by Anuradha Roy
Puran let out a strangled yelp. He thrust his hand into the flames to rescue his clothes. The man who had scrubbed him with the soap tried pulling him away, but Puran’s small frame was possessed with a new demonic strength. Charu, who had clambered down from her tree and cut across the valley to catch up with the jeep, saw him put his hands into the fire and screamed, “Chacha, Puran Chacha!” and tugged at his new yellow shirt, but she was not strong enough to stop him.
His hands were as charred as the clothes by the time he had retrieved them, but he tore off the yellow shirt and replaced it with his tattered and still smoking old uniform. Some of it came apart in his hands, but he managed to get it on, though one of its arms and a part of the collar had burned away.
Ama gave me a theatrical account of what had happened, but I did not see Puran for several days after the incident. He took to hiding in the cowshed and whimpering in a corner there, refusing to graze the animals. He slept huddled in the straw, holding a goat kid for warmth. Charu took him food and water and wheedled him into eating, then left to graze the cows and goats alone. Puran only dashed into the forest at dawn to shit when everyone was still asleep. One such morning, he came back, holding an animal in his arms.
He set it down in the courtyard. It stood there, only a little higher than the very tall black rooster that waggled its head at the intruder and circled it, pecking at the ground around its hooves. It was a fawn, exquisite in its delicate beauty, its long eyelashes fencing in pools of brown that took up most of its pointed face and big moist nose. Puran knelt next to it, and groaned and cooed and slapped the sides of his thighs in delight. The fawn would not let anyone else come close. If they did, it moved away with careful dignity. But when Puran cooed, it turned its head in his direction, took a step towards him and even allowed him to touch it, which he did with infinite tenderness. He gathered the creature in his arms after we had inspected it, and disappeared behind the stand of bamboo that blocked the cow stalls from our view. He made the fawn a soft, cushioned bed with piled pine needles and dry grass. He named her Rani, because she was queenly in her disdain and because she was a deer from Ranikhet.
Over the next weeks, we grew accustomed to seeing Puran carrying the fawn like a baby when he went to the forest, her legs poking quilllike out from beneath his arms. He fed her milk in an aluminium bowl and muttered to her day and night. She listened to him with the distant patience of a diva before an acolyte. After a while, having had enough of his adoration, Rani would get up and walk away to nibble at grass. The clerk said, “Puran has a lover at last, a princess no less, and she’s playing as hard to get as any pretty woman.” Everyone laughed, and shouted, “O Sanki, shall we arrange a wedding?”
I thought it a rare thing, almost other-wordlly, that this barking deer’s fawn had come to live among us. I waited every morning to catch a glimpse of her when Puran carried her down the hill for a constitutional before he left with the cattle, which he was now grazing again. It made me late for school some days, I said to Diwan Sahib, but I felt as if my day had not begun until I caught a glimpse of Rani’s liquid eyes and languid legs.
“Do you know what drew me to Corbett?” he said to Veer and me after he had heard me out. “That is, apart from the fact that he habitually described springs with ‘gin-clear’ water? – there’s a man after my own heart. Imagine mountain springs gushing gin!” Diwan Sahib poured himself a hefty measure of Bombay Sapphire.
“His tall tales?” Veer said in a tone so caustic that Diwan Sahib looked at him in surprise.
“Oh, come on,” Veer said. “That story where he kills a man-eater in a gorge with a gun in one hand and two nightjar eggs in the other? A tiger that munched dozens of people for dinner is killed with one shot, and the eggs survive!”
“You’re losing the wood for the trees, Veer,” Diwan Sahib said, sounding stricken. “Every adventure story has its exaggerations and embroidery. That doesn’t mean all of it is untrue. Look at Corbett’s jungle craft, his love of nature.”
“If I want fiction, I’ll read novels,” Veer said, and left the veranda for his room. We heard him banging and thumping inside, then a bellow. “Where the hell does that fool put my laptop charger? Himmat Singh! Himmat! A different place every day. It’s just not possible to run an office in this madhouse.”
Himmat Singh scuttled past us towards Veer’s room as fast as his creaking legs could manage. Silence for a moment or two, and then Veer snapped, “Behind that curtain? Which hiding place will you think of next?”
