The Folded Earth: A Novel (21 page)

fifteen

That first week in October, I thought I could hear the earth creaking on its tilted axis, moving a little further in the opposite direction each day, toward the cold months. Very slowly, but it did move, and the wet, gray, solid sky that had come down to live around houses and treetops through the months of rain thinned to uncover an airy concentration of blueness. Standing outside the house in the mornings, I luxuriated in the sunlight and heard nothing but the chirring of cicadas. At my feet, the meadow ended and slid away into limitless forests. Far below, the forest’s green was lit by bright points of autumnal red. Dinosaurs must have come up that slope once, crushing trees in their path, to sun themselves on the gigantic moss-greened granite boulders that were strewn over this part of the forest. The snow-peaks that ringed the horizon blazed; I could hardly raise my eyelids to let in their incandescence.

The golden light after the monsoon, the meadows pink with cosmos and wild lilies, and the clarity of the cool, dry air went through everyone like a live current. All around, people were whitewashing and painting and patching up their homes to undo the damage from the rains in time for Diwali. Mattresses were sunned after months of damp; women got down to the business of cutting grass to store for the winter months. In the bazaar, new election posters were plastered over the rain-sodden ones and new bunting went up everywhere. Roadworks began, and smoking barrels of tar added their acrid stench to the scent of honeysuckle. Mr. Chauhan’s men were everywhere, with cans of paint and tins of Brasso. The reunion was a month away.

At the factory, we were in the middle of labeling the hundreds of bottles of jam we had made out of the summer fruit. This too had to be done before Diwali, so that the stock would reach Delhi in time for festival sales. The newspapers had forgotten Orissa’s Christians and moved on to something else; DivineLite TV had once more applied itself to saving souls. Miss Wilson had calmed down. When she once more stormed into my class to rap her cane on a table and call for silence, I knew life was back to normal. In the staff room she told me after a particularly bad morning, “How long have you been teaching? Five years. Look at Joyce Mam. She only started three months ago and the students are like mice before her. Have you learned to control the children at all? Is there any progress? No. Zero!” She liked to say “zero” as a mocking “Zee-row! Zed-ee-ar-oh, zee-row!” She made a circle of her forefinger and thumb and placed it over her bespectacled eye as if she were looking at me through a monocle.

As the skies cleared, Diwan Sahib began to mend. He started asking for rum. He even wanted his Rolls-Royce cigarette case beside him again. “Since I look like a Silver Ghost myself,” he explained. In a not very audible voice, interrupted by hacking coughs, he ticked off doctors and nurses, as well as me, for being too bossy. He asked for the newspaper and made me sit by him reading the oddments I knew would amuse him: that the Western Railways washed its blankets only once a month; that a Ukrainian bank robber had chosen to steal a police car for his getaway; that in Australia a pet camel had tried to mate with the woman who owned him and killed her in the attempt. His room in the hospital had turned by imperceptible degrees into an extension of the Light House. His familiar mess of bottles, books, pills, and papers collected around him.

Mr. Qureshi came every day, the General now and then. Himmat Singh lived there, and slept in Diwan Sahib’s room. He had made himself a home in a corner with his own mattress and blankets. Each time Diwan Sahib made a sound, Himmat Singh clambered to his feet to see what was needed; for the rest of the day he chatted with the new friends he had made, or dozed in the sun by the window. He had smuggled in a bottle of rum from which he took slugs when no one was about; once I had caught him in the act of moving Diwan Sahib’s oxygen mask aside to give him a sip. I tried going there every day to prevent such efforts; Ama went to visit him at least twice a week and sometimes we came back together from the hospital in a jeep-taxi. Already the evenings were longer, darkness fell without warning. We would hurry back from the jeep drop-off point on Mall Road to the Light House, fearful of leopards behind every shadowed bush.

On the evening of October 11, after we came back from the hospital, I had only just shut my door when Ama came out and shouted: “Is Charu over there?”

She was not. She was not in the cow shed either. We searched all over the estate for her, flashlights and sticks in hand. “Where’s the girl? Has she fallen somewhere and broken a bone? Has a leopard mauled her?” Ama wailed. “When bad things start happening, they never stop.” She went into her rooms in confused agitation. Puran, who had been in his shed, staggered out drunk with sleep and added his shouts to ours, calling for Charu as he would for a lost cow. The clerk heard us and came out of his cottage. He looked up toward us and shouted, “What is it, Ama, why are you waking the birds again?”

Ama’s eyes fell on the wooden box that she stored valuables in. Nobody else was supposed to know where Ama hid the box or what was in it. But there it was, in plain view, its lid loose and the lock on it broken. Money was missing, as well as one piece of jewelry. This was Charu’s dead mother’s wedding nose ring: a bangle-sized gold hoop strung with pearls and gold beads, almost too heavy for a girl’s nostril to bear even on her wedding day, but nevertheless, a ring without which a hill girl’s wedding could not take place.

