The Folded Earth: A Novel (17 page)

eight

The bazaar was not the only place to be transformed during the monsoon. Mr. Chauhan’s deadline, the Regimental Reunion, was just over the horizon, and everywhere we could see evidence of his energy. Giant heaps of gravel and sand had been deposited at street corners, and in the rain they flowed onto the roads in little landslides. Some children, who found one such heap near their hut, squealed with pleasure as they pelted each other with balls of caked-up gravel. Their father rushed out with a bucket and scolded them, “Don’t waste it. We might need it. Here, let’s put it into this.”

Laborers appeared in fours and fives instead of the usual ones and twos. Squatting by the parapets, they began to knock at them in a dispirited way with hammers. The old stone parapets, lush with ferns and little pink lilies, were to be torn down and replaced with neater cement ones. Road rollers were on their way. As soon as the rains stopped, the pitted road was going to be relaid all the way down Mall Road, past the officers’ mess, and up to Mr. Chauhan’s house. The tin planters that hung on the arms of cement crosses along Mall Road had long been bereft of flowers; they were now filled with fresh earth and planted with geranium cuttings. Wrought iron benches were ordered from Haldwani and placed at strategic points. Three of the benches went missing within days. One of them disappeared from near the Light House and the next morning a cantonment official arrived and asked us questions about dead trees and the branches that needed to be lopped, while he walked all over our garden, his eyes reaching into the corners and down the slopes. Diwan Sahib made him an offer of tea and said, “Sit, sit down. We may not have wrought iron benches, but we do have chairs. Shall we donate them to the army?”

Mr. Chauhan was a familiar sight on the roads now, walking under a rain-sodden umbrella held over him by an orderly who followed him everywhere getting wetter and wetter. Other administrators buzzed around in their jeeps—Mr. Chauhan told us whenever he could—“but I myself, the man in command, I need to be on the front line verifying the situation on the ground, not blindly accepting reports from juniors.” He went on inspection tours. He chivvied the workers breaking down the old parapets and hammering at blocks of stone. More signs appeared, to indicate places where cows and buffaloes were forbidden, so that overgrazed trees and shrubs would come back to life.

One morning Mr. Chauhan spotted Puran, who was tying his cow to one of the metal posts on which a signboard stood. Mr. Chauhan abandoned the protection of his umbrella and snatched the cow’s rope from Puran’s hand. He banged the writing on the sign above them with his stick and yelled, “Not here. Not here! No cow here!” His stick clanged on the metal so loudly that Gappu Dhobi ran out from his house to see what the matter was. Mr. Chauhan flung the rope into Puran’s face and shouted again, “Not here, you illiterate village fool! You’ll be fined! You’ll be arrested!”

Puran shied away like a startled animal and fled. His feet had been in rubber slippers ever since his army-issue shoes had been burned by Mr. Chauhan’s men. His bare ankles were bleeding from leeches that settled there to feed. The slippers slithered on the wet hillside. He plunged into tall grass and gradually disappeared from view into a valley whose lush undergrowth hid stinging nettles, snakes, scorpions, and more leeches. Puran was in too much of a panic to bother about any of this. His cows and goats followed him down the valley, precisely into the area Mr. Chauhan had marked out of bounds. Their hooves flattened several new saplings Mr. Chauhan’s workforce had planted there the week before.

Later, soaked and irritable, Mr. Chauhan walked into his house, and when Mrs. Chauhan said in a voice full of concern, “How did you get so wet?” he shouted, “In the line of duty! I got wet in the line of duty!” He had forgotten to take off his muddy shoes at the door. They left a trail over a new carpet as Mr. Chauhan went toward the bedroom, yanking his sopping shirt from the tight waistband of his trousers. Mrs. Chauhan gave the carpet a look and slapped her forehead in exasperation. “
Offo!
What did I say? It’s become impossible to talk in this house, even a simple question.” She telephoned her sister in Lucknow for solace. “This job’s stress is really getting him down. Day and night, he’s never relaxed, not for one minute. And now I’ll have to send this carpet to you to be dry-cleaned. No dry cleaner’s even seen a real Kashmiri carpet in this place or even in Haldwani.”

