“We went by motorbike from Manali to Ladakh — through the Rohtang Pass, the Baralacha La, and we could even see the Karakoram.” The slides moved almost too quickly for us to register details as Veer showed us pictures of prayer wheels, exotic Buddhist dwellings, and the monasteries of Shey, Thikse, Alchi. It was remote, spectacular, and unfamiliar for those of us who had only seen such great heights from a distance. Another click: a view from the Ladakh plateau of barren land far below. Veer said, “That is China; half of Pangong lake falls in China. Nobody is allowed up that close to the boundary, but I knew someone in the Army. We left our motorbikes and trekked all over Ladakh and reached here in the end.”
“So if we start walking today in Ranikhet, one day we will reach China?” This was Ama.
Diwan Sahib said, “You’d get a bullet in your head when you crossed over.” Diwan Sahib had no patience with Ama’s garrulity and what he called her “animal husbandry department”. Every so often he had futile arguments with her over her goats lunching on the lilies and marigolds that still survived in his garden.
“Arre Ama,” the clerk said, “your forefathers and mine walked to China many times. That’s what my great grandfather told me. He went twice with some firanghis in the time of the British.”
There was a babble of voices. “Your great grandfather was a coolie,” Ama said. “What was he doing in China?” Himmat Singh gave a series of phlegmy coughs and struggled up a thought: “I have heard they eat tigers in China. And dogs. They also eat dogs.” “Aah, but then what do the leopards in China eat if the people eat the dogs?” the clerk wanted to know. They laughed. Charu, who had not spoken so far, said, “I would kill any leopard or Chinese who laid a finger on my Bijli.”
“That useless dog has a magic life,” Ama said. “So many dogs get eaten. But this one roams all over in the dark and next morning he’s sitting right there, by the stove, waiting for a roti to fall.”
I sat back, warm in my shawl, feet tucked into it, a woolly bundle listening to voices eddying over me. Diwan Sahib began to talk about the Great Game — the intrigues and spying, the explorers sent in disguise over the undiscovered massifs, passes, peaks, and ravines of the Himalaya by the Russians and the British looking to gain control of them. The names of early travellers fell from his lips like those of old friends: George Moorcroft crossed the fast-flowing Sutlej on the inflated skins of buffaloes and travelled disguised as a Hindu sadhu to search for the goat whose wool made Pashmina shawls. Nain Singh Rawat surveyed the Himalaya to map it accurately for the first time. He was a Pandit from our region, the Kumaon, said Diwan Sahib, and he reached Lhasa, Xinjiang, Nepal, and China not once but three times in the 1860s. His brother Kishen Singh Rawat went to Lhasa too. At that time nobody even knew exactly where Lhasa was.
How did they do that, Charu said in wonderment, on foot? To which Ama replied, impatient, “That is what was his bijniss. Other people run shops and offices, his work was to measure distances. Just like us: don’t we walk up and down the hills after cows day after day in rain and sun and snow? Can a city person do that?”
“You illiterate woman,” Himmat Singh said. “Walking Ranikhet’s slopes is not like walking through the mountains to China.”
“They could walk for days,” Diwan Sahib said, “Look at Corbett. When he was hunting the Chowgarh tiger, he went without food for about two days, and he was quite comfortable sleeping in the forks of trees.”
“Maybe he thought an underfed man would be less appealing to a hungry tiger,” Veer said. “And a lighter weight on the forks of those trees.”
I thought Diwan Sahib would lose his temper this time. Why was Veer attacking Corbett again? It was childish, the way he tried to antagonise Diwan Sahib. But Diwan Sahib went on as if Veer had not spoken and I relaxed in my shawl again. “Those people were made differently from us,” he said. Nain Singh Rawat had to use exactly 2,000 footsteps per mile, using a rosary with a hundred beads to keep count. Because the Chinese would have executed him if they found him, he travelled dressed as a lama, turning his prayer wheel, in which he had hidden a compass.
For the moment everyone was too busy talking to remember they were in the middle of a slideshow and that there were many more slides to see. Veer was behind me, at the back of the room. If I turned an imperceptible fraction, I could glimpse him outlined against the faint light that came in from the veranda through a murky old glass pane, could sense his eyes upon me in the darkness. I curled deeper into my shawl, my arms holding my shoulders close. He had bought the murukkus because he had heard me saying how much I missed them — I had said it only once, in passing. But he had remembered — and the pickle, which by some miracle was from my father’s factory. I wished the room were empty and his show for me alone.
Veer fiddled with the projector, and a new picture flickered on the wall, turning it grey and white and very cold. My eyes, half shut with daydreaming, snapped open. The slide showed a woman looking up into a camera pointed at her from above. She was bent under the weight of her rucksack and her face was etched with pain. Snow had settled like white trim on the purple of her anorak’s hood. The snow-covered slope she was climbing fell behind her into grey-green water half covered with splintered sheets of ice. Flakes of snow were sprinkled all over the photograph. Icy slopes rose out of the water on the far bank.
Veer was saying, “It was freezing and windy that day. This woman almost slipped and fell into the water just after I took this photograph. She was already feeling ill and the altitude made her worse. It’s over 16,000 feet. People can start bleeding from the nose. Their skin might peel off. They get terrible headaches and frostbite. My ear and missing finger — that’s from frostbite. Frostbite means your blood has frozen — literally.”
Every head in the room swivelled towards Veer as if they had not noticed his deformed ear and missing finger all these days. He changed the slide to turn them back to the wall.
I did not stop Veer to ask him the name of the place. I did not need to. I knew it was Roopkund. That was the water beside which Michael had frozen to his death. I scoured the pictures that snapped onto the wall one by one. A different angle each time: close-ups, long shots. Water and ice, ice and water. Lead-coloured sky. Sheer sides of brown rock and white snow rising from sheets of ice. I examined every inch with frantic concentration in the seconds before one picture made way for another. I had never seen Michael’s dead body. His death felt more a disappearance, still unreal, leaving behind a smoke-like vestige of hope. He was there on those slopes. He had to be. I waited for Michael’s blue and red-hooded jacket to appear. Then he would step away from the wall and into the room.
Long ago, when I was a little girl, I used to believe that radios contained people. No more than a few inches tall, but in every way human, those people were forever imprisoned within the big brown and black radio that stood on my father’s desk. It had a large dial, and round, serrated knobs for switches. When it was turned on, the panel inscribed with frequencies glowed with a yellow light that made the radio look like a little house. If someone took it apart, the singers on Binaca Geet Mala would step out onto the table and talk to me.
I felt icy winds curl around my fingertips, my toes, my face, even my heart. I was trembling. I thought I would cry out in pain and fear. I buried my face in my shawl and stopped my ears under it. My throat had wound itself into a tight knot.
“What is that, is it a waterfall?” someone in the room, who still had a voice, asked. Someone else said, “See how the falling water has frozen!” I inched out of my shawl again. The scene had changed to a herd of white sheep on a meadow enamelled with flowers. Veer muttered “Wrong sequence,” and then there was another stretch of water on the wall, a glassy expanse that reflected the sides of the gorge within which it flowed away into the horizon. At the banks were the frilly white edges of waves frozen in mid-surge. Charu went excitably to the wall to get a closer look and everybody shouted to her to get out of the way as the immense shadow of her head, caught in the projector’s beam, obscured the ice-sheeted river and its frozen waves.