by Anuradha Roy
I had heard leopards calling the night before, a hoarse sound much like the sawing of wood. It was very close to the house – I smelled its scent, like that of burned hair and buried myself deeper in my pillow. I wished I had never read Corbett. The leopards in Corbett’s stories were all natives of our hills, and short of opening locks on doors were able to enter almost any house at will, with the kind of intelligence and stealth that nobody imagined animals possessed. Had I remembered to lock the doors downstairs? Were the windows properly bolted? After tossing and turning I got up and checked and then tried to return to sleep again. The next day I heard that the General had almost lost Bozo to the leopard; miraculously, the dog had escaped with a gash on its shoulder.
The day after that I heard Charu’s call for Gouri coming and going, growing louder, then fainter, louder again, hopeful, questioning, despairing, as afternoon purpled into dusk. She wandered up and down every slope that I could see from my windows. The brass bells on the other cows tinkled as they came homeward from the valleys, but Gouri did not appear.
By dusk, a knot of people had gathered outside and the clerk shook his head and pulled on a beedi saying, “Call the girl back, it’s no use.” He bent over the fire outside his house and poked at it. “Take every care you can, but when the leopard wants something he gets it.”
“What do you expect?” Ama said. “We live in the middle of a forest.”
“The other day,” the taxi driver said, “we were standing by the road – at just this time – four of us. And Lachman’s dog was sniffing about right there, two feet from us. Before we knew it, a leopard had come out of the bushes and snatched it away. We chased it with sticks, we shouted and screamed, but it was too quick.”
“And?”
“And, what do you know? It dropped the dog! But by then the dog had died – maybe of fright – but it had a deep wound, dripping so much blood, the road went red. Half its fur and skin was torn off, you could see right down to its bones near the head.”
“That Lachman had paid five hundred rupees for it. And he’d been feeding it a boiled egg every day for the past year. Said it was a valuable guard dog.”
The other man smirked. “The bastard didn’t have money for his wife and children, but he made sure the dog got a boiled egg each day!”
“Boiled!” they said again and held each other, shaking with laughter. “Not even raw, boiled!”
Ama snarled, “Why don’t you get out and help the girl hunt for her cow instead of sitting here telling silly stories?” She hitched up her sari and creaked down the slope with a long stick in her hand, shaking her head at them and muttering.
Charu found Gouri at dawn the next day, in a deep gully. The cow had fallen in awkwardly. Two of its legs jutted at such an odd angle they were certainly broken, and it had a deep wound near its neck. It was alive, but it lay with a still, glazed look, not making a sound. The bell at its neck was red with blood as were the white patches on its mostly dark body.
Everyone gathered around the cow. Charu held out torn pieces of roti to it, eyes streaming tears, saying, “Gouri Joshi, eat something.” She tried to stem the flow of blood from the wound on its neck by stuffing her dupatta against it, but the cloth was soaked in a moment.
“We should call the vet,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“That animal doctor will be no good now; it’s too late,” the clerk said. There was a general murmur of assent.
“If anyone can get it out of there, it’s the Ohjha,” Ama said. “Send someone to call him. But will he come?”
Just three days before, Charu’s grandmother had been holding forth to me about how the Ohjha loathed the new vet. The new vet was a local man who spoke a Pahari dialect, and this had won people’s hearts – the earlier vets had all been strangers from the plains. The new man had cut into the Ohjha’s livelihood. Unlike the vet, the Ohjha was not employed by the hospital. Unlike the vet, the Ohjha had fulminated to Charu’s grandmother, there would be no food on his plate or drink in his glass if sick animals stopped being brought to him. The government paid the vet every month, regardless of how many animals he treated, but who paid the Ohjha? He had to make his way in the world by his own devices. “There he was, sitting in the middle of all the junk at the Kabariwallah’s,” said Ama, “shaking his trident and screaming into his glass of booze, ‘I’ll kick that crazy bastard, the vet, I’ll kick him in the balls!’ I told him, ‘Forget all that, old man, your bijniss is going to go thup, your days are numbered.’ I laughed at him. He won’t come now for me.”
