The Folded Earth: A Novel (7 page)

ten

It was in March that I met Charu’s Kundan Singh for the first time, when the imminence of spring spurred the hotel manager to throw a party at Aspen Lodge. There was still rain at times and sometimes knife-edged gusts of wind, but the pewter of last month’s light had taken on a pearly translucence and one morning I opened my door to find two hopeful pigtailed infants waiting there for me to discover the little heap of pink, white, and red blossoms they had deposited on my doorstep. I returned inside to get them small change to buy sweets with, as was the custom. Living alone I lost track of these things. Now I remembered that Phooldeyi, springtime’s flower festival, was not far off.

I realized when I went for the party that the hotel manager had intended to invite only those he considered people of consequence.
As a penniless teacher I was out of place among the generals, brigadiers, bureaucrats. Even Miss Wilson had not been thought grand enough for the occasion. But the manager had found me with Diwan Sahib when he came to ask him, and could hardly avoid including me. “Just a few friends,” he had said, “nothing much,” and I had pictured five or six people around a sunny table in the garden.

When I reached Aspen Lodge, I stood for a few minutes at the edge of the lawn, looking at the crowd and considering a quick retreat. Silk saris shimmered past. There were men in tweed jackets and lamb’s-wool pullovers. The lawn was full of people I had never seen before. My fingers plucked at my clothes. I wished I had not arrived straight from work. I had put on my best kurta that morning in honor of the lunch, but it was hidden beneath my thick, many-colored winter shawl, which Diwan Sahib always said would do nicely for a rug. My hair was probably dusted with white chalk from writing on blackboards.

I took shelter behind a wide-trunked chestnut tree, plucked out the striped pencil that held my untidy bun in place, and ran my fingers through my hair. I neatened my shawl, rubbed the dust off my shoes with a handkerchief, and before I could change my mind and leave, I made my way toward the nearest person. It was the Subdivisional Magistrate, who was talking to Mr. Chauhan, the administrator, congratulating him on the educative slogans he was putting up all over the town. Our host, the hotel manager, stood by looking deferential, as was politic before our town’s two highest-ranking bureaucrats.

“The messages are very good, especially for the young,” the Magistrate was saying to Mr. Chauhan. Mr. Chauhan looked down at the glittering toe caps of his shoes. Ever since he had been posted to Ranikhet, about six months before, he had been writing slogans, which he then made his staff paint on rock faces, or on boards that were then nailed to trees all over town. You could no longer take more than a few steps without meeting a sign.

“It gives a certain distinction to the place,” the hotel manager said. “Such educative signs.”

Early in his time in Ranikhet, Mr. Chauhan had brought a school exercise book to share with us when we invited him to St. Hilda’s to give away prizes on one of our sports days. The book had a bright, hard cover that showed a magenta-cheeked baby with large eyes, holding a pen in dimpled hands. The cover said “Apsara Single Ruled for your Writing Pleasure.” In the slots for “Name/School/Subject,” he had written, “Avinash Chauhan/Administrator Ranikhet/Signs for People Betterment.” When Mr. Chauhan held the exercise book toward me and Miss Wilson, I had noticed a tremor in his hands. For a moment, he had looked very much like one of our students.

“I have not shown these to anyone before. Please give me your honest opinion, Mams,” he had said.

Inside the exercise book were line after line of slogans, written in blue ballpoint:

“The last one is for the army golf course,” he had said, noticing my nonplussed look. And then: “My teacher—in Ranchi, you know, that is where I grew up—my teacher told me I had real talent. I won all the essay-writing prizes. Once I wrote an essay on a picnic to Dasham Falls and he said: ‘You have real talent, young Avinash,’ that is what he said.”

“Yes of course you do, Mr. Chauhan,” I had said. “You must not waste it.”

But today Mr. Chauhan seemed not to remember who I was. He spoke only to the manager and the Magistrate, pursing his lips and saying, “A little guidance at the right time is very valuable.” He had a small, officious-looking mustache, and though he was otherwise skinny, a paunch the size of a watermelon pushed out his navy-blue pullover. The bazaar gossip, which Mr. Qureshi reported to Diwan Sahib daily, was that Chauhan had made enough from kickbacks in his six months here to build himself a three-story house in Lucknow.