“I won’t be back tonight,” he shouted from his room. “Going to Bhimtal for dinner. Sick of Himmat’s food. Greasy chicken curry and rice every bloody day.” After a pause, we heard a door bang and the fan-belt screech and whine as he started his jeep.
Himmat went past us on his return journey, now with an impassive face. He would not look in our direction but muttered, “All these years nobody could cook better in the Kumaon than Himmat Singh. And now the chicken is greasy. Just from this morning.”
Diwan Sahib was crestfallen. “What’s the matter with Veer?” He fiddled with his drink, trying to recover his temper. He sounded thoughtful when he began to speak. “Look at Veer, he’s the opposite of Corbett,” he said. “He climbs the high Himalaya, the mountains give him his living. Yet with all this climbing and walking, what does he know of the forest or mountain, its wildlife or its plants? There’s no sense of wonder in him. Lost. Gone, entirely. It’s a – what do you call it? – macho – thing for him: how high, how fast, how many peaks? The other day I pointed out the dog roses to him – the first flowers this year – and he hardly even looked up.”
“Maybe he was preoccupied with something else,” I said.
“Come, come,” said Diwan Sahib, “you aren’t the world’s most avid botanist, but you noticed those blooms before I said anything to you.”
We were quiet for a while, silenced by a shared memory. I knew we were thinking back to my first spring in Ranikhet when Diwan Sahib had found me imprisoned in the dog rose creeper that ran wild along a wall at the Light House. My clothes were caught in the briars, my fingers bleeding from efforts to take out thorns. The more I had tried to move away, the more stuck I had got. There was no help at hand. By the time he came upon me I was almost in tears of annoyance and self-pity. “Damsel in distress,” he had said, “and no knight at hand.”
Diwan Sahib had extracted me thorn by thorn while I babbled embarrassed explanations: I had merely been trying to smell a flower and pick a few for a vase and get a cutting to plant in my own patch of green and I did not know how or when … After a while he had said in the impatient tones I came to know so well, “Could you stop chattering for a minute please, so that I can get you out of here and not be crucified too?” But his eyes were kind and the care with which he took each thorn out made me think, for the first time since Michael’s death, that I might one day feel less alone.
Now Diwan Sahib was speaking again, his voice dreamy. “I’ve always thought about the dog rose that it was wild, unglamorous – the scent is light and a bit sharp, and there are more thorns per flower than on almost any other rose. It is the quintessential beginning rose, no breeding, almost no colour, stitched probably by birds a thousand years ago. And yet when you see it, as on that outer wall of this house when it is in full bloom, holding those half-broken stones together – they remind you what is imperishable, real beauty.”
He stopped as if taken aback by his own eloquence and said in his everyday tones: “Where was I? Yes, Corbett. Corbett understood the jungle by looking, and he could tell you its story from the sounds he heard. If he heard a chital far off, he would know whether it was calling its young or calling to warn other animals of a tiger. He walked the forests barefoot when he was a boy. He understood the fall of every leaf and the meaning of a cloud – would it bring a hailstorm or rain.”
He suddenly seemed to remember it was his nephew he was discussing, and not very favourably. “Who am I to criticise?” he said, fini
shing his gin in one long swallow. “I taught him nothing when he was a boy. I could have.”
“But he said you taught him birdcalls and animal sounds and answered all his wildlife questions,” I said. “So you’re wrong on both counts. He is interested in nature, and you did teach him things.”
“No, it’s different. His interest in nature – it’s not what it seems. He is a complicated man, our friend Veer.”
Diwan Sahib stopped up his caustic words with another slug of gin and changed the subject. “Corbett was one of a kind because he never lost sight of the humans – and I mean the poor, the hill peasants whose cattle and kin were in danger from wild animals. In my days in Surajgarh, in the Nawab’s court, I saw many feudal lords and white colonials who knew a great deal about animals. They could read the jungle almost as well as Corbett. But they couldn’t have – wouldn’t dream of it – sat and gossiped with peasant women as Corbett did, answering all their nosy questions. None of them stayed up nights with a gun, guarding their crops from rats and birds. Why do you think they called him Carpet Sahib and adored him all over these hills? He would have understood Puran in a second.” He laughed bitterly. “He’d have understood that poor idiot’s grunts and groans and whimpers and made sense of them. He’d have talked to Puran in his own language.”
