The Folded Earth

Home > Other > The Folded Earth > Page 7
The Folded Earth Page 7

by Anuradha Roy


  Now she was shaking Puran by the shoulder and scolding him for dozing when he should have been watching. The clear mountain air carried her words to us. “They’re right to call you mad if you can’t even manage a few cows! I told you they were not to go to that garden any more!” She walked rapidly off into the valley, then up the slope on the other side, swatting Gouri Joshi with her stick. I had never seen her strike an animal before.

  11

  About six kilometres downhill from the frayed glories of the cantonment is the commercial centre of our town, the main bazaar. Houses are stacked five deep up the slopes of the bazaar hill, tumbling down on each other, threaded through with narrow, dirty alleyways and stinking open drains. The ground floors of the first row have shops with wooden shutters and shelves knocked together out of cheap plywood. Through the doors of the shops, you can see a cobbler stitching soles, a picture-framer measuring glass. There is Bhim Singh who sits walled in by steel and copper in his shop all day, selling everything from saucepans to nails and hammers. There is the one-eyed old Gopal Ram who repairs watches, Jewel Tailors which always ferret away bits of our cloth. There is the rheumy-eyed drunk in a beret who darns with such skill that old and new cannot be told apart. There are rows of villagers on the road in front of the shops; they sell their produce from gunny-sacks and handcarts. One man has a sack full of onions, another just has tomatoes, or misshapen oranges. Coolies trudge up and down between the cars and crowds, bent double under gas cylinders, crates, and metal trunks that they carry on their shoulders. There is a petrol pump, Mr Qureshi’s car workshop, and Bisht Bakery, with its “We Bake Memories” sign at the entrance. At the mandi, vegetables are sprinkled with water to make them seem fresher than they are. Its concrete floor is slippery with rotting peel and water. The two butchers’ shops are behind the mandi, and people hurry there for the marble-eyed heads of slaughtered goats, the cheapest meat you can buy.

  Our school’s jam factory is in the grounds of the church in the cantonment area, but St Hilda’s itself is in one of the back lanes of the bazaar and I walked there almost every day of the week for staff meetings and the classes I still took for the very young children. When I went in through the gates one morning soon after the hotel manager’s party, I found Miss Wilson in heated discussion with two young men who had parked their cars within the school compound.

  “It’s not safe for the children, this is their playground,” she was saying in her strident voice. “You, Deepak Bisht, you were a student here, you should have more sense than to park in a school playground.”

  “Only till the elections, Agnes Mam,” the man called Deepak said in a tone half playful, half pleading. The elections were still some months away, but this time, because there was a contender from Ranikhet, campaigning had begun early. “Please, Mam, there’s no space on the road,” he said. He gestured outward as if to point to the obviousness of it. A bus and a jeep that had come from opposite ends were at that moment conclusively stuck side by side, paring each other’s paint off if either of them attempted the smallest movement. Behind them, on both sides, for as far as we could see, the narrow road was a choked cacophony of cars, motorbikes, scooters and trucks, honking and beeping to hurry things up although it was clear that nothing of the sort was possible. The air was sooty with diesel fumes.

  “What is all this ‘please, please’, Deepak?” the other man said, shouting above the noise. “We have to park these cars, and that’s the end of it. She can’t do anything to stop us.”

  “Today there are two cars, tomorrow there will be twenty, and how will I stop them?” Miss Wilson wiped her face with a folded hanky and tucked it back in to her waist. She shook her head. “Take them away, take them away now,” she said, gesturing me to come with her and not interfere. She began to walk off before the argument went further along its futile path. She appeared afraid and aggressive at the same time. She knew she would not get her way. Like all of us, she was wary of the anarchic power of party workers in the middle of a campaign, when our small town, where everyone knew everyone at least by sight, was invaded by outsiders with microphones and motorbikes. In Bihar, we had read in the papers, small-time political goons commandeered any vehicle they fancied and did not return your car or scooter until the elections were over or the car ruined.