When Ama saw that the nose ring was gone, her finger went unconsciously to her own nostril, which a similar hoop had once pierced and left a sagging hole that was now empty of metal or stone. She rubbed it, as if in memory of all the rings and studs that had once pierced it. Slowly she put the box aside, shutting its lid so that the clerk and his wife, who had appeared by then as well, would be denied a look at the contents.

The clerk said, “I’ll get Lachman, and we’ll go in his taxi to look around. She must be somewhere, maybe one of her animals has wandered and she’s searching for it. Arre O, Puran, go and see: are all your cows and goats there in the sheds?”

Ama was looking straight at me, with a gaze so penetrating I could hardly meet her eyes. She said, “What do you say, Teacher-ni? Should we get a car?”

“She told me she might not do her lessons today because she had to go and see a friend who is getting married soon to a boy in Delhi.” I was stammering over the words. “I thought you knew.” Fear was making me feel weak. I needed to sit down. I held the door for support. Charu had no notion of big cities. What had made her do this without a word to me? If she got into trouble I would never forgive myself. Neither would Ama.

“And this boy is a good boy?” Ama said after a thought-filled pause. “After all, her friend’s mother would not marry her off to a rogue. In a far-off city. Eh, Teacher-ni?”

“He’s a good boy, Charu told me.” I tried to keep the tremble from my voice. I thought of setting off in pursuit of her. I had at least had the sense to write down Kundan’s address somewhere. She must have gone to him, where else would she have run to?

“From a good family?” Ama was saying. “This friend’s groom?”

“From a family that wanted nothing but the girl. No dowry, that is what Charu said. And he earns well, has a good, respectable job. His prospects are very good, he is going to travel even in foreign countries and earn five times what anyone here does.”

“Arre, Ama,” the clerk said, “stop going on and on about Charu’s friend. She’ll marry who she’ll marry, what do we care? Should I get the taxi or not? I think we should go and look for Charu. It’ll get too late if we wait any longer.”

Ama said, “Let it be today. I think she’ll be back. I think she had told me too about going to this friend’s house, but I had forgotten. Our Teacher-ni, she always knows where Charu is.”

sixteen

The next morning, Charu woke in one of the corridors of a Nainital hospital. She had spent the night there, finding nowhere else to wait for the morning bus to Delhi. The stench of urine and disinfectant had done away with her hunger pangs and throughout the night she had stayed awake listening to ill people groaning and mumbling in the open-windowed general ward. At night her worries turned into specters. What if she never found Kundan? Had she enough money if it took time to locate him? What if he said he no longer wanted her? Why had he written so uncaringly in his last letter? What would happen to her if she had to return to Ranikhet after a failed journey? Ama would throw her out of the house with the same ruthlessness she had shown Charu’s father. Ama did not forgive people; she remembered wrongdoing for years. Maybe Maya Mam would fight for her. She would shelter her for a few days. She too had married out of caste—and religion—and she had lost her family.

She closed her eyes and tried to lull herself with thoughts of Kundan. How astonished he would be to see her tomorrow. She could not make herself believe that she would truly see him again, touch him, smell the scent of his skin again, feel his lips—in a mere day, a few hours. What were a few hours after all the months they had spent apart? But these last few hours seemed to stretch longer than weeks and months.

Early next morning, as she walked by the Nainital lake soon after dawn, she noticed that you could see bubbles in the water where underground springs fed it. It did not seem right that she was at the lake without him; he should have been showing it to her. All around her was water, more than she had ever seen. She thought that the ocean on the way to Singapore could not be much bigger. There were dozens of boats moored at the waterside, bobbing in the morning breeze. “We will go right to the middle of the lake in a boat,” Kundan had promised her once, after a visit to Nainital with his employer, when he had seen the lake for the first time. He had kissed the soft, tender bits behind her ears and whispered as his hands traveled over her breasts: “There will be nobody but you and me in that boat.” Charu looked out across the water and imagined she and Kundan were at the center of it, on a red-and-blue boat with long white oars.

The sun was inching up the sky. Charu had lost sense of the time as she gazed at the water. She had no watch. Panic overtook her. She ran from the lakeside to the bus stop, losing her way, frantically asking one of the pony men leading out a mangy horse where the bus stop was, then scampering in the direction he pointed. Her bag thumped her hips. Her shawl flew off her head. Her breath came and went in shudders.

She reached the entrance to the bus stop. The conductor and driver had only just arrived. They were standing by the bus, exchanging notes, smoking. The early travelers had come, and were waiting for the buses to be cleaned. She ran up to the driver and asked, just to be sure there was no mistake, “Is this the six o’clock bus to Delhi?”

