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 owclass="underline" 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 alcohoclass="underline" 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.
Another click and we moved to blue goats somewhere on a mountainside, and traditional stone and slate houses that had stood intact through earthquakes when new concrete structures had tumbled into the dust. Then the wall turned indigo with water and a gasp went around the room. Slopes of snow rose out of the liquid and clung to a very blue sky. “This is Pangong Lake,” Veer’s voice said from the back of the darkened room, “in Ladakh. I took a group of Swiss birdwatchers there a few years ago.” A whir and a click lit up another view of the lake. Ama said, “That’s one place in the hills where water won’t ever run short,” and there was a murmur of laughter until Veer said, “It’s salty water.” Ama came back with, “No need to spend on salt then, just boil the vegetables in it straight.”
The room was dark, crowded with shadows of people: all of the hillside — Charu, Ama and their three visiting relatives from a remote village, the deaf-mute twins Beena and Mitu, the clerk from the water board and his young son — had assembled to watch the magic of pictures from Veer’s just-unpacked projector. Ranikhet had only one battered cinema. It cost money. A free slideshow was a novel treat.