  The other man slapped Deepak on the shoulder. “Sisterfucker,” he said amiably, “you’ve never told us you went to a Christian school. We should throw you out of the Party.” He laughed. “You’re a guy to be watched. We never know with you, the direction of the wind changes your colour from saffron to green.”

  Miss Wilson’s back stiffened and she stopped in her tracks. I turned back to the men and said, “Half your Party’s from schools just like these. What’s your problem?” Hypocrites, I muttered, loud enough for them to hear. My heart thudded and my breath grew short. I never picked fights. I did not know what had got into me.

  The laughing man turned towards me with an expression of mock amazement. When he spoke, his voice was lazy and salacious. “Madam, why are you getting into something that shouldn’t bother you? You’re not even one of them.”

  I began to sweat despite the cold. My hands had gone clammy. I could see my face in his reflecting sunglasses, distorted, small, windblown, scowling. Defenceless.

  Deepak gave me an apologetic look and tried to propel the other man away. He patted his companion’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go, we’re late. We have all those banners to put up.” The other man turned to go, but flung a last look in my direction, growling, “They’re schoolteachers, they’re women. So I’m letting them be. No son of a … picks a fight with me.”

  Miss Wilson, who had been standing a few feet away, shook her cane at some blue and white uniforms she spotted in the grounds and shouted, “Inside, inside, children! There are cars here now, you can’t play! And you, Maya, ring the bell, the chowkidar has forgotten and it’s past nine o’clock. What’s wrong with all you people?”

  * * *

  All through my childhood, I was my father’s pet. He had put aside his disappointment at not fathering a son, and had begun to take perverse pride in me, his only child, the girl who won all the prizes in school, his bright-eyed, adoring devotee. When he came back from work, mine was the name he called from the door, and despite his bad right leg, he scooped me up and swung me in the air when I was little enough, saying, “Now tell me, my Princess, which giants have you killed today?” When I was a little older, I went with him on his rounds of our factories and once, when I was no more than seven years old, he pulled me out of the chalk grid of a hopscotch game and introduced me to some visiting grown-ups with a flourish: “Meet the Princess of Begumpet Pickles! One day she will become the first female industrial magnate of this country.” He spoke to me only in English because he considered it the language of success, even though this excluded my Telugu-speaking mother from our conversations. From infancy, I was made to understand I was the heir. Once when my mother protested, “She will be married, she won’t be your daughter any more, she’ll have her own life and she may want other things,” my father snapped at her. “She’ll live here and run the business, and I’ll arrange a husband for her who lives with us. Why am I earning all this money if not for my grandsons?”

  He continued the practice of calling for me until well into my teenage years – his car would stop, I would hear his step on the staircase and then hear my name. I would put aside whatever I was doing and run to the front door to open it and hand him his glass of fresh coconut water. It was only during my senior school years, when extra classes began to keep me away from home, that this routine began to be disrupted. Finally it ceased altogether.

  I can see now that my father sensed even then that he was losing me, and everything he did was an attempt somehow to corral me, to reclaim our lost days of easy happiness when I was a willing disciple and he my unquestioned master. He insisted that I spend hours with him on the factory’s accounts after school. Holidays were to be s
pent going to work with him and learning on the job. “Nothing like learning on the job,” he would repeat, tapping his silver-headed stick on the floor. “Get your head out of the clouds, Maya, life is not lived on a cloud.” Twice, when I was still a pig-tailed teenager, he made me sit behind his big shining work desk – I needed a cushion to reach the right commanding height – summon a wretched employee, and inform the man that he was being sacked. If I knew something of this kind was in the offing and tried to hide from him, he forced me out of the house and into his car. “You don’t become a businesswoman unless you learn to be tough, you have to be steel inside,” he would say. On the drive, he would lecture me all the way: “Business is all about decisions that are taken in the larger interest, with a long-term plan. That man you sacked was serving no purpose any more. His salary was a waste of our money. It had to be done. Do you think I like sacking people? See this as your management degree, Maya. This is teaching you more than any business academy.”