“Yes,” they said. “The doors open after a while.”

She went a little distance off and waited, eyeing the men and the bus watchfully, taking no chances. At five minutes to six, she was first at the door. Other people were now straggling in with suitcases and bags, looking drowsy. She climbed in and got herself a window seat in the second row. The windows were cracked and some of them had the remnants of blue curtains thick with dirt. Charu bunched her curtain away for a last look at the lake. She plumped her bag on her lap. She would comb her hair when she reached Delhi, and before she saw him she would try to find a place to change into the prettier salwar kurta she had packed. She would wash her face and put some fresh kohl around her eyes. She smiled her secret smile, twisting her silver nose stud to settle it better. She took out a stale roti and lump of jaggery and munched on them for her breakfast.

*  *  *

The journey from Nainital to Delhi takes about eight hours by road. For the first part, the bus drops down from the hills on a narrow, spiral-staired road, with jungle on either side. At times the forest breaks, and when it did Charu saw snow peaks through the gaps. The same mountains she saw in Ranikhet, here too! She leaned her head against the rattling window of the bus and let her thoughts wander.

The bus charged onward, taking the bends at a speed that made her queasy. The driver had a feverish air and a face like a skull, and he flung his shoulders this way and that as he wrestled with his wheel. He thrust his head out of the window to yell to truckers coming the opposite way: “Arre, Ustad, is there a jam ahead?” “Is the road open, should I go on?” Otherwise he laughed and sang. When he sang folksongs his voice was swaggering and loud. With romantic film songs it became a high squeak from which he emerged at abrupt intervals to yell curses at cars in his way: “Arre, saala, privaaate!” He swerved toward big cars to give them a fright.

In the rearview mirror, his eyes gleamed. When Charu inadvertently looked toward the mirror, she met his eyes, which he narrowed and winked. She quickly looked away, toward the woman on the next seat, who nodded at her over the toddler in her arms. The child gave Charu a wide, three-tooth smile. He put out a dimpled hand and clutched a fistful of her hair, pulling with all his might. Charu gasped. The woman gave the child a sharp slap and said, “I’ve told him, and told him, and told him,
don’t
pull hair, but does he listen?” Her shrill voice rose above the noise of the wheezing bus. “What a wicked child. Not mine, or I would have taught him a thing or two; my sister-in-law’s, you know, she’ll ruin him with her love, a boy after three girls, so what can one do?” She pinched the child on its arm and ordered, “Say namaste to didi, you wicked boy.”

Charu looked out of her window and saw they were passing a waterfall. She wished she could wash her feet in its sparkle. The woman resumed: “Sometimes he vomits because he feels sick on these hill roads. If you give him the window seat, we will all be at peace.”

The child bawled, as if on cue. “He just wants to look out of the window.” This time the woman sounded as if she was accusing Charu of making him cry.

Charu said, “I am used to crying babies. It makes no difference to me.” She turned away. She could sense the woman’s peevish looks but she was inured to such things. She leaned her head on the window rails and shut her eyes.

The bus stopped at two points for people to buy food, drink tea, and use the bushes. Charu rushed in and out of the bus at those stops, afraid of losing her seat. She ate the last of her roti and jaggery and spent two rupees buying a glass of tea. It came in a tiny plastic cup. She could hardly hold it for the heat, but the tea was thick and sweet and she felt revived by the few sips the cup contained.

Once the bus left the hills behind, it began to hurtle at high speed. The roads were wider, though still bumpy, and there were fields on either side as far as the eye could see. Charu had never seen land so flat and endless. You might walk the whole day and never have to go up or down a slope. She wondered how that would feel.

When the bus went through one of the many small towns on the way, she saw no fields, only white dust, and the sun felt as if it would burn through her skin. Every house was a grim square of concrete. Drains on the road’s sides brimmed with an oily sludge. It was dirtier and poorer than the dirtiest and poorest part of Ranikhet’s bazaar. How did people live like that? she wondered. Fat flies buzzed over mounds of bright orange jalebis and samosas on handcarts selling food. Dust and piss everywhere, the bus churning up black mud as it bludgeoned its way through the crowds.

