The Folded Earth Read online

  “What rubbish you can talk,” I had said crossly. And then held his hand to my cheek to reassure me with its un-dead warmth.

  I was alone. I had no contact with friends: I had lost them over the years of being wrapped up in Michael. I had in effect no family although my parents did live in the same city. My father had made a great show of formally disowning me when I married. A son-in-law of a different religion was abhorrent. My mother was too intimidated by him to do more than steal out for occasional trysts with me at a temple. She had no way of getting news of me unless I contacted her. I did not. Not yet. What was I to say to her? The pain would extinguish her. I had a job, but it did not cross my mind that I needed to inform my office why I had stopped coming to work. A tin with ashes lay in my bed where Michael should have been. I was twenty-five years old and already my life was over.

  3

  I cannot remember how many weeks I wandered the streets this way, or why I decided that the first person I had to talk to about Michael’s death was his priest, Father Joseph. I waited for the bus that had always taken me to work, and sat beside the girl at the third window who used to save a seat for me every day. She talked about her fiancé again: “My Would-be” is what she called him. They were to be married that year. He wanted to arrive for the wedding on an elephant, but she had since girlhood pictured her groom on a white horse, as she had seen in the movies.

  “Are there any elephants in Hyderabad?”

  “Maybe not,” she said, smiling. “But my Would-be feels higher up is safer in traffic.” She spoke close to my ear to be heard over the sound of honking cars. I tried to make sense of what she was saying, but her words were obliterated by the panic my own thoughts unleashed: Michael was gone forever. I would never in my life – my days, nights or evenings, never at meals or in bed or on the street – I would never be with him again. What was this city to me now, without him? He was this city. He was the meaning of its buildings and streets.

  We were passing the minarets and lawns of the Hyderabad Public School, an old, long, sprawling mansion that might have been a palace. The girl clutched my hand to draw my attention, and pointed at it. “Actually what my Would-be wants is to light up that building, and have the wedding there,” she laughed. “He wants me to feel like a princess.”

  I thought of the very few people who were at my wedding: all strangers to me. Our families had stayed away, loathing each other’s religion with a passion. Michael’s parents had refused even to meet me. Only two rebellious young cousins of his came and took photographs – each one a different grouping of the four of us – plus the marriage registrar, whose droopy moustache and drowsy eyes gave his face an all-in-a-day’s-work expression. After the paperwork, we had gone with the cousins to a biryani house in the Charminar area. An aquarium framed by panels of beige satin covered most of one wall. It was filled with murky water and plastic ferns, but there were no fish. The bill for our food came to 378 rupees. In all, our wedding cost us under five hundred rupees. It was nothing compared to the opulent weddings of my relatives and friends, but I had cared only for the happy light in Michael’s eyes, the scent of the flowers in the garlands he had brought for my hair and my neck, and the way he had pressed against me in the cramped seat of the rickshaw on our way to our newly-rented two rooms.

  My sari was a dark-green silk that had belonged to my mother. She had given it to me the night I ran away from home. She had not said a word, but had kissed my hair and then my face, staring at it as if she might never see it again. She took off her emerald earrings and twisted them into my earlobes. She draped a corner of her treasured sari over my head to see how I would look in it. For a long minute she stared at my half-veiled face, then put a finger to the kohl in her eyes and smudged its blackness onto my forehead to protect me from evil spirits. We spoke in gestures and were careful not to make a sound: we knew my father was somewhere in the house, alert to every rustle, every whisper.

  From the day my father had found out about Michael, he had become as watchful as an animal waiting to pounce. He prowled all over the house, somehow soundless despite the stick he always carried as a crutch to compensate for his shorter left leg. He said nothing, but no longer allowed me to leave the house, not even to go to college. I was only nineteen then, an undergraduate who needed to go to classes. He told everyone I had chickenpox and was too contagious for visitors. He cooked up a doctor’s certificate for my college principal. He put a stop to friends, outings, telephone calls. At times, I felt his cold-eyed gaze travelling over my body as if he were trying to gauge which parts of it Michael had touched. But I was his daughter. Before my fall from grace, he had done his best to train me to follow his example: to be ruthless in getting what one wanted, to take calculated risks. His efforts must have yielded results. I escaped him within a fortnight, knowing I would never return home.

  My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board. She shouted, as if in a movie: “Let me go! I want to live! I want to live!” My eyes blurred and I began to see human skeletons and bones at the edges of the pool, on the green tiles: skulls, clavicles, fibulas, tibia and femurs. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with ancient silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. I saw skulls at the bottom of the pool, turning their blind gaze this way and that in the clear water, magnified by it. They bobbed to the surface. One of them splashed to the edge of the pool, next to my feet, and the face streaming away from it in dissolving ribbons was Michael’s.

  The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as you do in dreams. It was only when a face rose from the water close to my feet and in a French accent said, “Are you alright?” that I realised my face was wet with tears, my nose was running, my hair was dishevelled, and I was late for Michael’s priest.