“Why won’t he come? He needs the work,” the taxi-driver said. He got into his cab and drove off to Mall Road to spread the word: anyone who saw the Ohjha was to tell him to come at once.
Ama said, “You don’t believe any of this, Teacher-ni, you city people, but someone’s put a spell on that cow, or an evil wind is blowing curses over it. Or else why did it wander so far this time?”
“Yes, only the Ohjha can do something,” the clerk nodded in sombre agreement.
I said, “Don’t let Charu stay out there all night, it’s too cold and too dangerous.” But her grandmother, realising it would be pointless, did not try calling Charu back home. That evening, she took down a stack of rotis for the cow and food for the girl, helped her make a fire, then hobbled back up. She would do all Charu’s share of the work herself and ask her no questions, however long the cow remained alive; and who could tell, perhaps Charu’s devotion would work a miracle?
The Ohjha came the next afternoon. He lit a fire near Gouri Joshi and threw all kinds of things into it. Little boys from the neighbourhood were made to run up and down the hill many times to cater to the Ohjha’s demands: Ghee! Turmeric! Some uncooked rice! A lemon. Green chillies! A piece of yellow cloth. And so on. He waved his peacock feathers over the cow, chanted, swayed, and shrieked again and again, shaking his head so hard it looked as if it would snap and fall off his neck. Then he went still and quiet. After an interval when everyone waited, respectful and expectant, he gave his verdict: “When the time comes to return to the world of ghosts and spirits, nobody can stand between death and life.” He shook out his robes and feathers, picked up his trident, and walked away. By then, he had deposited charms all over the hillside, eaten three meals at Ama’s house, and pocketed twenty rupees.
Charu remained with the cow all the next day and the day after that. During the day, between grazing their other cattle, Puran came and sat by the cow, stroking it, pressing his own concoction of ground-up herbs to its wounds, and muttering his gibberish into its ear. For some of the time that Puran was there the cow’s eyes appeared to flicker with a suggestion of life, its pain seemed briefly soothed. Then it sank back into a stupor.
Charu had another visitor too. Every evening, when there was no danger of other people, Kundan Singh came stealing down the slope to the forest and sat with Charu till it was time to serve dinner at Aspen Lodge. He collected wood to make a fire near her to keep leopards away. He bought noisy little fireworks from the market to frighten off animals. He went away at mid-evening to resume work and then, after he had served dinner, and his duties were done, he came back with a torch, down the dark slopes, weaving between tree trunks and brambles. He brought whatever food he had been able to squirrel away from the hotelier’s dinner and laid open steel tiffin boxes for her to eat from. He wanted Charu to have the best bits, things she had never eaten: meatballs the first day, chicken the next, then fried rice and egg curry. After eating, they held each other close by the fire, wrapped in a blanket thick enough for the chill of summer nights. Only when sunlight crept up over the ridge did he leave to serve the hotelier and his wife their bed-tea and Marie biscuits.
Kundan Singh thought he might never be as happy again, despite Charu’s tears, the gasping sobs that interrupted her numbed silence, and just below them, the pain-filled eyes of Gouri Joshi, which on the fourth day clouded over and closed.
16
My house was very small. It had two rooms, and a tiny kitchen w
ith two doors. One of the doors opened towards a rockface that in summer was covered with wildflowers. There was so little space between the rockface and the door that you had to walk between them sideways. The larger room, on the ground floor, led out to a north-facing veranda where I had hung geranium overhead that trailed pink and red when it flowered. Every afternoon, after I finished with the school and factory and had had my tea with Diwan Sahib and read the papers with him, I would come back and sit in my veranda, waiting for the sun to set over the snow-peaks.
I was not a good housekeeper, but I could not bring myself to employ someone to clean up. I did not have the spare cash, and besides I had never liked people going through my belongings. The only time someone – a childhood friend – came to stay with me in Ranikhet, she was lecturing me by the second morning: “Maya, for heaven’s sake! You’re never going to use that broken lamp again! And this ancient toaster? Has it ever worked? Why don’t you throw out that ugly tin trunk and get a proper side table? And, my God, look at those cobwebs!” When I told her cleaning cobwebs had been Michael’s department because I was not tall enough, she gave me an exasperated look and climbed onto a chair with a broom in her purposeful hand. She kept picking clothes out of my cupboard, holding them up for display between a finger and thumb, and saying, “Hey, there are flood victims who would turn this down if you donated it to them!”