Mr. Chauhan overheard her from the bedroom. He sat on the bed with his head in his hands. A damp patch grew around him as water seeped out from his wet clothes. He pressed his fingers on his Australia-shaped birthmark, which throbbed to the beat of his agitated pulse. He unearthed a hidden packet, lit a cigarette with a match that shook, and resolved that this time he would teach Puran a lesson he would never forget.

*  *  *

Burdened with her new preoccupations, Charu no longer remembered to steal grain from Ama’s store for Puran’s deer. He had to wait every morning for his mother to leave their rooms for the few moments that it took him to steal some of the hen’s grain from her storage tin, just a little bit every day so that she would not notice. This, combined with the freshest of the rotting fruits and vegetables that Charu brought back from the bazaar for her cows, supplied the food for his baby barking deer, which had grown steadily over the past five months, and was now more body, less leg. When he took the food to the shed and whispered, “Rani, Rani,” he saw her large, dimly glowing eyes turn in his direction, but she did not get up until he had set the grain and fruit in the usual place and withdrawn some distance away.

One afternoon that August, when he called to Rani on returning from grazing the goats, he saw there was empty space in the place in the shed where her eyes should have been. The shed was tiny. Even so, he scrambled around as if the deer might be hiding under the heaps of hay and sacking strewn on the floor. She had wandered off twice in the past, and both times he had rushed about the hills like a man possessed, only calming down when he had found her and shepherded her back to the shed, all the while making mewling noises of relief. When he did not find her in the shed that afternoon, he ran down to the slope where he usually took her to graze and survey the world of commoners. She must have gone off without him again, he thought. He felt his heart turn into a cold, heavy stone at the thought of leopards, jackals, foxes, dogs—all waiting to savage her.

Puran walked the slopes calling for Rani in his loud, hoarse, hollow voice, until Charu heard his calls and came to see what the matter was. She searched the slopes with him: they went in different directions, came back, met, and asked each other, “Did you see her?” and separated again. They went deeper into the valley that led to the Dhobi Ghat; they walked every path through the pine forests to the north, the oak forests to the east, and then started searching the path through the woods to the bazaar. They clambered over the boulders near the stream that cut across the shortcut to the bazaar and at the narrow bridge over the stream they encountered Joshi, the forest guard. “Your deer is at the police station,” the guard told them. “You crazy fool, Puran, don’t you know it’s illegal to keep those deer at home? What were you thinking? It’s not a pet dog or a goat, it’s a deer. Chauhan Sa’ab’s order: it’s going to the Nainital zoo.” Charu and Puran hardly waited for him to finish what he was saying. They panted their way up the slope they had just run down and then over the shortcut to Mall Road where the police station was, with the forest guard’s voice in their ears: “Don’t go, he’ll put you in the zoo as well. They have zoos for mad people in Nainital!”

The police station was on a hillock above Mall Road, a yellow, two-roomed cottage with a red roof. It had no more than a rudimentary lockup that was occupied only sometimes, usually by drunk people who needed to sleep off their fog. The constable in charge was a tall, sharp-featured woman from the plains who had a reputation for being tough with lawless motorcyclists and water thieves. She had a tight bun; she carried a stout, polished stick to brandish at the unruly; and she was never seen dressed in anything but her khaki uniform sari that she pinned up like a neatly folded napkin.

Charu and Puran reached the door of the station gathering the courage to reason with her, and found it empty save for the chowkidar peeling onions in the veranda. Through the main room they could see the bars of the lockup and Puran ran in, despite the chowkidar yelling, “O, Puran,” and getting up hastily to stop him. Puran was on his haunches before the bars in a moment.

Rani was pacing around behind the bars of the lockup. Twice, as they watched, her hooves slid on the polished floor, and she knocked her head against the wall on the other side. Puran held the bars and rocked back and forth. Something between a moan and a sob burst from him, then turned into rhythmic keening sounds.

“Let her out,” Charu begged the chowkidar. “Let her out, she will die.”

The chowkidar ticked them off in a loud, hectoring voice. “How dare you,” he said. “This is a police station, not your house that you come in and do as you please.” He yelled to whoever might be listening, “We are the police, what do you think, that we have all the time in the world for lunatic cowherds?”

Puran sat by the bars of the lockup groaning and calling Rani’s name. He had some of her grain in his pockets and he scattered it on the floor of the lockup, but Rani paid no attention to him. It was as if she had not noticed him at all. The skin on her back trembled and shuddered in spasms of fright; the whites of her eyes were flecked with red. In despair, Puran pulled at the lock on the grille, banging it against the iron rods to break it. The chowkidar grabbed his arm and pulled him aside shouting, “Saala, this is government property. What do you think you’re doing?”