  I ran up the stairs to Father Joseph’s room and burst in without knocking. I stopped and held the back of a chair to steady myself. A house with a trident-shaped peak framed in its window, Michael had said: a house that looked out at the Trishul, and at its base Roopkund, the phantom-lake. He had seen such a house once, he had told me where it was. He had dreamed we would live there and wake each morning looking at the Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit its three tips one by one.

  “Father, find me work in Ranikhet. Please,” I said. “I can’t stay on here a single day longer.”

  * * *

  Four months after Michael died, I climbed into the train that had taken him away from me. It went from Hyderabad to Delhi, a northward journey that took a day and a night. One more night on a different train brought me further north, to Kathgodam, where the train lines stopped and the hills began. It was another three hours by bus over twisted, ever-steeper roads to Ranikhet, a little town deep in the Himalaya. In my bag was the address of the school in which Father Joseph had fixed me a job. I was going to be two thousand kilometres from anything I knew, but that was just numbers. In truth the distance was beyond measurement.

  4

  The sky over
our heads here in the mountains has not the immensity of the sky I grew up with in the Deccan, where it spans the entire planet, broken only by the building-sized boulders that sit here and there on the open flatland of the plateau as if a giant’s child had collected them from the giant’s river and dropped them like marbles on a playing field. In the hills the sky is circumscribed. Its fluid blue is cupped in the palm of a hand whose fingers are the mountains around us. We too are cupped in its palm and while there is a feeling of limitless distance, we have at the same time the sense that here on our hill is where life begins and ends. Here is where sky begins and ends, and if there are other places, they have skies different from our sky.

  Our town spans three hills. It is far away from everywhere and very small. If you look at it from the other side of the valley at night, you see darkness dotted here and there with yellow lights half-hidden by trees. On every side there are mountains and forests, stretching many miles, interrupted only by tiny hamlets and villages so small that they might have just five houses and nothing but a foot-beaten path connecting them to the main road miles away. To the north of our town is the high Himalaya: ice-white peaks on the other side of which lie Tibet and China. On clear days, eastward, you can see the five pyramids of the Pancha Chuli, which are at Nepal’s door.

  When you come up to our town from the plains, the dust-gloomed, table-flat land begins to slope upward at Kathgodam, folding itself into hillsides, and in less than two hours the trees change from banyan, mango, banana and sal, to pine, oak, cypress and cedar. Everything looks sharper-edged in the clear air, as if your bad eyesight has been inexplicably cured. Ferns fountain from rockfaces, flowers blossom on stone. In fertile areas, the hills are terraced into green and brown circles of wheat fields with squares of white, where the peasants’ slate-roofed cottages are. The dishevelled small towns are soon left behind, and then you pass gushing mountain rivers and barren cliff sides pincushioned with cacti, deep forests and still grey-blue lakes. By the time you are in Ranikhet, you have travelled from the tropics to temperate lands.

  This was the town to which I came after I lost Michael. Father Joseph used his network to get me a job at St Hilda’s, a church-run school. I found a cottage to rent, on an estate called the Light House because it was so situated that the mansion on the upper grounds caught the first rays of sun on its eastern windows, and the last of them on its western lawns. My landlord, whom everyone called Diwan Sahib, lived alone in the crumbling mansion. Down the slope there was a set of brick and mud rooms clustered around a beaten earth courtyard and cattle sheds. Charu lived here with her grandmother and an uncle, Puran, who was often called Sanki Puran because he did not seem to have all his wits about him.

  My own cottage, close to theirs, had once been stables where herders were housed in a room above the stalls for horses and cows. The cottage now had two whitewashed rooms of stone, one above the other, and a small veranda. The wooden planks of its floors creaked and shifted with age. The kitchen and bathroom, tacked on later, stood at odd angles to one another and to the house. None of the windows or doors fitted well. Icy draughts surged through the gaps in winter, and in the monsoon insects took up residence in the corners of the rooms: slow-moving black scorpions, confused moths that banged into lights, green-eyed spiders whose legs could span dinner plates.

  My cottage was at the edge of the spur on which the Light House stood. When I lay in bed, what I saw framed in the window was the Trishul. At its base, invisible at this distance, was the lake where Michael had spent his last hours. Nothing but miles of forests and wave upon wave of blue and green hills between us.

  5

  St Hilda’s is not really a convent, but since people think of convents as places where their children will be taught good English, that is what the church which owned it had decided to call it. The children would come to learn English, they reasoned, and would be taught a little bit about Jesus, which they could keep or cast aside as they pleased.

  Charu had been one of my students. She was twelve when we met, and came to school pig-tailed, face shining, hair reeking of mustard oil, in navy and white, scrubbed clean, exercise book and pencil in hand – and she daydreamed in class all day. She barely learned to write even the alphabet. Many days of the week, she simply did not come. Later, walking home in the afternoon I would spot her grazing her grandmother’s cows. Or I would hear her high voice from across a hill, calling one of them, “Gouri! Goureeeeee-ooo!” In the summer months I could be sure of spotting her navy skirt halfway up a kafal tree and if I called at the tree, “Why weren’t you at school?” she would clamber down, thrust at me a handful of red, just-plucked kafals, and vanish into the forest.

