks emerge for those devoted to them through the coldest of winters, the wettest of monsoons. The mountains, Diwan Sahib said in an uncharacteristic rush of sentimentality fueled by a few drinks at his fireplace, believe that love must be tested by adversity.

It was more or less the last thing he said. He got up to poke the fire and go to the bathroom. “Fix me another drink please, Maya,” he said, and half stumbled to the door, from where he called in a voice too high to be his own, “Switch on the light, why is it so dark, I can’t see.” Before I could reach him, he had crumpled over the arm of a chair and was sliding to the floor. He had grown so thin that I thought I would be able to move him easily enough to his bed, but he was too heavy to shift, and I could see there was no need.

*  *  *

The night Diwan Sahib died, I realized that I had never experienced death at firsthand. The two people closest to me had died far away: Michael’s death happened with a telephone call. My mother’s death too had reached me the same way—this time it was a call from my uncle. To prevent my rushing to Hyderabad for her funeral, my father had forbidden anyone from telling me until after she had been cremated.

I had no idea what to do. Ama and the protocols of death took over. She ordered everyone about, even Himmat Singh, who bathed Diwan Sahib’s body and laid him out on the living room floor dressed in formal clothes I had never seen before. They were too large for him and his arms disappeared into the sleeves, which the postman folded up so that his long-fingered, square-nailed hands could be seen. They stuffed balls of cotton wool into his nostrils. Someone covered him with a brown and maroon checked sheet and pulled the sheet over his face. Ama placed an incense holder on his chest, and lit half a dozen incense sticks. “Why can’t he stay in his bed till the morning?” I asked Ama, but she pronounced: “That is not how we do it here.”

People came from everywhere, many I did not recognize, as well as Mr. Qureshi, the General, Puran, Ramesh, even Mr. and Mrs. Chauhan. Ama took up a position right before Diwan Sahib’s body, where she sat utterly still, hooded in her sari, as mourner in chief. When someone new came in, where she would normally have erupted into a loud namaste and a volley of questions, not the suggestion of a smile altered her expression of rigid solemnity. We sat in a gloomy circle around Diwan Sahib’s body all night, though the men took turns to go outside into the freezing garden, and stood swathed in shawls, warming their hands at a brazier, a firelit cabal that smoked, drank. Diwan Sahib would have joined them, I thought. He never did anything merely because it was expected of him. He would have cracked jokes. He would have finished a whole bottle of his rum.

Halfway through the night we heard a loud creaking, cracking, splintering, groaning sound like a giant’s death rattle, and then a huge falling. It was a rotted old tree that woodcutters had been sawing at for the past three days and the sudden gale that struck up after midnight had finally torn the trunk from its base. The men outside marveled at the coincidence and said: “Diwan Sa’ab has taken a whole tree with him. The forest is mourning.”

After his cremation early the next day, I occupied myself clearing out Diwan Sahib’s room. The unused medicines I threw in a bin. There were empty rum and gin bottles behind curtains, under the table, under Diwan Sahib’s bed. Books towered by his bedside in piles that tottered when touched. Anthropology, the folklore of Kumaon, histories of India, hardbound volumes on the flora and fauna of the Himalaya, records of appointments in the princely state of Surajgarh. A set of cassettes with recorded birdcalls. No more performances from Diwan Sahib; the children at the school would have to settle for those tapes now. A ticker tape of thoughts ran relentlessly through my head. His closest relative was probably Veer, but how would we get in touch with him when he was unreachable somewhere in the high Himalaya? In the absence of anyone else, I would have to deal with the pedantic after-death chores. I did not know if he had medical insurance or if he had left instructions for his bank accounts. I probably needed to write to someone about stopping his pension. And what about that lease for the house? It had not been renewed in the end. I would have to find Ama and Puran somewhere to live if the house had to be returned to the cantonment. And where would I live? My mind went over and over the same thoughts, but all of them were punctuated by one question as unending and softly insistent as the scops owl’s hooting: where was Diwan Sahib’s Rolls-Royce cigarette case? Now that he was gone, it was imperative that I should have it. There was no other object I associated more closely with him. I needed to find it. I would turn the house inside out if I had to.

But first I had to finish with his room. I folded Diwan Sahib’s worn-out blankets and put them in a cupboard. Stripped the bed of its sheets. Busily I reached for his pillow. That was when I saw that it still held the hollow of his head and a few white strands of his hair.

I sat down on his sheetless bed. I had not lost my composure when he died, or at his cremation, despite the incongruous cascade of red roses at the cremation ground, and the thrush that insisted on whistling in accompaniment to Mr. Qureshi’s noisy tears, or even when the blue-yellow-red paragliders performing for the Regimental Reunion floated past us over the smoke from Diwan Sahib’s pyre like two brilliantly-colored birds. At the sight of that pillow and the strands of his hair, I became unjoined.