Charu recognized that she was up against a force too powerful for her. Why would a police chowkidar—far less someone as elevated as the constable—pay attention to her? She thought of the only person she knew she could turn to.
His
words would count with the police. They would have to obey him. She ran to Puran to explain, then sped off, bounding over every available shortcut, her pink plastic slippers slipping and sliding on the monsoon-mossed rocks.

nine

It was no use trying to finish reading the newspaper. Ama had arrived with the story of a certain Mangesh who worked for Missis Gracie long ago. He put her into one of those orphanages for old people, she said, and swindled her house away. And his wife, “that woman Asha, you’ve seen her, of course—tall and thin as a bamboo pole, with a voice that reaches the next valley even when she whispers, but she thinks she’s pretty—she has put a spell on my cow Ratna, she gives no milk at all anymore.” Ama moved a ball of chewing tobacco from one of her cheeks to the other as she spoke and sat down with a groan on the staircase leading to Diwan Sahib’s veranda.

Diwan Sahib scowled at me and at Ama, and hauled himself out of his chair, retreating behind a line of dripping blue hydrangeas that separated his garden from the nettles below. I glimpsed his hands fumbling at his waist, and after a moment’s pause heard the sound of trickling water on grass. All else was quiet but for the tapping of a woodpecker making its way up a nearby tree trunk, grub by grub. Ama sighed, then said: “He is half-mad. Pisses into the bushes like some common villager and they say he was a prince before. He drinks so much he keeps falling down. Did you hear, he fell down yesterday too? His shoulder has a big black mark. Himmat Singh told me.”

Diwan Sahib was hidden by the bushes. I could hear thumping, as if someone was beating carpets. Then my landlord was yelling, “Arre O! Can you hear me? What are you doing?”

The monotonous
whump-whump
from below stopped for a minute, then started again. Diwan Sahib stumbled down the slope clutching his pajamas’ waistband and yelling, “Leave the nettles alone, you donkey!” Now we could see him through a gap in the hydrangeas, tall, thin, teetering at the very edge of the slope, looking as if he would trip and roll downhill with his next step.

I half got up, started to call out, “Be careful!” but stopped myself. He detested what he called “clucking.”

“It’s only nettle,” a man’s voice said from below. “I’m not cutting your precious bushes, am I?” His stick hit the bushes again. I stood up to look, and saw that the man had already beaten down many of the high, overgrown nettle bushes into damp green rags. The nettles formed a barrier around the house and protected it from the road a few meters below
.
The more impenetrable they grew, the more Diwan Sahib rejoiced at keeping prying people out. The nettles would spring back in a month, so there was no need for an argument. But once annoyed, Diwan Sahib was difficult to reason with. He shouted back, “I planted those nettles!”

“Oh yes? Who plants nettle? Weeds—dirty, stinging weeds! He plants them he says.”
Whump!
The man’s stick began hitting the nettle bushes with even greater force. As the stick came down on the bushes again and again, I winced, imagining the man behind me on a lonely forest road, armed with that stick. “Useless old fool,” we heard the man shout in a harsh voice. “Sanki lunatic! Says he plants nettles!”

“You aren’t young yourself,” Diwan Sahib yelled. “Have you seen how old you are?”

Diwan Sahib came back toward the garden. “Have you seen how old he is? And he has the insolence to call me old.” His white hair stood on end, from his having torn off his cap in a hurry. His dressing gown flapped around his ankles. He had climbed back too quickly and now each gasping breath was accompanied by a whistling sound. He stooped and searched for a glass, one he must have flung into the bushes earlier that morning. He wiped it on his shirt and splashed rum into it from the bottle on the table next to him. Then he sat back in his chair and laughed until it turned into a hacking cough. “Someone’s been attacking the nettle for days, and I’ve never managed to catch the fellow in the act before,” he wheezed. “I recognized him today. He’s that retired forest guard—Himmat says he’s lost his mind.”

Ama said, “Why wouldn’t he have? He’s forever grabbing our sickles and axes and taking them away. Claimed we were stealing wood from the forest. And in secret he was selling our axes in the bazaar. We cursed him, many times. So he went mad.”

