Anuradha Roy - The Folded Earth

“This is the last time, Maya,” Miss Wilson said, taking the bill from the man. “He’s too old now, he’s senile. What’s all this nonsense? When we call him for a purpose and make so many arrangements! He should stick to the purpose. This is not done.”

That evening Diwan Sahib began running a temperature. For a few days he lay in bed in a stupor that worried me enough to call the doctor, who said, “Give him fluids, but not the kind he usually drinks.” I sat up nights, placing ice-cold swabs on his forehead when his fever rose. I passed my hands over his soft, sparse hair to make him sleep. He babbled in a slurred delirium about people and things I knew nothing of: “Farha … not Char Bagh, meet me at the Imambara … Farha, can you come … the Nawab needs a clock, he has no clock … The letters … my will … Veer … get the box, get the box, go away, take him away from me!” He had great trouble breathing and I had to raise him and massage his back to soothe his aching ribs, which he tried rubbing himself in his restless sleep. I realised he had dwindled much more than I had thought: his ribs poked out beneath his skin, his body was narrow and bony. I felt an unexpected, painful tenderness for him and quietly left his room and paced on the veranda for a while to get a grip on myself. He detested sentimentality and, fever or no fever, he would know how I was feeling from the merest glimpse of my face.

After the fever dropped away, he grew demanding and foul-tempered. He refused help from those of us who were there, but he made cutting remarks about Veer’s absence in times of need. “It’s a talent not to be underestimated,” he said when Ankit Rawat came looking for Veer one day for help with his election campaign. “The art of being away when there is tiresome work to be done for other people. The young man will no doubt come back just in time for your victory speech.” He pushed aside Himmat Singh’s food, said he wanted chicken stew with rosemary. I had no idea how to make it, but I looked up a rarely used cookbook and made a list of the ingredients I would need. I plucked a fistful of rosemary from the bushes around the house. I bought a chicken and whatever suitable vegetables I could find in the monsoon, when it was hard to find any good vegetables at all. The stew had potatoes, beans, and little onions that turned into translucent globes when cooked. Diwan Sahib had one mouthful and said it tasted of slop. I cooked him fish the next day and he said it was smelly. Some days I was so irritated by his cantankerousness that I did not go up to his house at all. “So busy, aren’t you,” he said the next time he saw me. “Huge factory to run. Quite the Madam Corporate.” For the rest of the evening, he did not say a word or look at me again. I sat with him for half an hour, growing angrier each minute, then got up and left without a goodbye.

After ten days, he was well enough to sit up in a chair, but stopped coming outside to sit under his spruce tree. When I came back from work with the newspapers as before and looked in to see him, he would be at his fireplace, although it was the middle of the afternoon. He wore a sweater and even indoors his shapeless, brown woolly cap. “The older, the colder,” he said, sounding belligerent.

The room he sat in was high-ceilinged and dark. The walls were overgrown with dusty bookshelves filled with old paperbacks that the lightest touch might have disintegrated. Diwan Sahib sat there, nursing an “early, medicinal brandy”, poking at the fire with a pair of long cast-iron tongs. We had never spoken of it, but I could not look at the fireplace now without seeing his manuscript burning there. The wall over the fireplace had a paler patch, with dust lines marking a rectangle where the picture of the dogs had been. My eyes kept returning to that bleached rectangle, as if I expected the old photograph to reappear there by magic.

The firelight carved Diwan Sahib’s face into hollows. He had stopped trimming his beard, and it had grown longer, making him look like a sadhu. His eyes were still bright, however, and if he was in a good humour when he saw me, he said, “The prettiest girl in Ranikhet! Dark as coal, so she lights up my room!” To Mr Qureshi, he said one day when I came in: “If I was younger I would warm my hands on her cheeks.” Mr Qureshi looked away quickly and busied himself searching for something he did not find.

Every evening, the rain came down on the tin roof, sometimes drumming on it and collecting in buckets and bowls inside the house where the roof had sprung leaks, sometimes no more than a soft murmur above our heads. If it stopped, all went quiet, and we sat listening to the tup-tup of dripping water from the rainwater drains that ran along the roofs.

Mr Qureshi and I talked all the time, trying to fill the gloomy house with our chatter, telling Diwan Sahib the local news: Chauhan had had a little too much to drink at a party in the officers’ mess and boasted about his kickbacks: now he was trying to salvage the situation; Miss Wilson complained of sleepless nights because of Umed Singh, who was promising in his election speeches that he would make sure all the church land in Ranikhet was turned over to common use if he came to power; Bozo had got into a fight with Bijli and almost had an ear torn off, so the General no longer brought him for walks past my house; and in the last few days Puran had been heard whimpering soft endearments to an owl who had taken to roosting in his shed. Perhaps this meant he would eventually emerge from the grief of Rani’s death.

Whenever there was a lull in our strained conversation, all we heard was the rain, the cracklings in the fire, and Diwan Sahib’s phlegmy cough, which did not respond to any quantity of hot rum.

Every day, after those long evenings with Diwan Sahib, I returned home and sat in a weary slump with a cup of coffee, trying to stay awake and deal with my daily bundle of schoolwork to be marked and account books to be checked. I was very tired. It was the kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep would take away. I was fed up with the endlessness of my work and Diwan Sahib’s illness and his moods. I was fed up with my ironclad routine. I did not want to spend one dismal evening after another at his fireplace, going over the same old stories. Ranikhet’s want of urban pleasures began to gnaw at me: why was there not one decent cinema, not a single good bookshop, not even a library? I wished I could take off in a bus to Nainital for the day — have a pizza for lunch, stroll in and out of shops, eat ice cream. But of course I could not leave as long as Diwan Sahib was ill.

This made me boil up immediately into a broth of resentment at Veer’s absence. How did he manage to be out of reach when he was most required? What was the point of our togetherness if he was never there? My thoughts slid with an aching sense of loss to my mother. Even when I had no friends in my first years in Ranikhet, it was reassurance enough that she was there, somewhere — that I would have a letter from her every so often, that I might hear her voice on the telephone. It was my fault, I told myself. I had not managed to make any real friends after leaving Hyderabad. On and off there was a new teacher at St Hilda’s who made me feel hopeful because we spoke the same language, laughed at the same things, but usually they tired of Ranikhet and within a few months went away again. Until Veer arrived, I had found no-one in town to spend time with.

One such worn-out night, when I was half asleep on my table with my head on the account books, I heard sounds from Charu’s house, voices I could not recognise. I switched off the light and pulled my curtain aside just a crack. Ama was outside, holding a stick and talking at the tin shed they had in front of their cottage. Someone was babbling and crying inside the shed; occasionally I heard a loud, unfamiliar, agitated voice, neither fully male nor female. The single, naked light bulb they had outside, hanging from a tree branch, swung in the breeze, making shadows leap and subside. There was something so eerie about the scene that I felt afraid of the dark corners of my own little house.