  One late afternoon in my first year in Ranikhet, I saw Charu’s grandmother sitting outside their house, sunning herself on a mat. She was a bony woman with hollow cheeks, her skin raisined by years of hard labour in the sun. Her eyes had a quiverful of lines at their corners. Everyone called her “Ama” and she was renowned for having been the most beautiful woman of Ranikhet. She was not afraid of anything or anyone, and had thrown Charu’s father, her younger son, out of her house for being drunk every day and beating his wife to death in a drunken fit. She would bring up her grandchild alone, she had said, they did not need a man around the house if it was a man like him. He still visited, a weedy fellow with a ravaged face, and a beedi tucked behind each ear. He sat glumly in the courtyard and smoked while his mother scolded him about keeping a mistress and demanded money for his daughter’s upkeep. Meanwhile somehow she fed and housed yet poorer relatives who arrived without warning from remote villages and stayed for days, sometimes weeks.

  Ama had a voice that could carry across several valleys and a laugh I could very often hear from my own house nearby. From here and there, she had picked up English phrases and words with which she seasoned her talk. If I had a cold, she would insist, “You must breathe in steam from water boiled with Eucalipstick.” Every time prices rose, she said, “Does Gormint care if we live or die?” Government was a person who lived far away and grew fat while her cheeks hollowed with too much work and too little food. “One day,” she said, “I will find a Gormint babu for Charu to marry and then we’ll kill a hen to eat every day.” As she said this, she shook with laughter at the improbability of her dream.

  Whenever she sighted me, her eyes, already creased from years of battling sun and wind and cold, creased up more, and she smiled a mouthful of stained, brown teeth and shouted, “Namaste, Teacher-ni!” That is what she called me, tongue-in-cheek: Teacher-ni. Everyone else called me Maya Mam.

  “Why do you pay the fees if you can’t make Charu come to school?” I had asked her that afternoon. “Why not send her to the government school? It’s free.”

  “I can put grass before the cow,” she said. “Can I make it eat? But it is still my cow, so I have to feed it, don’t I?”

  “Charu is hardly a cow,” I said. “She is your granddaughter. And I am not fodder.”

  The old woman laughed loud and long. “I know who Charu is,” she said. “Now you tell me, what can I do? I get her ready every day, I send her off, and then – where she goes – how can I stop her? Should I chase her with a stick all the way to the school? She will learn when the time comes. A girl learns what she needs to know.”

  I gave up on Charu after a while, and stopped scolding her about her truancy. She did not altogether stop coming: on the days when she felt her uniform needed an airing or she wanted to see her friends, she would turn up, smile angelically at me, settle down at her place on a bench, and draw five-petalled flowers throughout the class. On some evenings she came to my veranda, which had a smooth red floor, to play gitti, her pebble game. Often she brought with her two girls, Beena and Mitu, twins who lived down the hill: neither of them could speak or hear, but we managed. They had shy smiles, light-brown hair, and improbable blue eyes: Ama said their mother, Lati, also deaf and mute, had slept with a wandering firanghi who had eyes as blue, and here was God’
s punishment: two girls. “Deaf and mute as well!”

  Charu taught me her game: it involved five pebbles that you had to do dexterous things with, throwing up one, scooping up the others, then catching the one in flight before it hit the ground. I was new to the town, I hardly knew anyone, and had nothing very much to do apart from the school. Many evenings she and I sat with the twins, playing with the stones, watching evening fires being lit outside nearby hutments as the neighbourhood dogs were called back from creeks and bushes before leopards slunk out from the shadowed forests to feed.

  I could have chosen differently. I could have found a better-paid job elsewhere. I could have returned to my own family. It had been a source of bewilderment to my mother why I did not go back to my old life at home after Michael’s death. The edge of my father’s anger was blunted now that Michael had left my life. All I had to do was to tell him that I had been wrong and misguided, and beg him to trust me again. My mother was tearful and imploring. I did not need to teach in a school, so far away, hard up, all by myself. We could be together again as before.

  My mother died two years after Michael, uncomprehending to the end about my stubborn refusal. In one of her reproachful letters, she accused me of being as unforgiving as my father: how could a girl punish her parents and reject her home this way?

  But I was at home. I had got used to thinking of Charu, her grandmother, her half-witted uncle Sanki Puran, and my landlord Diwan Sahib as my family now. I could no longer imagine living anywhere else. Though I cannot know precisely when it happened, a time had come when I became a hill-person who was only at peace where the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea.

  6

  It was six years after I began to live in Ranikhet: I remember it was a December afternoon, about three o’clock, the sun already too weak to warm anything, and I was on my way back from work. As every day, I went first to my landlord’s house. Unusually for that time of day, he was not alone. I found him with a man I had never met before and they were so engrossed in conversation that they hardly noticed me as I laid a bundle of newspapers on the grass and stood behind Diwan Sahib’s chair.