“Why don’t you use your curses on a more deserving target—Chauhan, or that politician stirring up trouble?” Diwan Sahib said, picking up his packet of cigarettes.

“You’d better not smoke,” I said. “Your performance is next week, and you can’t cough all the time you’re there, so don’t—” I stopped as he lit up.

Diwan Sahib had been practicing for months and his day at St. Hilda’s was almost upon us. Usually he talked of jungle craft and imitated the calls of animals and birds. Sometimes he told the children stories of illustrious Himalayan travelers, old and new, such as Frank Smythe, Edmund Hillary, or Bill Aitken.

“What are you going to do this year?” I asked him.

“This year—” All of a sudden Diwan Sahib became almost bashful. “This year I want to tell them how fortunate they are. How absolutely fortunate they are. I want your little perishers to understand that.”

“Fortunate? Half of them don’t get enough to eat,” Ama said. “They won’t even have a job when they finish with that school. All this studying is a waste of time.” She gave me a look of concentrated scorn. The day before she had had yet another argument with Charu about the amount of time she was spending at my house on her lessons.

Diwan Sahib ignored her. “I am going to tell them,” he said, “that they must put their ears to the earth and rocks and hear them breathe. Because here in Ranikhet the rocks do breathe. I am going to tell them to listen for one second on their way through the woods to their school for the sound of the sap rising through the trees, to spend one day painting the snow peaks they never bother to look at. They are like people born rich who don’t understand what money is until it disappears.”

“I’d rather have some money and not just the mountains,” Ama said. “You can’t eat mountains.” She made a move as if to leave. Diwan Sahib was too deep in thought to notice her. He continued, “I want to tell them they live in a corner of the earth where predators still roam free. Where, on an evening’s playing among the trees, they might hear movement in the undergrowth and see a kalij pheasant scuttling away with its mate. Where they do all these ordinary things, like lessons and tuitions and games, and then come home to the call of foxes and owls.”

I said, taking care with my words, “It’s natural for them not to notice owls and foxes calling. They’ve grown up with them. Just as city children pay no attention to car noises—”

Diwan Sahib looked at me aghast. “A scops owl like a car noise! Are you off your head?” He was overtaken by another of his coughing fits as Charu rushed in. She never spoke directly to Diwan Sahib, afraid of him or shy; today she ran to his chair and held its arm, panting, and said, in a high, trembling voice, “You have to save Puran. They have arrested his deer.”

*  *  *

Diwan Sahib changed into a rather grand if crumpled and mothballed gray jacket and white shirt. “You can’t deal with the police and that fool Chauhan in a dressing gown,” he explained when he emerged in his uncharacteristic finery. We had to walk slower than usual because he coughed a lot and had to stop frequently to catch his breath. Halfway there, the drizzle thickened; raindrops were flung into our faces by the wind. Ama hitched her sari to her knees and fished out the plastic bag she kept tucked in her waistband for such eventualities. Her white hair straggled out from under the bag-cap. I rolled up my jeans. By the time we reached the police station, we were cold, soaked, bedraggled.

We charged into the police station, past the shouts of the chowkidar, to the bars of the lockup. The deer was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was Puran, caged behind the bars. He sat in a corner, whimpering and groaning, scratching his head and slapping his thighs. Tears and snot smeared his face. The room was rank with the effects of rain on his foul-smelling clothes.

The constable sat at her desk looking irritable and shouting for the chowkidar to light some incense. “What do you think? I want him here? I want to throw him out, he smells enough to make me want to cut off my nose,” she said to Ama, who looked frightened and tearful at the sight of her son imprisoned. I had never before seen Ama at a loss for words. Now she slid to her haunches and half sat, half crouched on the floor, head in her hands, quite unmindful of the plastic bag that topped it like an upturned boat. Charu stood very straight, holding the bars of the lockup. Her face had frozen into anger at the constable’s words and she had assumed a fierce, silent hauteur.

The constable had not invited Diwan Sahib to sit. He stood over her desk, still panting, leaning on it with both hands. He drew a wheezy breath and began to explain the situation to her with painstaking, careful courtesy. Puran was a little different from others, he said. He could not talk to people, but he could talk to animals. Animals trusted him. Foxes came to him if he called them. Injured birds arrived on his doorstep to be cured. Dogs with broken legs found their way to his cowshed. It was necessary that he be treated differently because he was incapable of understanding such things as wildlife laws.

