The humps of hills all around the spur on which I stood were shadows. After a while, the lights at Ama’s and at the clerk’s went off. In the absolute darkness the sky felt larger, the stars came down, the trees grew blacker. The lopsided half moon was trapped in a cage of branches. Now that I was alone again, a corner of the terror I had felt during the slideshow edged its way back. That woman’s pain-filled face, the ice, the green water — it was not Roopkund, it was a river in Kashmir, but how different could Roopkund be? I felt a shiver go down the back of my neck from some fear I could not define. I was reminded of the way Corbett said he sensed the presence of a man-eating tiger even if he had not seen one: “I felt I was in danger,” he wrote, “and that the danger that threatened me was on the rock in front of me. The fact that I had seen no movement did not in any way reassure me — the man-eater was on the rock, of that I was sure.” I had typed three of Diwan Sahib’s drafts in which those lines appeared and they were engraved on my mind. Corbett’s words had never felt so palpable. Now I understood what he meant, and the apprehension was all the more powerful for being illogical.
I looked up at the stretching limbs of the deodars. The trees were vastly high. Only eagles reached their very top and they told nobody what they saw from there. Each fringed branch was almost large enough to be a tree on its own. For a dizzy moment, it felt as if I were the one human left alive, glued by gravity alone to the edge of a spinning globe, only just keeping myself from being flung off.
14
That night, I had a vivid dream in which skulls rolled down white slopes and fell into pools of green water. I saw a woman hooded in an anorak, clawing her way up a snowslope. Someone was photographing her as she struggled, saying Smile, say cheese? The voice was Veer’s. Then the woman’s face turned into Michael’s and suddenly he was falling, toppling over the edge of the slope, and as he fell through the white space towards the water, I felt myself falling too, flailing, unmoored, weightless, helpless, until I woke up sweating under my blankets.
It was long past the time for the army bugles. The sun was blazing through the window. It was a holiday. I could hear children playing and the clerk’s boombox pumping out music with a bass beat that resounded across the hillside. Ama’s side of a conversation was taking place in shouts just below my window. Someone had wound barbed wire around my head and set fire to it. I staggered down to the kitchen to make myself coffee. How much rum had I drunk the night before? One at Diwan Sahib’s. And did I have one, or was it two, after Veer left?
I sat at the dining table with my coffee and a painkiller, and noticed a familiar piece of paper on it, weighed down with a jam jar: Diwan Sahib’s electricity bill. He had asked me to deal with it — that was a week ago, and now it was late, so there would be a fine. How much? I looked at the bill — an extra thirty rupees. It was not a lot, and I missed the due date almost every month. But today it made me feel as if someone had just tightened that wire round my head. I covered my aching eyes with my palms and felt them dampen with tears. I was always in trouble with Miss Wilson, my students failed their exams, my house was a mess of old and useless things because I could not bring myself to throw anything away, every month I paid late fines out of my tiny salary because I put things off. The two people most precious to me, my mother and Michael, were dead, and my father was growing old alone in that vast, echoing house in Hyderabad while I was alone in mine, thousands of miles away. Yet he and I, equally implacable, could not find a way back to each other. I put my head on the table and broke into sobs.
After a while I picked my head up, swallowed my mud-cold coffee and decided I would visit Michael’s grave. If I went to his grave and talked to him I would calm down and the knot in my throat, which had come to live there since the evening before, would dissolve. I would pay that overdue bill on the way.
I walked down to the electricity office by various shortcuts past the backs of people’s houses. Past Tiwari, the plumber, who raised his hands in a Namaste; past three lumbering olive-green army trucks, each one as big as my bedroom; past the sign that said Military Area, You May be Questioned; past the soldiers who stood at attention all day at the gates of the officers’ mess; past Mr Qureshi, who rolled down his car’s window and told me a long story about how he was driving around house-hunting for relatives who had been given an eviction notice. “It is impossible, there’s not even a tin shed to be found, Maya. You’d find gold hidden under a tree in Ranikhet more easily than a place to live in.” I tried to hurry away from Pande, the hobbling old advocate, but he stopped me and said with a worried look, “Where to, Maya Mam, where to? Tell me, did you know there is a London in Canada also? Do you think that somewhere else in the world there is another Ranikhet? What is real in this world, Mam, can you tell me? Till last week I thought Timbuctoo was not a real place. Then my grandson — he is only seven, you know and this little one already knows much more than me! — he says, ‘No Dadaji, it’s a city in China!’ Child is the Grandfather of Man, I feel it truer every day.”
By the time I had paid the bill, reached the low wall that crumbled around the graveyard, and walked under the stone archway towards Michael, my headache had turned into hammer blows. I reached the grave in a mist of pain, hardly able to open my eyes or see straight. I thought I had walked by mistake to the wrong grave and began to stumble away, when I stopped and looked at the headstone again. It was the right one, of course — low, dark, square, inscribed with Michael’s name, and the words “ever after” — a modest stone with no decoration. At this moment, it had one broken bottle on it and another empty bottle propped against it. Shattered glass lay all around the grave. The day lilies I had planted had been dug out and thrown aside, their long leaves wilted, their light-starved tubers helpless under the sun. Some of the plants had buds on them, some had shrivelled flowers.
The day I buried that tin of ashes there and planted the bulbs, I had had nobody for company but Miss Wilson. She had not thought it worth while to summon the church gravediggers for my small tin, so she had stood by, reading aloud from her Bible, her dull voice reducing the beautiful words to monotonous rubble as I dug with a kutala, an implement whose curved blade I was then unused to. It had been a cold day, with a clammy, grey wind that swept through the pines around the cemetery. The earth was frost-hardened. Nearby was a nettle bush which set my skin on fire if I brushed against it. Mrs Wilson interrupted her reading occasionally to say, “Deeper, deeper. At least three feet.” Her double chins wobbled, and the large mole under her right eye, which sprouted hair, seemed to twitch. She sucked on her buck teeth, making a kissing sound as she read. Though I knew she was there out of compassion and was trying to help, I felt a concentration of hatred for her such as I had not felt before for anyone. The burial had taken more than an hour — she had noted the time on the round gold watch she wore on her right wrist. It had belonged to her maternal grandfather from Kozhikode, she told me that morning, he was once the Collector and this was his retirement present. At intervals she said, “It is eleven. This watch has never been wrong in six-tee years. You have taken half an hour already. We should have brought the gardener with us after all. I thought you’d be able to dig a simple hole. I would do it faster.” But she did not once offer to take over the digging.
In a heart-stopping flash the thought crossed my mind that the tin with Michael’s ashes had been dug out and flung away as the lilies had been. It must have rusted by now, or disintegrated altogether. What if vandals had thrown it down the valley? I went this way and that in a panic, looking for the tin; then decided I was being irrational, that the tin must still be where I had put it: three feet down, as Miss Wilson had insisted. The vandals had not dug so deep, I could see that. I began to gather the lily bulbs from all around the grave to replant them.