The Folded Earth

by Anuradha Roy

  Ama said, “Why wouldn’t he have? He’s forever grabbing our sickles and axes and taking them away. Claimed we were stealing wood from the forest. And in secret he was selling our axes in the bazaar. We cursed him, many times. So he went mad.”

  “Why don’t you use your curses on a more deserving target – Chauhan, or that politician stirring up trouble?” Diwan Sahib said, picking up his packet of cigarettes.

  “You’d better not smoke,” I said. “Your performance is next week, and you can’t cough all the time you’re there, so don’t – ” I stopped as he lit up.

  Diwan Sahib had been practising for months and his day at St Hilda’s was almost upon us. Usually he talked of jungle craft and imitated the calls of animals and birds. Sometimes he told the children stories of illustrious Himalayan travellers, old and new, such as Frank Smythe, Edmund Hillary, or Bill Aitken.

  “What are you going to do this year?” I asked him.

  “This year – ” All of a sudden Diwan Sahib became almost bashful. “This year I want to tell them how fortunate they are. How absolutely fortunate they are. I want your little perishers to understand that.”

  “Fortunate? Half of them don’t get enough to eat,” Ama said. “They won’t even have a job when they finish with that school. All this studying is a waste of time.” She gave me a look of concentrated scorn. The day before she had had yet another argument with Charu about the amount of time she was spending at my house on her lessons.

  Diwan Sahib ignored her. “I am going to tell them,” he said, “that they must put their ears to the earth and rocks and hear them breathe. Because here in Ranikhet the rocks do breathe. I am going to tell them to listen for one second on their way through the woods to their school for the sound of the sap rising through the trees; to spend one day painting the snow peaks they never bother to look at. They are like people born rich who don’t understand what money is until it disappears.”

  “I’d rather have some money and not just the mountains,” Ama said. “You can’t eat mountains.” She made a move as if to leave.

  Diwan Sahib was too deep in thought to notice her. He continued, “I want to tell them they live in a corner of the earth where predators still roam free. Where, on an evening’s playing among the trees, they might hear movement in the undergrowth and see a kalij pheasant scuttling away with its mate. Where they do all these ordinary things, like lessons and tuitions and games, and then come home to the call of foxes and owls.”

  I said, taking care with my words, “It’s natural for them not to notice owls and foxes calling. They’ve grown up with them. Just as city children pay no attention to car noises – ”

  Diwan Sahib looked at me aghast. “A Scop’s Owl like a car noise! Are you off your head?” He was overtaken by another of his coughing fits as Charu rushed in. She never spoke directly to Diwan Sahib, afraid of him or shy; today she ran to his chair and held its arm, panting, and said, in a high, trembling voice, “You have to save Puran. They have arrested his deer.”

  * * *

  Diwan Sahib changed into a rather grand if crumpled and mothballed grey jacket and white shirt. “You can’t deal with the police and that fool Chauhan in a dressing gown,” he explained when he emerged in his uncharacteristic finery. We had to walk slower than usual because he coughed a lot and had to stop frequently to catch his breath. Halfway there, the drizzle thickened, raindrops were flung into our faces by the wind. Ama hitched her sari to her knees and fished out the plastic bag she kept tucked in her waistband for such eventualities. Her white hair straggled out from under the bag-cap. I rolled up my jeans. By the time we reached the police station, we were cold, soaked, bedraggled.

  We charged into the police station, past the shouts of the chowkidar, to the bars of the lock-up. The deer was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was Puran, caged behind the bars. He sat in a corner, whimpering and groaning, scratching his head and slapping his thighs. Tears and snot smeared his face. The room was rank with the effects of rain on his foul-smelling clothes.

  The constable sat at her desk looking irritable and shouting for the chowkidar to light some incense. “What do you think? I want him here? I want to throw him out, he smells enough to make me want to cut off my nose,” she said to Ama, who looked frightened and tearful at the sight of her son imprisoned. I had never before seen Ama at a loss for words. Now she slid to her haunches and half-sat, half-crouched on the floor, head in her hands, quite unmindful of the plastic bag that topped it like an upturned boat. Charu stood very straight, holding the bars of the lock-up. Her face had frozen into anger at the constable’s words and she had assumed a fierce, silent hauteur.