Diwan Sahib’s baritone was interspersed with fits of coughing and he searched in his long-unused trousers for a handkerchief. I passed him a tissue. The constable tapped her pencil on the table. Then she spun a five-rupee coin on it again and again like a top and waited each time till it rattled to a halt.

Puran was not raising the deer with a view to eating it, Diwan Sahib continued patiently. He had rescued it from the forest. If he had not rescued it the lost deer would have been devoured by other animals.

“That is the law of the jungle,” the constable interrupted him to say. “And the deer is a wild animal.”

“Of course,” Diwan Sahib said, “and in every other instance you would be absolutely right. But Puran is a special case. Did you know that—”

A note of ingratiation crept into his voice. I had never seen him bend over the way he was doing now. He smiled at her as if trying to please.

The constable interrupted again. Nothing was possible, she said. She began to shuffle her papers and files. She looked Diwan Sahib up and down with scarcely concealed disdain. She had been posted to Ranikhet only a few months before, and had no idea who he was. To her, he looked like any other rain-soaked, old, small-town man—educated, no question, but she had no time for such refinement and slow civilities. She had risen the hard way, she was tough, her tongue was sharp, and as a policewoman she had to be feared and respected, not loved. All this was written on her face. No doubt, too, she could smell the rum on Diwan Sahib’s breath. His big hands, even when resting on her table, shook with the tremor that we were familiar with but which she must have thought another symptom of his drunkenness. Her eyes went to his feet. He had managed a shirt, trousers, and jacket, but his feet had been too swollen for shoes and he had pushed them into purple bathroom slippers. She looked at the wet, mud-spattered slippers and back at his face. “The law is the law,” she stated. “I have work to do. It is illegal for people to keep wild animals at home whether as pets or as food. He is no different from anyone else in the eyes of the law.” She returned to her file and did not look up again.

Mr. Chauhan had left instructions that if Puran came after the deer, he was to be locked up until the deer was safely in Nainital’s zoo, and for a few days after, to teach him a lesson. If anyone made a fuss, Mr. Chauhan had ordered, tell them this is a non-bailable offense under the Wildlife Protection Act and Puran would have to serve a proper jail term for fattening a barking deer in order to kill and eat it. “And while you are at it,” he had instructed the constable, “I want those army clothes off him, and burned, this time to ashes.” Having issued his instructions, Mr. Chauhan had left for Bhimtal.

*  *  *

Puran came home in someone else’s clothes after three days. He went into his ramshackle shed and would not emerge, not even to eat. We heard from a friend in Nainital that Rani was moping and pining in her new cage at the zoo, and had refused food and water. All day she stood virtually immobile in a corner of her cage, despite the persistence of the zoo’s vet. A week later, the vet advised a revolutionary step: he wanted Puran brought to Nainital. “That’s the only hope,” he said, “the deer might eat if he feeds it.”

Mr. Chauhan’s permission was sought. He slammed the telephone down, fuming. “Here I am, the ad-min-is-trator of this city,” he said, emphasizing every syllable with a rap of his pen on the desk. “And they want me to give all my time to these foolish matters!” It would be the ultimate humiliation for him to have to send Puran to Nainital. He would not hear of it. He got into his jeep, its large pimple of a red beacon gleaming, and went off to inspect the site of a new amusement park, his flagship project, for which a swathe of oak forest was being cleared. It was pointless saying to tourists, “Come just for the peace and the landscape.” Ranikhet was to have sights. It must generate as much revenue as Bhimtal and Nainital, Mr. Chauhan had decided, and once he decided something, he acted. This was no time for nonsense with madmen and deer. He told his secretary to say he was in meetings all day if there were more calls from the zoo.

On the thirteenth day, the deer died of malnutrition, dehydration, and grief. It became a small news item in the local paper and a journalist came to interview Puran for a “human interest” feature. Ama, frantic with excitement at the thought of her son being in the newspaper, showed him to the cowshed Puran had taken refuge in. The journalist walked to the shed as gingerly as a stork in a marsh and waited ankle-deep in mud and dung for Puran to emerge, but despite Ama’s knocks, entreaties, scoldings, and curses he remained inside his shed and would speak to nobody.