  After these encounters, I would retreat to a corner of our orchard, where, under a chikoo tree, a stray dog twice had puppies. I brought food for the bitch, milk for the puppies, and sat with them for long hours, letting the puppies nip my hands, feeling myself restored limb by limb, muscle by muscle, by their bemused joy over a dead leaf or a mound of soft earth they could dig.

  I despised myself for not having had the steel to stand up for Puran during the party when Mr Chauhan had threatened him. Ramesh had protested; why didn’t I, when Puran was part of my “family”? My two worlds had never intersected this way before and when for once they did, I had not measured up. With the men who had threatened Miss Wilson today, I wondered how brave I would be if I faced real, physical danger when just their suggestion of violence made me so afraid for myself.

  That afternoon, I went to the tea shack by the Jhoola Devi temple. The temple was laden with thousands of tarnished brass bells, big and small, decades old, heavy with wishes. They were everywhere: they hung from ceilings, windows, doors, railings, walls, tied to each other with bits of wire, string, fading red-gold cloth, tinsel. It was an ancient temple to which people came when in need, and tied on those brass bells for their wishes to be granted.

  None of the bells were mine, but this temple had replaced the chikoo tree of my childhood. Its surrounding forests of oak, chestnut, and rhododendron were so dense and dark that when I walked through them, the sky narrowed to a road-shaped ribbon overhead. I liked the little temple’s blue pillars and flower-filled courtyard and was friends with the priest’s daughters who sat outside knitting in the sun. One of them worked in our jam-jelly unit. There was the temple dog whom I fed batashas; I waited to hear him howl in tune with the priest’s conch. The sound of the conch reminded me of a temple I used to go to with my mother in Hyderabad. She and I would meet there, unknown to my father, after I left home. We would sit together in the stone courtyard outside the temple and she would buy me a string of orange flowers from the vendors by the gateway and pin it into my hair, saying, “Be strong. The moment you have a baby, he will not wait a day, he will want you to be his daughter again.” Each time, she brought me a piece of jewellery from her box and thrust it into my hands, without a word.

  The boy who ran the tea shack at Jhoola Devi made me instant noodles topped with fried onion and chopped green chillies, and a glass of gingery tea. While I ate, he pottered about, giving me the latest news on forest fires, the water supply, leopard sightings. He claimed every time to have seen a leopard, sometimes families of them. “Just before you came, not five minutes ago!” When average leopards seemed too run-of-the-mill to boast about, he said, “I know they say India has no black panthers, but I have seen one sitting here, in the middle of this very road, coal black but for a white patch on its tail, with green, shining eyes. There is another I have seen – not once but twice – it comes up from the forest on full-moon nights, and this one has square markings instead of round.”

  He had to raise his voice to make himself heard that evening. Songs relayed by a microphone drowned his voice. The singing did not come from our temple, but from one further away, where a godman had taken up residence. Jeeps drew up and off-loaded fresh platoons of acolytes who marched up the hill to his temple. The way to it was festooned with banners and garlands.

  “It’s started early this time,” the boy said, when I asked him what the noise was for. “It’s not for a religious festival – the Baba has come for the elections. He’ll be here for the next six months.” The boy’s smile was wide and untroubled. “It’s great for business, as long as it lasts!”

  12

  Sanki Puran had no recollection of his cow having aimed a kick at the Brigadier, but Mr Chauhan’s neck throbbed with stress each time he allowed his thoughts to return to that party. He had tended, since that day, to encounter Puran at every turn: smelly, slovenly, a disgrace. What was more, he grazed his animals on precisely those slopes where Mr Chauhan had planted signs both in Hindi and in English announcing fines for illegal grazing. Puran was not acquainted with the alphabet in either language, but he welcomed the iron signboards because the posts they stood upon provided sturdy places to tether cattle.