  The constable had not invited Diwan Sahib to sit. He stood over her desk, still panting, leaning on it with both hands. He drew a wheezy breath and began to explain the situation to her with painstaking, careful courtesy. Puran was a little different from others, he said. He could not talk to people, but he could talk to animals. Animals trusted him. Foxes came to him if he called them. Injured birds arrived on his doorstep to be cured. Dogs with broken legs found their way to his cowshed. It was necessary that he be treated differently because he was incapable of understanding such things as wildlife laws.

  Diwan Sahib’s baritone was interspersed with fits of coughing and he searched in his long-unused trousers for a handkerchief. I passed him a tissue. The constable tapped her pencil on the table. Then she spun a five-rupee coin on it again and again like a top and waited each time till it rattled to a halt.

  Puran was not raising the deer with a view to eating it, Diwan Sahib continued patiently. He had rescued it from the forest. If he had not rescued it the lost deer would have been devoured by other animals.

  “That is the law of the jungle,” the constable interrupted him to say. “And the deer is a wild animal.”

  “Of course,” Diwan Sahib said, “and in every other instance you would be absolutely right. But Puran is a special case. Did you know that – ”

  A note of ingratiation crept into his voice. I had never seen him bend over the way he was doing now. He smiled at her as if trying to please.

  The constable interrupted again. Nothing was possible, she said. She began to shuffle her papers and files. She looked Diwan Sahib up and down with scarcely concealed disdain. She had been posted to Ranikhet only a few months before, and had no idea who he was. To her, he looked like any other rain-soaked, old, small-town man – educated, no question – but she had no time for such refinement and slow civilities. She had risen the hard way, she was tough, her tongue was sharp, and as a policewoman she had to be feared and respected, not loved. All this was written on her face. No doubt, too, she could smell the rum on Diwan Sahib’s breath. His big hands, even when resting on her table, shook with the tremor that we were familiar with but which she must have thought another symptom of his drunkenness. Her eyes went to his feet. He had managed a shirt, trousers, and jacket, but his feet had been too swollen for shoes and he had pushed them into purple bathroom slippers. She looked at the wet, mud-spattered slippers and back at his face. “The law is the law,” she stated. “I have work to do. It is illegal for people to keep wild animals at home whether as pets or as food. He is no different from anyone else in the eyes of the law.” She returned to her file and did not look up again.

  Mr Chauhan had left instructions that if Puran came after the deer, he was to be locked up until the deer was safely in Nainital’s zoo, and for a few days after, to teach him a lesson. If anyone made a fuss, Mr Chauhan had ordered, tell them this is a non-bailable offence under the Wildlife Protection Act and Puran would have to serve a proper jail term for fattening a barking deer in order to kill and eat it. “And while you are at it,” he had instructed the constable, “I want those army clothes off him, and burned, this time to ashes.” Having issued his instructions, Mr Chauhan had left for Bhimtal.

  * * *

  Puran came home in someone else’s clothes after three days. He went into his ramshackle shed
and would not emerge, not even to eat. We heard from a friend in Nainital that Rani was moping and pining in her new cage at the zoo, and had refused food and water. All day she stood virtually immobile in a corner of her cage, despite the persistence of the zoo’s vet. A week later, the vet advised a revolutionary step: he wanted Puran brought to Nainital. “That’s the only hope,” he said, “the deer might eat if he feeds it.”