The afternoon deepened and grew more mellow. A large family of pale-furred langurs alighted on the deodars. Their tails painted elliptical loops in the air as they swooped from tree to tree, the branches swung low with their weight as they landed. The monkeys disagreed with each other, now in soft chatters, now in screeches. Some of the mothers held tiny, ancient-faced babies to their breasts. Dogs barked at them in a frenzy and strained at the chains that tethered them to doorposts. The langurs knew the dogs were tied up and paid them no attention, but when they noticed us they turned their black, human-looking faces towards us, trying to decide if we were a danger.
Until humans came and made anthills out of these mountains, Diwan Sahib was saying, looking up at the langurs, the land had belonged to these monkeys, and to barking deer, nilgai, tiger, barasingha, leopards, jackals, the great horned owl, and even to cheetahs and lions. The archaeology of the wilderness consisted of these lost animals, not of ruined walls, terracotta amulets, and potsherds. Only now and then did we catch a glimpse of the distant past of our forests, when the shadow of a barasingha’s horns flitted through the denser woods, or when a leopard coughed at night. It was extremely rare, though not unknown, for wild animals to trust human beings, Diwan Sahib said. Why should they, when we have destroyed their world? Puran’s affinity to animals was a lost treasure. Puran was the sanest of us all, because animals knew whom to trust. They were imbeciles themselves who called Puran half-witted.
13
Veer returned at the end of the month from Dehra Dun and Delhi. He had been away for a fortnight, getting things organised for the next trekking season, which he was going to run from Ranikhet. He came back laden with gifts. There were exotic southern edibles for me: yogurt marinated chillies, murukkus. He had even brought me a bottle of pickle, made from whole baby mangoes – the kind I had been used to in Hyderabad and had only dreamed of ever since. Had I told him about my past? I flipped through our old conversations, which I could recall virtually down to the last detail. The bottle remained unopened on my table for several days as I tried to get used to it. I picked it up every now and then, my heartbeat quickening each time I examined the label, which said, “Begumpet Pickles: Traditionally Made from a Secret Recipe Handed Down for Generations”. I was reminded of the day my father had put one of his palms over my eyes as he led me to a thick-trunked mango tree in our garden to show me my new tree house. I must have been seven years old. A little red ladder led up to the house, and its inner walls were painted with butterflies. It had a toy telephone with a bell that rang. One morning my father had called me down from the tree house saying in an absurd telephone-operator voice: “Hello, hello, phone call for the Princess of Begumpet Pickles. She must come down at once to see the new labels on our pickle bottles!”
For Diwan Sahib, Veer had brought an expensive illustrated guide to India’s birds that had just come out. I began leafing through it as soon as Diwan Sahib let go of it, to look up a bird I had seen that very morning, when I turned a wooded corner so loud with harsh screeches of magpies that it sounded like the playground at St Hilda’s when the bell rang at the end of the school day. I had crept closer to see what the birds were agitated about, and a slow, large, brown shape had detached itself from a shadowy branch and sailed off towards a nearby tree, with the magpies in outraged pursuit. It was an enormous owl, made eyeless by the sun. It sat immobile on the second tree, submitting to the screeching and pecking of the many magpies, like some ancient nobleman resigned to his suffering. The prince of darkness, reduced to nothing when his time was past, I told Diwan Sahib in an unthinking attempt at cleverness. He raised an eyebrow, and with a rueful smile murmured, “How true.” He reached for the book again, opened it to the right page, and returned it to me. “Maybe this one?” he said. There it was, in glossy colour, my owl: a Brown Wood Owl. I snapped the book shut, triumphant. The caption said it was usually almost two feet tall.
“It was exactly that height, it hardly even looks like a bird,” I said.
“ ‘After variations in colour, form and melody on a million birds, he was cast on earth, an afterthought’.” Diwan Sahib spoke in the voice he kept for quotations. “Maya, do you know that poem about the owl? And then how did it go? ‘When stars their voyages fulfil, attired in light from east to west, cloaked in night he moves to kill’ … no, I think I missed a verse.”
