Puran shuffled past them, uncomprehending. Touching his woollen cap in an improvised salute, he said, “Namaste Sa’ab,” in a hoarse voice that sounded as if it came from the depths of a barrel, then shambled after his cows and goats, retreating bit by bit until we could only see the bobbing top of his cap.
Charu was still in the valley below, miniaturised by the distance. She was looking up the hill in our direction, at nobody but Kundan Singh as he struggled with Pinki, who had remained there to chew one last napkin. Before Kundan came into her life, her uncle Puran had been her closest friend. He was as defenceless as a child, he had always been. He could talk to animals, but people left him confused and mumbling. He gave dead bats and birds tender burials and allowed monkeys to pick lice off his head. People might think him mad but Charu stood up for him if anyone harassed him or called him crazy.
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?”