“It is also good that you are going to replace the parapets. These old stone ones are so untidy, grass and wild plants growing out of them,” the manager was saying.

“I am putting benches also,” Mr. Chauhan said in the Magistrate’s direction. “You will see. Ranikhet has to become the Switzerland of India. Or at least it must be another Shimla. I am making a View Point. With telescope. For one rupee anyone can worship Nanda Devi-ji through zoom lens. And furthermore I am getting many roads relaid.” After each of Mr. Chauhan’s statements, which came with stately pauses in between, the manager murmured, “Point taken, sir. Point well taken.”

“The roads, that’s urgent,” said the Subdivisional Magistrate. “Has to be done on a war footing.” He looked well-informed and important. A uniformed bearer hovered by his elbow holding a tray laden with little samosas. The Magistrate paid him no attention at all.

“Will the metaling of Mall Road go so far as our properties?” the hotel manager inquired in a hesitant voice. “You know, tourism is ruined by bad roads. This road was last repaired ten years back, I hear, but now—”

“Not this time, not this time,” Mr. Chauhan said. “I would like all of Ranikhet to have smooth roads, but this time our budget allows repair of only one part of Mall Road, for administrative purposes.”

I cleared my throat and said, “If only you could repair the road going to St. Hilda’s! Our children have a hard time.”

The Magistrate and my host noticed me at last. Together they said, “Madam, you must be—”

“Maya Mam,” Mr. Chauhan said, beaming at me in an unlooked-for burst of bonhomie. “A teacher at the convent. A valuable citizen! She teaches her children to make jams and jellies.”

“They do schoolwork,” I said. “But they need practical skills too.”

I opened my mouth to expand on the topic, but the men had moved on already to another: who would be the candidates for the elections coming up? The two main contenders for the Nainital seat had already begun campaigning. Surely the BJP would win—the time was ripe for Hindus to govern their own country, show the world, they agreed. “Will the minister change?” the manager said to the Subdivisional Magistrate, who replied, “I am a mere servant of the people and have to humor whichever minister I get.” They laughed together and raised their glasses in a mock toast. The hotel proprietor, unsure of lunchtime protocol in a new town, had served no alcohol. They had to say their “cheers” with plain Coke and Kissan orange squash. His wife was in Delhi still, he said to me, apologetic. “That’s why things are a bit disorganized.” She would come in a month, when it was a little warmer.

I looked around for Diwan Sahib, whom I spotted sitting at a plastic table under a plum tree snowy with blossoms, tipping his hip flask into his glass, making no attempt to be discreet. He had come in a dark-blue shirt against which his white shock of hair and beard looked whiter and more disheveled than usual, giving him a raffish air. He threw a twisted half smile in my direction and nodded to me to come across. The wives of the other guests, who sat in a separate group further away, sipped their squash and darted exasperated looks at him. One said as I was passing, “We must have more lunch parties, but only for
select
people.”

They looked around the relaid garden and admired the geometric precision of the flower beds. Within the beds, segregated by color and type, were the plants that would flower in summer. Several flowers already bloomed in the martial lines of tulips, lilies, and carnations, staked and tied with string so they could not stray. Some of the women got up from their chairs to examine the flower beds closer too, so as to show off their saris. When one of them bent down to sniff the tulips, her companion broke into giggles and exclaimed, “Oh, Mrs. Sood, those flowers have no smell! They are tulips. They come from Holland. I went there once on a Thomas Cook tour! Whole fields of tulips, as if they are wheat or rice—this is nothing.”

I sat down next to Diwan Sahib and he said, “Had enough of the Burra Sa’abs?” His eyes twinkled and his wrinkles deepened when he smiled. I felt immediately at ease. I stretched out my legs, swiveled my ankles, and rested my head against the backrest of my chair.

“Why come,” I said to him, “if you will not meet anyone?”

“I am happy enough meeting only you,” he said. “But I never seem to see you. Even when you come in the afternoons you hide behind a newspaper.”