I left the house and went down to my cottage. A deadening inertia closed its fist around me. I began to feel sleepy all the time. I stopped going to work. I do not know what I did. Things rotted, dust settled, the alarm clock clanged every day at six in the morning, but I did not get out of bed, nor did I bother to change the clock’s setting to stop it ringing the next day. Maybe I slept. I think I ate at times. I had no memory of it, nor any recollection of crying, yet when I woke up at odd times in the middle of the day or night, my face was wet with tears. In my dreams, my mother, Michael, and Diwan Sahib were trapped in unlikely, fear-freighted situations. We could not find each other at crowded stations. Someone was left behind on a boat at sea that had glided far out into the water. We were in different rooms of the same house; I called their names but nobody answered. An enormous bird with a curved beak and sharp talons came and sat on my arm in one of my dreams, making me wake up in a panic, rubbing my arm where its claws had been. Sometimes Veer was there, but we were in rooms filled with trekkers, rucksacks, strangers sending us off in two different directions. I heard Ama calling my name or Charu saying, “Did the postman come? Look, here is a letter for me, read it out,” but when I unglued my tight-shut eyes, I knew I had dreamed their voices.

One morning I heard a banging sound that went on and on, and struggled awake. I managed to sit up, understood that this time someone really was knocking. I stumbled to the door and found Ama there. She had been calling me for days, she said. “Today I was ready to bang the door down. I thought, ‘Teacher-ni will die of starvation if not grief.’ Look at yourself: thin as a stick and old, your head like a dry coconut. Why? Is it your father who has died, or your husband?” She stood over me while I washed my face and then thumped a steel plate down on my table. It had three fat, dark madua rotis soaked in ghee, a steaming spoonful of lai saag, the greens I loved, some raw onions, and a green chili. I ate without a word, as if I had never eaten before.

After I had finished eating, Ama and I sat in the veranda, where she settled at her favorite place on the stairs and said, “You were sleeping, but someone’s been very busy while you were dead to the world.” She tucked a wad of her chewing tobacco into her mouth to create the space for a dramatic pause. Diwan Sahib’s house was a mess, she said, every single trunk and cupboard was inside out, the pages between every book had been examined—by Veer. He had scarcely stopped for a minute’s rest; he was like a man possessed. He had ransacked the whole house, and then left in his jeep without explaining anything to anyone.

“How long was he here?” I asked her, startled. Did he come to my cottage? I wanted to ask her. Did he not try to find me? Did he ask Ama about me? How could he have left without a word to me? I did not dare ask her the questions I really wanted answers to.

“He came two days after the cremation, looking like something blown here by the wind. He didn’t want to know anything about how his uncle had passed away or who had done the cremation or any of that. He kept asking: has anyone been in this house? Has anyone been looking for anything? I told him you had been there, settling Diwan Sahib’s room, but for no more than half a day.”

“And then?”

“I told him you were down here. I said I had called many times, but you had not come out, so we were worried. But he? He has no time or ears for anything that is not about himself.

“Don’t look like that,” Ama said after a minute. “You are blinded, you can’t see. There he is, swearing love and care for his uncle, but who looked after the old man through his illnesses? Was he here? Oh no, he only turns up when it is all finished, to see what he can get. All these months, he kept leaving cigarettes all over the house, and getting Diwan Sa’ab drunk. Didn’t you notice how his health collapsed after his nephew came into his life again?”

“What do you mean? Have you gone off your head? Do you know what you’re saying?” I stood up in one violent movement, had to hold on to the chair to steady my spinning head.

Ama had hinted at her suspicions before, but they had been barbed suggestions. Now, with Diwan Sahib dead and Veer having come and gone without even seeing me, she spoke her mind and her words had the unmistakable coloring of the hostility she had long felt toward Veer. Himmat Singh never failed to relay to Ama anything of interest that he overheard in the Light House so she had known for years that Veer wanted her evicted. I wondered what else she knew. I lowered myself carefully into my chair again, still feeling wobbly.

“Look at you,” Ama said. “That’s what happens when you don’t eat for days. And I haven’t gone off my head, my head’s very clear. Who kept the old man supplied with so many bottles? Who bought all those packets of cigarettes that he found wherever his eyes fell? I had told you then, and I will tell you now, this apple of Diwan Sa’ab’s eye came back here only to send him to his death. There are many ways to finish people off, you know.”

She heard cowbells close by and hurried away to the edge of the hill to yell at Puran. “Arre O, Puran, can’t you see Ratna is eating Sahu-ji’s beans? Donkey, good-for-nothing, fool! Lost in his own world and the cattle wander anywhere they please.” She was tender-faced as she sat down again. “Everyone says Puran’s a madman and he’s a crazy fool, there’s no doubt about that. See how he’s crooning over that pet owl these days. It’s like the sun rises when that owl opens its eyes at night. But if I had to trust my life to anyone it would be Puran, not that Veer Singh, who cares only for himself
.
Your teeth will break on a big black pebble when you eat
that
bowl of dal, take my word for it. I notice everything, nothing escapes me.”