Something snapped into place in my head. Roopkund was not a river. Roopkund was a lake. Lakes did not have waves. Lakes did not flow. I found my voice at last and said to Veer, “This sequence of pictures, it’s not — it’s not Roopkund, is it?”
“You obviously haven’t heard a word of my long-winded commentary. Why do I bother? It’s the Zanskar river. In Kashmir. Why would you think it’s Roopkund? That’s a lake, not a river.” He closed a box with an irritable snap.
The spell was broken; people began to stir. Beena and Mitu scrambled up. They were to leave early the next morning for Varanasi to start a new life at a convent. Diwan Sahib waved them towards him and placed rolls of money in their hands and closed their fists. He patted their heads when they dived downward to touch his feet. “Enough, go now, go,” he said. “Himmat Singh, refill my glass. From the new bottle Veer Sahib brought from Delhi.” The clerk scurried after Himmat into the kitchen in the hope of a stolen drink.
Ama stood up with an abrupt push of her chair. “Travelling is all very well,” she said. “But it’s for people with money to burn and nothing better to do but eat, drink and idle. Why go walking up and down hills for pleasure? We do that every day for work. Charu, come on, we have to go. Puran will have set fire to the cowshed by now.”
* * *
That night, after dinner, Veer collected his torch and stick to walk me to my cottage. At the front door we saw that the light outside the veranda was falling in a shower of tiny golden drops. He went back in to find his umbrella, big enough for two in that kind of rain. My cottage was not far — maybe five hundred yards — but the slope was thick with trees, and leopards sometimes lay in wait for stray dogs or forgotten goats; it was not wise for me to walk down alone so late in the evening, he said.
We walked slower, I knew, than we needed to. By the time we reached my door, the drizzle had stopped and every night scent was deeper and muskier in the dampness. We stood outside, chatting of this and that in voices softer than usual. Apart from a faint television noise from the postman’s house and a pressure cooker that hissed once every other minute, there was hardly a sound. Above our heads the huge ivory trumpets of datura glowed like dimmed lamps in the starlight. We were swathed in their heavy scent, the flowers were so low that they brushed my face. Veer touched one of the flowers, then looked at me and said, “So beautiful.”
I felt something leap inside me. “And deadly,” I said. “Just like those pretty foxgloves. Never go by appearances.”
I could not see his face clearly in the starlight alone, but he seemed to frown and turn away. He switched his torch on again, as if he were about to leave.
“It’s what Diwan Sahib says: we saw valleys covered in foxgloves when we went for walks before,” I said, not ready to confront my empty house yet. “I wanted to pick them because they were so pretty, and he told me how poisonous the prettiest plants and mushrooms in the hills can be.”
Not far from Ranikhet, Diwan Sahib had said, during one of those long walks he and I went on in my first two years, a woman and her child were poisoned by wild mushrooms cooked at home. They ate the mushrooms around a table with five others. Nobody could later remember which of them had eaten the dish with the mushrooms, and which had not. That night, the child’s face turned blue and he began to shiver and vomit. When it was almost dawn, he had a shuddering fit, his muscles relaxed, and he stopped breathing. The mother became bloated as if she had been dredged out days after drowning. She would have exploded if pricked with a pin. They lived in a remote hamlet, and the roads connecting it to the world had been washed away in monsoon rain. No hospital could be reached, though she lived three days more.
Why was nobody else at the table poisoned by those mushrooms? Diwan Sahib said it reminded him of a curious, very old man at the Nawab of Surajgarh’s court, who had been there since the Nawab’s father’s time, and who wore brown clothes and a green pugree and had a face as cavernous as a starving man’s. He walked long hours in the forest and came back with cloth bags full of plants that he disappeared with into his laboratory, which was a quack’s den filled with glass flasks and Bunsen burners and test tubes and vernier callipers, and where, in the instant when the door opened a crack as he slid in, the smells that trickled out were of a kind that existed only in hallucinations and nightmares, so that when he shut the door you wondered if you had imagined them. It was rumoured that he manufactured poisons in that den, and the rumour was strengthened by the inexplicable decline or death from time to time of people at the court who had fallen foul of the Nawab. The Nawab had claimed that the man made medicine, Diwan Sahib said, but the line between medicines and poisons is finely drawn, and this very foxglove, so poisonous and so beautiful, in the correct quantity, produced digitalis, which was medicine for troubles of the heart. “Not devastated hearts,” he had said laughing, “like yours or mine, Maya, for that there is no medicine but death, which too the foxglove can provide.”
By now, despite the chill of the spring night, we were sitting on the steps that led to my front door, inches apart. I could feel the warmth of Veer all along my legs. Twice, by accident, our shoulders touched, and he did not move away. The Scop’s Owl began its low, periodic call, a sound so muted that it emphasised how quiet the hillside had fallen. The pressure cooker had stopped hissing. The clerk’s television had been put to sleep. I saw a curtain flutter at Charu’s house. It was sure to be Ama, eavesdropping. “It’s late,” I said, getting up. “I have been talking on and on. You should go.” The clerk too could see us from his cottage. They would exchange notes tomorrow, while grazing the cows or filling water. “That Teacher-ni — ” Ama would say, before she began embroidering her tale.
Veer saw me looking at Ama’s windows. “Yes, it’s late, and the Ranikhet Town Crier is busy collecting material.” He got up as well and, to my surprise, put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a quick hug. His chin briefly came down and rested in my hair. And then he was gone, the beam from his torch flickering and leaping like a large firefly as he walked away. A few nights before, when he and I had been walking downhill just as we had today, we had seen five dancing fireflies a few feet away and stopped, torch switched off, and for a time that was both as long as eternity and as short as a second, we had stood gazing at the tiny globules of light racing each other, being snuffed out by bushes, then appearing again.
I wrapped my shawl tighter and strolled around my house, brushing past geranium leaves that unloosed clouds of lemony perfume. I thought back to the morning that Michael had left on his last journey. I had gone with him to the station to see him off and we stood on the platform, our hips touching, our shoulders touching, as long as he dared, until departure was announced and the chaos of people on the platform emptied into waving arms, and the train began pulling out. I said, “Go, go, you’ll miss it!” He held me close for an instant, kissed the top of my head, then loped off into the train. That was the last time I saw him, and the last time any man had touched me — until this evening.