  Mr Chauhan’s permission was sought. He slammed the telephone down, fuming. “Here I am, the Ad-Min-is-Trator of this city,” he said, emphasising every syllable with a rap of his pen on the desk. “And they want me to give all my time to these foolish matters!” It would be the ultimate humiliation for him to have to send Puran to Nainital. He would not hear of it. He got into his jeep, its large pimple of a red beacon gleaming, and went off to inspect the site of a new amusement park, his flagship project, for which a swathe of oak forest was being cleared. It was pointless saying to tourists, “Come just for the peace and the landscape.” Ranikhet was to have sights. It must generate as much revenue as Bhimtal and Nainital, Mr Chauhan had decided, and once he decided something, he acted. This was no time for nonsense with madmen and deer. He told his secretary to say he was in meetings all day if there were more calls from the zoo.

  On the thirteenth day, the deer died of malnutrition, dehydration, and grief. It became a small news item in the local paper and a journalist came to interview Puran for a “human interest” feature. Ama, frantic with excitement at the thought of her son being in the newspaper, showed him to the cowshed Puran had taken refuge in. The journalist walked to the shed as gingerly as a stork in a marsh and waited ankle-deep in mud and dung for Puran to emerge, but despite Ama’s knocks, entreaties, scoldings, and curses he remained inside his shed and would speak to nobody.

  * * *

  On the evening of our fruitless visit to the police station, I went up to the Light House. When Veer was away, I often went there for a drink and sometimes dinner and sat by Diwan Sahib’s fire before returning home to my exercise books. That day, when I entered the half-dark living room, I saw him crouched over the fireplace, feeding paper into it from bundles lying at his feet. He put in sheaf after sheaf. The fire dipped as each thick bunch of paper was added to it, and then blazed when the new lot of paper caught. I did not have to ask Diwan Sahib what he was doing. I could see it was years of work he was burning, his and mine, the many versions of his Corbett book. His hands shook as he reached for the papers and then for the fire. He was bent close enough over the flames for the room to smell faintly of singed hair. Droplets of a runny cold shone in the firelight as his nose dripped. He swiped it once with a sleeve, then continued. When the entire manuscript was in the fire, he stood up, staring into the leaping flames. Then he seemed to remember something else. He looked above the fireplace at the framed picture of his golden retrievers. I leaped forward now, with a cry, but I was too late to stop him. He had flung it into the blaze, and the glass shattered against the logs in the fireplace. The old wood of the picture’s frame caught instantly. I saw the photograph curl at the edges and melt away.

  10

  I could not account for it on a rational level, but after the death of the deer a whispering began in my head that pointed to change, an alteration so profound and yet so inexplicable as to seem more superstition than logic. It was as if we were standing before a still expanse of water and only I could sense a shark slicing through it below the surface, heading for us. On the brightest days, I felt as if the corner of a deep shadow was edging in, inch by imperceptible inch, until it was no longer a corner but a darkness that in time would obliterate us.

  I grew morbidly obsessed with wondering what had happened to Rani’s body in the zoo. They would call it a carcass. I remembered our neighbour’s Alsatian in Hyderabad – a handsome, smiling dog with a long tail that the family never talked to or petted because they considered it a guard dog, too dangerous to touch. I used to scratch his head for him on my way to school. One day, I saw a man cycling down the road before our houses with a gunny bag trailing off his back seat from a long rope. The gunny bag cleared a swathe of dust on the earthen road as he went past. The man hunched forward and pedalled with an effort in the way people do when cycling with a heavy load. Later I learned that the Alsatian had died, and that the family had despatched its body in a sack strung from that bicycle, to be thrown into the municipal dump.

  Was Rani’s body rotting in a dump along with other rubbish? Was it being torn apart by rats? Perhaps the zoo had fed her carcass to their leopards in cages. But there cannot have been much flesh on that delicate fawn’s half-starved body. I told myself that the vet, who had tried to save her life, had carried Rani’s body to the kind of forest she had been born in, and left it there for it to return slowly to the earth again. I tried to make myself believe that this was what happened.

