Anuradha Roy - The Folded Earth

One morning I heard a banging sound that went on and on, and struggled awake. I managed to sit up, understood that this time someone really was knocking. I stumbled to the door and found Ama there. She had been calling me for days, she said. “Today I was ready to bang the door down. I thought, ‘Teacher-ni will die of starvation if not grief.’ Look at yourself: thin as a stick and old, your head like a dry coconut. Why? Is it your father who has died, or your husband?” She stood over me while I washed my face and then thumped a steel plate down on my table. It had three fat, dark madua rotis soaked in ghee, a steaming spoonful of lai saag, the greens I loved, some raw onions and a green chilli. I ate without a word, as if I had never eaten before.

After I had finished eating, Ama and I sat in the veranda, where she settled at her favourite place on the stairs and said, “You were sleeping, but someone’s been very busy while you were dead to the world.” She tucked a wad of her chewing tobacco into her mouth to create the space for a dramatic pause. Diwan Sahib’s house was a mess, she said, every single trunk and cupboard was inside out, the pages between every book had been examined — by Veer. He had scarcely stopped for a minute’s rest, he was like a man possessed. He had ransacked the whole house, and then left in his jeep without explaining anything to anyone.

“How long was he here?” I asked her, startled. Did he come to my cottage? I wanted to ask her. Did he not try to find me? Did he ask Ama about me? How could he have left without a word to me? I did not dare ask her the questions I really wanted answers to.

“He came two days after the cremation, looking like something blown here by the wind. He didn’t want to know anything about how his uncle had passed away or who had done the cremation or any of that. He kept asking: has anyone been in this house? Has anyone been looking for anything? I told him you had been there, settling Diwan Sahib’s room, but for no more than half a day.”

“And then?”

“I told him you were down here. I said I had called many times, but you had not come out, so we were worried. But he? He has no time or ears for anything that is not about himself.

“Don’t look like that,” Ama said after a minute. “You are blinded, you can’t see. There he is, swearing love and care for his uncle, but who looked after the old man through his illnesses? Was he here? Oh no, he only turns up when it is all finished, to see what he can get. All these months, he kept leaving cigarettes all over the house, and getting Diwan Sa’ab drunk. Didn’t you notice how his health collapsed after his nephew came into his life again?”

“What do you mean? Have you gone off your head? Do you know what you’re saying?” I stood up in one violent movement, had to hold on to the chair to steady my spinning head.

Ama had hinted at her suspicions before, but they had been barbed suggestions. Now, with Diwan Sahib dead and Veer having come and gone without even seeing me, she spoke her mind and her words had the unmistakable colouring of the hostility she had long felt towards Veer. Himmat Singh never failed to relay to Ama anything of interest that he overheard in the Light House so she had known for years that Veer wanted her evicted. I wondered what else she knew. I lowered myself carefully into my chair again, still feeling wobbly.

“Look at you,” Ama said. “That’s what happens when you don’t eat for days. And I haven’t gone off my head, my head’s very clear. Who kept the old man supplied with so many bottles? Who bought all those packets of cigarettes that he found wherever his eyes fell? I had told you then, and I will tell you now, this apple of Diwan Sa’ab’s eye came back here only to send him to his death. There are many ways to finish people off, you know.”

She heard cowbells close by and hurried away to the edge of the hill to yell at Puran. “Arre O Puran, can’t you see Ratna is eating Sahu-ji’s beans? Donkey, good-for-nothing, fool! Lost in his own world and the cattle wander anywhere they please.” She was tender-faced as she sat down again. “Everyone says Puran’s a madman and he’s a crazy fool, there’s no doubt about that. See how he’s crooning over that pet owl these days. It’s like the sun rises when that owl opens its eyes at night. But if I had to trust my life to anyone it would be Puran, not that Veer Singh, who cares only for himself. Your teeth will break on a big black pebble when you eat that bowl of dal, take my word for it. I notice everything, nothing escapes me.”

She gave me a significant look and repeated, “I notice everything, make no mistake. People may not pay attention to what an old woman thinks. People who are educated and think they know it all.”

* * *

That night I again had the nightmare that had visited me from time to time, each time subtly altered.

This time I was speaking to someone whose breath I could hear only inches from my ears: wheeze and gurgle, wheeze and gurgle. It was a man — who could not hear me. I could not see his face for the hood of his anorak, but I knew who it was.

“Stop,” I cried in my dream with a terrible urgency:

Come back. Where are you going?

You force foot after foot. You slide downward even as you move up. The slope shifts. The rock that seemed firm slides and falls a soundless distance away into the black gorge. Your feet are wet and warm. With your own blood — though why should that be when you’ve left the leeches behind? You look down at your boots. Blood is spilling over their rims. You stop at last, and so does the man with you, who says, You were always a worrier, come on.

Look this way, to the left! Can’t you see me begging you to turn back? Why can’t you hear me?

Your feet start up the slope again and your heart booms like a drum keeping time. The air is cold and dry, scouring your nostrils. You are pausing every few steps, drooping with weariness. The other man prods the small of your back to urge you on. Around us, all is grey: grey rocks, dirty grey snow, low grey sky. The binocular strap around your neck is a resting noose.

I would scoop you up like a baby and carry you away to safety if I could. I would zip us into a single sleeping bag and wrap myself around you all night so that the warmth of my legs could thaw your legs. I would press your hands into the warmest part of me to unfreeze your fingers.

Just a little further, the other man says.

I strain to see his face. I think I have heard his voice before. Your blood-filled boots ooze into the grey snow. They drip slick red onto stones. Can you feel anything but the sticky wetness of your feet? Only exhaustion. What can you hear? The binoculars knocking against your chest. The wind like an ocean wave.

We come to the top. It is not the level top of a plateau or the crest of a hill. It is the rim of a cavernous grey-white bowl within which the wind is swirling, shifting snow dust, tiny pebbles. Far below, at the base of the bowl, we can see water reflecting sky, slabs of ice breaking the reflection into irregular geometries. Steep sides of grey scree slide away from us into the bowl.

The other man says, Have you seen anything like that? Look through your binoculars.

The voice is from far away, the sound of sand scraped with a spade. I have heard this voice before, in another place and time. He puts a hand on your shoulder and it is missing a finger.

You raise the binoculars to your eyes and see what I knew was waiting. The edges of the lake are populated. Human skeletons and bones. Clavicles, skulls. Tibia, fibula, femur. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. Some skeletons almost intact, frozen into the bed of the lake, others clinging to the slope, trying to claw a way out. A skull floats on the liquid part of the lake.