Anuradha Roy - The Folded Earth

That afternoon, when the jam was all bottled, labelled, and packed away in boxes, and the room’s floor empty, the girls put the song on again. The more daring among them danced to it, while the other village girls, screaming with laughter, joined in sometimes or hid behind dekchis and dupattas in embarrassment. When I entered the room, they tugged my hand, and begged me to join in. “You have to, Maya Mam, we do everything you tell us to. Now it’s your turn.”

I tied my dupatta in a knot at my hips, and danced too. It had been five years or more since I had felt as light-hearted. Diwan Sahib was well again, Charu was united with Kundan, we had bottled our jam in time, and the goons had gone away without doing us any harm. My loose bun came undone and my hair flew around my face. Someone came and plucked my glasses off and threw them aside. The girls exclaimed, “Without her glasses, Maya Mam looks exactly like a film star!” Beena and Mitu gestured with their hands to show me the steps, teaching me how to dance the way they did — shoulder shrugs, hip wiggles, hands that sliced the air like blades. Our clothes were drenched in sweat by the time we stopped, and I was breathless and buzzing with happiness.

It was only a few hours later that Beena tore up from the valley below to the clearing outside their hut, which I could see from my house. Her teeth were bared and her mouth gaped in a silent scream. Her clothes were half-ripped off her shoulders, revealing yellow, frayed bra-straps. Her mother, scrubbing a pan with sand outside their hut, looked up, and Mitu started up from the stairs on which she had been sitting and day-dreaming. Beena squatted in the middle of the courtyard speaking with her hands to her mother and sister, too fast and frantic for me to try making sense of it. Her talk was mute shadow play, her cries more terrifying for being noiseless. When she had finished, the mother swooped at Beena and pulled her head by a handful of her hair. She slapped her again and again, on her face, or wherever her hands could reach. Mitu tried to prise them apart, but her mother was too strong for her. Beena managed to bend, picked up a handful of dust and flung it into her mother’s eyes, then scrambled away as her mother’s face warped with pain and her hands flew to her streaming eyes.

I had no way of reading their gestures and could not tell what was wrong, but as I looked on in horror, I heard Ama’s voice at my ear. “Beena says she was coming back from the bazaar through the forest, and a man molested her. She says it was one of the men from Nainital who came to the factory today. He had been ogling her in the afternoon also, she says, when she was serving them tea. Her mother says it’s her fault, she wears tight clothes and goes wandering in the market, and giggles at boys.”

Ama turned back to the spectacle with a grin, and said, “That Beena’s a wildcat. Just look how they’re fighting, mother and daughter.” She cackled and stuffed some tobacco into her mouth. “It’s like watching a T.V. with the sound off. Whenever they fight, I run out to see.”

She noticed the disgust on my face and said, “Why are you so worried? Nothing happened to the girl. She’s very tough. She bit his cheek, and kicked him in the stomach and he ran away. And the mother is a loose woman anyway, she doesn’t care, really.”

“I’m going to take her to the police,” I said. “She has to report it right away. They can catch the man before he disappears.”

“Teacher-ni,” Ama said in a resigned voice. “Lati will never let you take her daughter to the police, and Beena won’t go. It’ll just add to their troubles. The less this news travels, the better for the girl.” She assumed her knowing expression and said, “There is so much I don’t talk about. If I revealed all the secrets I’ve digested and stored in my stomach, half this hillside’s people would have to go and drown themselves in a pail of water.” She gave me a long, pregnant look.

* * *

That night I dreamed my familiar dream of the dead lake at Roopkund; only this time, Beena’s and Mitu’s heads had joined the other skulls and they were scratching with their dead nails at an ice floe, trying to escape the water. I woke in a sweat and saw that the branch of a tree had stooped so close to one of my windows that I could see its black claws tapping the glass pane as the wind gathered and buffeted the trees. The house creaked and muttered, and the first drops of rain quickly turned into a steady drumming on the roof. The wind-chime I had hung on my peach tree tinkled with such insistence that I wanted to run out into the rain and pull it off to stop the noise. All the happiness of the afternoon had disappeared, as if it had never been.

I curled my body into a tight ball of aloneness. Diwan Sahib had been world-weary when I told him I wanted to go to the police about Beena. “Nothing’s ever going to change,” he had said. “No policeman will be interested, no new politician, no elections, nothing will ever make a difference.” He had slumped into his chair and dozed off after a while as he often did nowadays, even midway through conversations. Veer was in Dehra Dun, from where he would leave on another long trek with a new lot of clients. We had not been able to find the space or time for days to be together. He had not appeared remotely regretful at our parting, and when I had announced with blithe nonchalance that I would go to Dehra Dun with him, we had had another quarrel. “You in Dehra Dun with me? Forget it,” he had said. “I’ll be at work. It’s not a holiday for me.” He had shoved things into his rucksack, hoisted it into his jeep and driven off without a proper goodbye. He had not telephoned since.

In winter the barbet calls all day from its lonely perch high in a leafless tree. Its plaintive, monotonous cry is the distillation of solitude and sadness. The tourists have gone, and the summer visitors with them. Only now does our town feel truly ours, as if it has been rescued from intruders and returned to us. The earth is hard with cold, the air stings ears and eyes and makes noses water. The tree-darkened roads looping the hillsides are deserted, there is no fear of tourists’ cars careering round the bends. The big old houses in the cantonment area are empty again. Waiters and cooks are playing cricket on the lawns of their hotels. They have planted three somewhat straight sticks as wickets. One of the waiters, Chandan, is teaching himself to ride a bicycle and he lurches dangerously as he lets go of the handlebars to join his palms and say, “Namaste, Maya Mam,” as he passes me. I taught him when he was a boy of twelve or fourteen. Another of my relative failures, but at least he mastered the alphabet, and he learned to add, though he never managed multiplying or dividing.

Mall Road in this season has a lazy air. In the morning when the sun bakes the other side of the road, every shopkeeper at the row of cupboard-sized shops below Meghdoot Hotel deserts his post, and customers have to seek them out on the opposite parapet. Men slurp tea at Negi’s shack. Next to the lamppost, people sit on their haunches at a charcoal brazier munching the warm peanuts roasted on it. Dogs amble around, occasionally snapping and snarling at each other. When the sun starts to go down, swallows knife through the air into their perches at the candle-lit grocery shop. A squad of monkeys clambers over the tin roof of Pandey-ji’s vegetable shop, dividing into ones and twos to attack the vegetable baskets from many fronts. Pandey-ji’s mother, a woman with gold nose studs and a large bun, chases them with a stick, screaming at the top of her voice. Two soldiers polish the already gleaming brass plate that says officers’ mess next to an imposing pair of gates, while dozens of cadets, hair shaven to their ears, file past to their barracks further down.