  Throughout his working life, Mr Chauhan had despaired over the lack of discipline, civic sense and hard work among his fellow citizens, but what he saw around him in the hill country beat everything he had ever been exasperated by before. It was as if people were on holiday all the time. Apart from getting drunk or gossiping around the peanut seller’s charcoal brazier, Mr Chauhan did not see the men doing anything at all. And of all the men he saw, Sanki Puran grated the most. “Not only is he a shiftless rowdy,” he told his wife, “he is shiftless and rowdy in an army uniform. But I have decided what I need to do, for a start.”

  His wife saw that familiar gleam in his eyes and smiled. He really did know how to change things. She remembered the time when they had been posted in a cantonment town in Uttar Pradesh, where too he was Administrator, “responsible for everything from light in a bulb and water in the tap, to keeping the cantonment clean and green”. His notion of “clean” included reforming the morals of the young. He came up with a novel scheme. He sent the police around to all the public parks in the cantonment area and wherever they came upon romancing teenagers, the policemen frightened them out of their wits by taking their pictures, demanding their names and addresses, and threatening to inform their parents of – as Mr Chauhan put it – their “extra-curricular activities”. “This is when you should be studying, not being obscene in parks,” Mr Chauhan had thundered at a cowering couple on the first raid, one that he had personally conducted to show the staff how to go about it. Mrs Chauhan narrated this story of her husband’s innovative thinking to many people in Ranikhet and told them she was sure he had thought of something similarly novel and exemplary for the insane cowherd.

  What happened a few days after the party later became a frightening haze in Puran’s head. It was around midday. He had been sitting at the edge of the slope next to his cows. He had tied Gangu, the skittish young one, to a tree, spoken some sense into the wobbly, large-eyed new calf that was unable to draw enough milk from its mother, and then sat back on his haunches, smoking grass. Charu was at some distance, high up in a tall oak tree, cutting fodder with her sickle. She saw the four men approach Puran but returned to cutting oak leaves, not for a moment imagining what they were going to do.

  Without warning Puran felt rough hands on his shoulders, harsh voices in his ear, giving him instructions: he could not tell what. He saw nothing but a blur of laughing faces. They thrust him into a jeep. He responded with keening, terrified, animal sounds to its unfamiliar rolling motion as it charged off, taking bends and slopes at high speed. The men slapped him around the ears and shouted, “Arre yaar, shut up! Chootiya! Donkey!” Then they stopped the vehicle, pushed him out, stripped him down to his threadbare underpants and thrust him under a roadside tap. The icy water clawed at him. They threw a bar of bright green soap towards him. He shiv
ered at the unexpected feel of open air on his near-naked body. It made him ache with the cold. He clutched the soap not knowing what he was expected to do with it.

  One of the men who was kinder than the others tried telling him something, then, getting no response, rolled up his sleeves, took the soap from his hand and lathered him all over while the other men screamed with laughter and slapped their thighs, shouting, “Mammi, Mammi, give him a good wash!” Puran’s knees knocked and he clasped his hands over his crotch. A small knot of people had gathered by this time, some of them waiting with empty canisters and buckets for their turn at the tap. Nobody dared raising a protest against the men, among whom they recognised Mr Chauhan’s guard, driver, and chowkidar. Some of the gathered people thought it was a joke. Some said, “Good thing, that crazy Puran really needed a bath.”

  After it was over, Puran found himself in an unfamiliar yellow shirt, red pullover, and overlarge blue trousers. He babbled in his hollow-sounding voice and darted for his own clothes, which had been flung to the verge in an untidy heap. Before he could reach them, one of the men picked up the clothes on the end of a stick and tossed them into a heap of twigs and leaves and pine cones he had set fire to at the road’s edge. The shoes followed. The flames leaped and crackled; the fumes from the burning rubber made people draw back with choking coughs.

 

‹ Prev