Once or twice they drove through market fairs, and Charu’s eyes tore at whatever they could as the bus swayed between rows of vendors who had laid out their goods on squares of sacking at the road’s edge: heaps of dry red chilies, cascading mounds of tomatoes, T-shirts in a hundred colors, glittering saris, dried turmeric sticks, stacks of bottle gourd, plastic shoes. They passed tractors filled with the sugarcane harvest, bullocks being sold at a cattle fair, mangled cars and trucks left over from recent accidents, their wheels still pointing to the sky. They stopped at toll gates where boys came up to the window to sell plastic pouches of water, fried papad, roasted gram, sliced cucumbers, and coconut. Charu fished out another two of her precious rupees and bought a hot, sour packet of the gram sprinkled with raw onions and tomatoes. For some time she sat holding it, letting its aroma come to her, feeling her mouth water. The woman next to her picked some of the gram out from the packet, and tossed it into her mouth. “Good,” she said. “It’s good.” Charu was outraged. The packet was tiny, and now a whole mouthful was gone. Before the woman took more, Charu tucked her packet out of reach, hiding it between herself and the window, surreptitiously picking out one grain at a time to suck on.

They went over bridges and through traffic jams. When they crossed the Ganga at Garh Mukteshwar, the bus slowed, then came to a stop in a traffic jam. Many passengers clamored for it to remain on the bridge so they could run down and throw coins into the holy water, but the driver threatened, “Anyone who gets off will be left behind.” The woman next to Charu leaned right across her to the window, bowed her head, bumped it against the window grille again and again, and murmured, “Hari Om, Hari Om.” Charu could smell the woman’s stale nylon sweat. Nobody smelled like that in the hills.

The river, though very wide, looked shallow. There were people in it, and the water came only up to their waists. Low steps led away from the water to the banks, which had rows of temples as far as her eye could see. The steps were crowded with sadhus, priests, people praying. One of the temples had a clock in a tall tower, its hands stalled at five twenty. The river water below it was still as well.

“Water in the hills flows very fast,” Charu said, almost to herself. “You can be washed away in it.”

The woman moved away and said, “This is our mighty Ganga-ji, not a little river in the hills.
”
Then she repeated, “Hari
Om
!”

In the late afternoon, after crawling through two traffic jams, they were in Delhi.

*  *  *

Charu had thought she would be awed by a big city, but already, along the journey, before they had quite reached Delhi, she had got used to tall buildings and roads that were like five rivers of cars joined into one. She felt a sense of familiarity. She had seen such roads on TV. She realized she knew big cities from films and pictures in magazines.

What she was not prepared for was the stench. It smelled of putrid things, filthy drains, sewage, burning rubber, and smoke from factories. The stench came in through the windows of the bus; it was all around and she could hardly draw breath without coughing. She had not been prepared for the sky. She had thought skies were blue everywhere, as grass was green or red roses red; but here the sky was the slate-gray color of village roofs, only dirtier. You could not see far at all, just till the next few towering pillars of buildings, which stood close together like walls with square holes. They all looked the same, and as if they would fall any moment. Beyond, there was a haze of smoke. What kind of house did Kundan live in? she wondered. One of those?

The woman sitting next to her had told her they were getting off at a place called Anand Vihar Bus Terminus. “Where do you have to go?” the woman had asked her, but Charu had ignored the question, not trusting a stranger. She kept feeling the place on her chest where her cloth bag nestled under her dupatta, with the bulk of her money and her mother’s nose ring. She was now more apprehensive than she had been at any point in her entire journey. As the bus drew into the terminus, the strangeness of the new city became terrifyingly real.

Crowds of people bore down on the slowing bus. They were running alongside the bus, banging it with their hands, shouting. Some hauled themselves up by the window rods, and hung from them, pressing their faces to the windows. One face said, “Auto, auto,” the other face said, “Rickshaw? Tempo? Where to?” Her eyes scoured what little she could see beyond the crowds of men at the windows and doors. The bus stop was a vast cemented area, with bay after bay for buses from various states. All the hills buses came into Bay 12, and Charu’s bus too headed for it. Any minute now, she thought, she would see that loved, familiar face. He would appear, pick up her bundle, and take her home. He would hold her hand in the auto.

She got off the bus, too confused to say yes or no to the autowallahs sidling up to her with, “Share auto? Where to?” She stumbled about, trying to find a slightly empty spot where she could stand and wait for Kundan. Nearby, a transvestite in a shimmering green-gold sari and long earrings went from person to person nudging and flirting to make them give her money. She poked Charu in the waist and said, “Setting up shop?” Charu leaped backward in alarm. An old man snatched her out of the way of a reversing bus and shouted, “Are you blind?”

Charu scanned the crowd for a face that looked kinder than the others, but nobody had time to stop. All the people around her were in a hurry, either getting on buses or off them or hunting for autos, or looking for relatives or buying tickets from hectoring touts. Everyone else knew what to do and where to go. She plucked up courage and asked a woman, “Could you tell me—” but the woman pushed her aside to run after a bus that was revving its engine and leaving. There was so much noise: a vast confused mingling of horns, voices, vendors’ shouts, engines. All the faces from her own bus, which had grown familiar to Charu over the eight hours they had traveled together, had melted away. She felt alone as she never had on the most deserted hillside or deepest forest.