Sometimes I did have cleaning fits, but just as I was about to throw something out, I would be held back by a memory: that’s the chipped blue ceramic bowl Michael and I bought when we set up house, that patched and darned sweater I never wear is the one my mother knitted for me, and that’s the toaster Diwan Sahib gave me during my first month in Ranikhet – it fused in a blaze of sparks the very next week and resisted all attempts to repair it, but still. Over the years, the clutter had become part of the comforting topography of the house, and after I had locked up at night and drawn the curtains and sat down with my glass of rum, I felt the house sighing with me, as if it were unwinding as well.
The cleanest part of the house was the earthen courtyard around it, which Charu swept every morning as if it were an extension of her own yard. She would come early with a broom, her hair and mouth covered with her dupatta, sweep and rake and sweep again, and leave in a cloud of dust and dry leaves. She would return a minute later and sprinkle a mug of water before the door to settle the dust, and when the smell of damp earth reached me inside the house, I would know she had finished.
In the days after Gouri Joshi died, Charu did not come. I did not expect her to: her grandmother said she was moping and hardly managing her chores. Then she did begin to come once more, but the sweeping was haphazard and the leaves remained unraked in many places. I watched her listless movements and was reminded of Mr Chauhan’s despair over the filth in the cantonment and his promise to turn Ranikhet into a Switzerland. He had said he would do something about the vandalism at the graveyard where Michael was buried, but he had done nothing that I could see. The lilies had struggled back to life, however, and no more damage had been done.
Charu disappeared for long hours with – and sometimes without – the other cows and goats. She often left Bijli behind too, tied to the door-post, indignant and restless, barking all afternoon. She left Ama to do all the work in their vegetable patches. When she ate at all, she poked at the rice on her plate, pushing much of it away. I heard her grandmother’s strident voice shout at her. “You think food grows on trees? Half your rice is thrown into the cow’s feed every day. You need to starve a day or two and then you’ll know what food is about.”
I did not know it then, but Charu did: Ranikhet appeared to be a dead end to the hotel manager and he had decided to move back to Delhi. With him would go his cook, her Kundan Singh. Charu had never been to the city he would go off to: she had no way of picturing his future life far away. What unimaginable lures and temptations did it hold? She did not know if she would ever see him again.
Later, when things fell into place, I was able to understand what I had seen that summer when I went deep into the forest one afternoon. I had followed my usual route to the temple until, near Westview Hotel, I decided I would walk along the stream instead, to see where it led. I went down a low slope and with every step seemed to leave a little more daylight behind. There was a path of sorts, beaten by human feet for some of the way, then the undergrowth grew dense and thorny bushes began to catch on my clothes. Somewhere I could hear a whistling thrush. Its piercing, clear song cut its own path through the forest, each surge of melody punctuated by a few seconds of rustling quiet.
I had not thought of it for years, but the air, the trees, the aquarium-green light all around, took me back to a forest near Hyderabad where I had once gone with Michael. It was a wilderness with a half-dry stream somewhere in it and we had chanced upon it during one of our joyrides on Michael’s motorbike. He had been teaching me how to ride it, seated behind me, putting his hands over mine on the handlebars to guide me. For several days we had had nothing but painful falls, collisions and quarrels, but that day I had finally got the hang of it and was speeding down the empty road, jubilant, when Michael suddenly said, “Stop!”