Veer had also brought alcohol: two cases of superior rum and gin. Until Veer came, Diwan Sahib had bought humbler alcohol, a bottle at a time, via the General, who had access to subsidised army supplies. Despite his grand past, Diwan Sahib was no longer wealthy. He had rented out the two cottages on his estate for extra income, but he ended up taking no rent at all from Ama, and for the past two years he had left my own rent cheques uncashed. If I protested, he said I was paying him rent in kind, by running his errands and typing his manuscript. He lived an austere life and his bare house contained nothing but worn essentials. I rejoiced now to see him surrounded by creature comforts: a new heater, an imported, feather-light duvet, thermal socks, and good gin and rum. Veer saw to it that Diwan Sahib had the best, and plenty of it. But since Diwan Sahib in turn passed on a bottle or two to me, I had nothing to grumble about.
For himself, Veer had brought a new wristwatch. If you pressed any of the tiny knobs that ran down each side in a row, it turned from watch to compass, altimeter, thermometer, or barometer. The needles that told the time swung up and down to inform us that in the cantonment we were at about 6,100 feet while St Hilda’s, in the bazaar, was at 5,600 feet. Veer could not stop fiddling with the watch, but when I teased him, saying he was like a child with a new toy, he protested. “This is survival for me. It’s work. It’s like having a phone or a computer. It’ll be my lifesaver in a blizzard on some glacier far from help.”
The rhythm of my life changed whenever Veer returned. My days became changeable. I could not tell if he did it on purpose, but very often he drove up the hill from the bazaar just around the time I walked up from St Hilda’s to the factory. His jeep would stop beside me, a look would pass between us, and I would get in. Sometimes he paused to buy hot samosas and we took the longer, more isolated route back home, stopping on the way for a brief picnic. I could talk to him in a way I could with no-one else. I knew I would be understood, and knew exactly the conversation we might have when, for example, I said, “I wonder if mules too wear horseshoes.”
Our road had been blocked by a line of sweet-faced, slow-witted mules. They were being urged on with much shouting and prodding by their herdsmen. Some of the mules, living up to their reputation, simply refused to move despite being pushed from behind.
“Do mules wear shoes or not?” I said. “And
what about elephants? Do they wear horseshoes? And if they do, what are the shoes called?”
“A topic most worthy of research,” Veer said. “The field could be extended and deepened. What decides it? Is it soft-footedness or hoofedness? Is it the distance travelled, the load carried? Shall we propose it to my uncle as the subject of his next book?”
“What about bullocks? They have to walk miles. Dragging heavy carts.”
“Not to forget camels,” Veer said in a parody of a formal, professional voice. “And yaks. Have you considered yaks? Nilgai? Zebras? Other than research, I see definite business possibilities here. Maybe you should give up your school and get into making shoes for animals? Might they have standard shoe sizes? Should you outsource the manufacturing to China?”
Once a new teacher at St Hilda’s was in the jeep with us when Veer and I wandered into one such nonsensical conversation. She had wanted to visit me at home – to test out the possibility of a friendship, I suppose. She looked out of the window throughout the drive, saying nothing, and after five minutes I forgot that she was there. After Veer had dropped us off at my door and driven away, she walked through my two rooms picking up this and examining that while I made tea. She paused before the pictures of Michael on my desk, and of my mother, and wanted to know about Michael, about when my mother had died and why I did not return to my father to be with him in his solitary old age. When we had settled down with cups of tea in my veranda, she said, “You talked very funnily with that gentleman in the jeep. Like you’re a mad child. And the way he replied – as if you’re both eight-year-olds. Are you friends? Or is he a relative of yours?”
She gave me a searching look. I changed the subject as soon as I could. Neither she nor I mentioned a next visit when she left.
One evening soon after coming back from his Delhi trip, Veer unveiled his slide projector. With the first slide, the far end of Diwan Sahib’s disused dining room, usually a bare expanse of rough whitewash, turned gold and blue and a sigh went across the room. It was the high altitude desert of Leh: barren gold earth in moon-surface formations beneath a vast sky. The land looked as raw as on the day of creation. In its folds you could see the shifting of continents, the breaking away of the Indian peninsula from Africa, and hear the cosmic boom as it crashed into Asia and thrust the Himalaya out of the ocean.