The General began talking at us as he advanced, tap-tapping the Naga spear he used as a walking stick, although it was much taller than him. His voice had long ago acquired the ability to reach the last row of soldiers in a parade. “I never read the papers. And look at my eyesight, perfect! Still driving. Why? Because I never read anything smaller than the headlines. Nothing but anarchy, I say, bombs and terrorists everywhere, waste of time reading about it. ‘Improve your Eye Sight, Never Read or Write’: I told Chauhan to nail that one to a tree—right next to the Central School.”

“Don’t come anywhere near our school,” I said. “It’s hard enough as it is, getting the classrooms filled.”

He frowned at me. “What? Who—ah, it’s you, Maya. Better off empty, I say, those classrooms. You’re ruining those pretty village girls by teaching them to read. Social misfits.” Though his head was just about level with mine, the General was confident of his authority. He held himself very straight, and like a cartoon general, he had a thick, white mustache that was curled at the tips. He adjusted the Kumaon Regiment cap he invariably wore and looked at the empty chair beside us.

Diwan Sahib held his flask out and said, “Sit down, General Sahib, I know why you’re interested in my company all of a sudden.”

The General lowered himself into the chair and held a glass out toward the hip flask. “Where’s that boy of yours? Hasn’t he come? Heard he lives here now.”

“He’s gone off somewhere. Wandering. Trekking, he calls it,” Diwan Sahib said, concentrating on his pouring of careful drops from his flask into the glass.

“Strange to see him after all these years, our young Veer. Don’t mind me, Diwan Sahib, he’s your nephew, of course. But—Maya, I knew this boy when he was just this high, and even when he was a little child he was like a grown-up. You know? I’d make jokes—every other child would laugh his head off, but this boy? Nothing. Not a smile even. Couldn’t get a word out of him.”
The General gave a loud laugh after his first sip of rum. “Takes after his uncle, doesn’t he? Yes, Diwan Sahib?”

Ramesh ambled across and patted the General on the shoulder. He was the only man in Ranikhet who would take such a liberty. “I say, General,” he boomed, “you have named your house General’s Retreat, but generals should never retreat, they should always advance.” His face turned pink as he chortled with merriment. Ramesh was a retired economist from Harvard whom everyone called Professor. He told people to their faces what others did not dare to say behind their backs. He got away with it because of his unquenchable good humor. Now he settled down with a sigh, helped himself to Diwan Sahib’s hip flask, and said, “Next time we should meet at home. I brought lots of Kingfisher beer from Delhi. And I have a new recipe for mutton biryani.”

“I didn’t know you cooked,” I said.

“Oh no, Maya, of course I don’t cook.” Ramesh waved his hand grandly as if to gesture at his battalion of cooks. “I will make the biryani only in the way that Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal.”

The Brigadier stood at the far end of the garden with an earnest-looking woman, who seemed to be an outsider. She was asking him, “What happens when a soldier has doubts about war, sir? What if they don’t want to fight?”

“We call such people bullshitters,” the Brigadier said. “That’s what we say, damn bullshitters!”

The woman mustered courage and said, “Sir, what about all this we hear, of army men raping and molesting women in the Northeast—and in Kashmir—”

The Brigadier interrupted her in a sharp voice that we heard across the lawn. “One rotten fruit here or there, madam, doesn’t make a bad basket. We deal with deviants, we do it more swiftly than anyone else.”

The hotel manager tried drawing the woman away. “Ah, Kusum-ji,” he said in arch tones, “now why don’t you have another samosa? And look, all those ladies at the flower bed there want to show you something. You remember the rule, Kusum-ji, parties and politics don’t ever mix, isn’t that what they say?”

Mr. Chauhan thumped a table and said, “That I will put on a signboard right away! And also, ‘Politics before Food, Does your Digestion No Good.’ In fact, this I may prepare and send you for display in your hotel’s lobby.”

The once-desolate bungalow was painted and polished. Its once-dislocated windows sat squarely within their frames; its roof shone red with fresh paint. The hotel manager’s profession had trained him in setting up a pretty home: the tablecloths had frilled edges, vases sprouted fresh flowers, wrought iron lampshades hung from the trees. There was a new terra-cotta birdhouse, too small for the long tail of the magpie struggling to enter it. Huge striped canvas umbrellas shaded the tables. Two bearer boys went from person to person with trays of drinks and pakoras. One of them held his tray out to me. I was intrigued by his face, which had the startling beauty of young boys in the paintings of Renaissance Italy.