  * * *

  On the morning of Diwan’s Sahib’s yearly performance at our school, a gentle rain fell, dissolving into the foliage before it met the earth. It was a day or two after Rani’s death. Ever since his soaking on the way to the police station, Diwan Sahib had had a cold, and I wondered if he was strong enough to last through an hour of talking and mimicking animal calls when he was breaking into coughs and sneezes every few minutes. It had been decided that Mr Qureshi would drive us there in his car since Diwan Sahib would not be able to walk all the way to the school. Charu had been looking forward to this day, and the ride in a car, but after the death of Rani she had been avoiding us, almost as if we were to blame for not being able to save Puran and the deer, and that morning Ama said: “Charu is not well. She won’t go.”

  At the school, the children, in order of class and height, sat on the floor of our Assembly Hall. The hall was blue and white and red with school uniforms and ties. The infants in the front three rows, no more than five or six years old, were my charges. They nudged each other and began to chatter when we entered the room. Two of the daring ones shot out of their places and ran to take my hand in a display of ownership that made Miss Wilson scowl. “Just you look. All this time they were sitting so Diss-iplined! You appear and immediately there is chaos.”

  When the children had been calmed, the microphone tested, a bottle of water and glass procured and Diwan Sahib seated, all eyes turned towards him. The children had bet that he would begin this year with a tiger’s call. Some of them clutched each other’s hands in anticipation of getting a pleasurable fright.

  There was silence. A teacher edged the microphone closer to Diwan Sahib. Someone spoke at the back of the room and Miss Wilson rapped out, “Quay-it! We are about to begin.” But Diwan Sahib still did not begin. I was worried he might have forgotten why he was there. The children started to fidget. I stepped up to him and whispered: “Start.” He had shrunk into himself since his encounter with the police constable, had barely spoken since then. His shoulders had acquired a hunch, as if he were curling into himself, and his gaze, when it did turn towards me, looked as if it were fixed on something far away. He had not once cracked a joke or even been sarcastic at my expense.

  And then he began to speak, but now nobody could hear him. The audio boy came up and adjusted the microphone, which settled down after a minute’s whistling – ”Too loud, too loud,” Miss Wilson had shouted from the front row – and becoming inaudible. Diwan Sahib had carried on speaking, disregarding the microphone. His voice was low and at times he mumbled.

  “I don’t know how many in this room live in the bazaar,” he was saying, “how many in villages further away, and how many in the cantonment. How many miles do you walk to come to school? You get up early every morning, at dawn. The older ones among you have to fill water from streams before you do anything else. Some of you have to light fires or help your mothers cook a meal before school. You have to climb up steep hillsides to reach here and you get wet every day of the monsoon during this walk. In the afternoon, you make traffic come to a stop in the bazaar when you come out of the school and stream o
nto the road, chattering like monkeys – ”

  He tried to imitate a langur, but began to cough. He drank a long sip of water and resumed.

  “I have looked at your faces when you come out of school – so bright and shining and full of promise – and I have thought each time: What kind of future will you have? What will you do with your education? And what kind of world will I or your teachers leave you?

  “In one corner of Ranikhet – how many of you know it? – in one corner, on the way to the Jhoola Devi temple, there is a forest path going off to the side and it leads to a knoll. If you walk down that path to the knoll, you will find a clearing on a spur surrounded by tall trees. In the time of our forefathers, there may have been Himalayan Golden Eagles nesting in those trees and in the rocks. They are rare, majestic birds and have not been seen here in living memory. But even now, those of you who look up at the sky will see eagles over the Golf Course, circling and looking for prey. These are the Steppe Eagles that come here each winter from the deserts of Mongolia and Kazakhstan. I used to sit on the knoll and watch the eagles: they used to roost on those tall trees.”

  In earlier times, this would have been Diwan Sahib’s cue for giving the children a thrill; he would have said, “They are big enough to eat little children,” with a smacking of his lips. But today he just said, “They are so powerful that they can kill even foxes, goat kids, fawns of deer. Yet the Steppe Eagle hardly ever calls and as for the Golden Eagle, can you believe it, their call is just a weak yelp, almost like a puppy’s. Grown-up Golden Eagles make a two-syllable ‘kee-yep’ sound in a slow, measured series. Their young call with piercing, insistent ‘ssseeeeeeee-chk’ or ‘kikiki’ notes.”