The sound of the motorbike died down, I parked it at the edge of the forest, and we walked into it, hand in hand, as if we were children in a fairy-tale entering an enchanted wood. Broad-leaved trees, stacked close and deep, blocked out the sun, their green looking black in the shade. There was dark earth and mulch underfoot, and a drumstick tree with a furry blanket of caterpillars over its trunk. The air was sweet with the dense scent of the tiny white flowers of wild curry leaf plants. I picked up a dead branch to use as my machete, but it broke in half with my first swipe at the brush. I plucked a red wildflower and stuck it behind my ear. We laughed a lot. I felt beautiful. My hair was loose, it fell to my waist. We found a small, dead bird on our path. I mourned for the loneliness of its mate. Michael had a smile in his eyes when he said, “The mate is happily mating with a newer, bluer, larger bird.”
“If I died,” I had said, “you would find a newer, bluer bird within a week, men are like that.”
And Michael had said, “You wouldn’t wait for me to die to find another man, look at the dozens humming around your ears like butterflies on a flower.” He had stopped walking then and kissed me everywhere, his urgent hands inside my clothes.
* * *
I was summoned to the present by the call of a fox. It was some distance away, invisible in the undergrowth. Its cry made the forest seem quieter and more deserted than I had noticed, the road very distant. The canopy formed overhead by the trees hid most of the sky. In the stillness, I heard voices, and then saw them: Charu and Kundan Singh. They were a little way ahead, in a clearing, the sun giving their hair golden halos as if they had stepped out of a painting. I stopped, hardly daring to breathe. I noticed every detail: his white and blue shirt, his mop of hair, the way his eyebrows overhung his deep-set eyes, her dupatta, the green of a tender new leaf, his young man’s Adam’s apple, the brass amulet tied to his neck with a thick black thread, the sparkling green glass studs in her ear lobes, the look on her face of desperation.
Her back was against a giant chestnut tree. He stood facing her, barricading her between his arms against a tree. I heard him saying, “I will be back, you’re not to worry, I will be back. You must wait. I’ll write to you.”
She said, “You’ll write!”
“Yes!” he said, fervent. “Every week. Every day.”
She turned her face up to him and I could see tears in her eyes. In a mumble so quiet I could hardly hear it, she said, “But I can’t read. I can’t read or write. I never learned.”
He looked flummoxed for a second. Then in a pleading voice he said, “I’ll do everything else. You just have to learn to read and write. Or find someone to read for you.”
She laughed despite the tears. “And how will I get someone else to read out your letters? What will you write about? What you cooked for lunch, what the ma
nager said to you?”
He buried his fingers and then his face in her hair. “I’ll write in riddles,” he said. “It is only you who will know what I am saying.” He twisted the studs in her ear and said, “Give me one of these, and when we meet again, it’ll be back with the other. It’ll be our lucky charm.”
It was about a fortnight later, early in May, that Charu came to me with a letter from her friend “Sunita” and asked me to teach her to read and write.
PART TWO
1
It was early one morning that summer, Diwan Sahib still rumpled with sleep, holding his mug of tea, and I on my way to school, cutting through his lawn. A distant humming sound that came closer every second had stopped me in my tracks and brought him out from his bedroom in his night-clothes.
The sound resolved itself into an olive green helicopter and I said, “It’s just a helicopter.” As I started on my way again, Diwan Sahib said, “It may not be just a helicopter. Not in an army town. Have you any idea what goes on here? This is a town that lives by secrets. State secrets. Army secrets. Grubby little personal secrets.”
He looked more ill-tempered and bleary-eyed than was usual for his early mornings, and looked set to embark on a long story I would not be able to interrupt. I quickened my pace and shouted over my shoulder at him, “It is just a helicopter, and I’ll see you after school.”
That day however, the helicopter noise was insistent, and there were two of them: circling the forests, first coming down very low, then swooping away in another direction, chopping up the sky with their blades. Was it a General visiting, or did a forest fire needed monitoring? Each time the sound approached, people paused in whatever they were doing to look up and puzzle over it.
The restless sound echoed through the skies all day. By mid-afternoon we noticed dark plumes of smoke in the distance, and some people claimed they had heard an explosion. At Bisht Bakery, both customers and bakers were agreed that the Army was trying to find a Chinese spy who had slipped in through the northern border. By the time I reached Negi’s tea stall, the consensus had changed: an escaped terrorist was on the run and had set fire to something important.
