“If anyone can get it out of there, it’s the Ohjha,” Ama said. “Send someone to call him. But will he come?”
Just three days before, Charu’s grandmother had been holding forth to me about how the Ohjha loathed the new vet. The new vet was a local man who spoke a Pahari dialect, and this had won people’s hearts — the earlier vets had all been strangers from the plains. The new man had cut into the Ohjha’s livelihood. Unlike the vet, the Ohjha was not employed by the hospital. Unlike the vet, the Ohjha had fulminated to Charu’s grandmother, there would be no food on his plate or drink in his glass if sick animals stopped being brought to him. The government paid the vet every month, regardless of how many animals he treated, but who paid the Ohjha? He had to make his way in the world by his own devices. “There he was, sitting in the middle of all the junk at the Kabariwallah’s,” said Ama, “shaking his trident and screaming into his glass of booze, ‘I’ll kick that crazy bastard, the vet, I’ll kick him in the balls!’ I told him, ‘Forget all that, old man, your bijniss is going to go thup, your days are numbered.’ I laughed at him. He won’t come now for me.”
“Why won’t he come? He needs the work,” the taxi-driver said. He got into his cab and drove off to Mall Road to spread the word: anyone who saw the Ohjha was to tell him to come at once.
Ama said, “You don’t believe any of this, Teacher-ni, you city people, but someone’s put a spell on that cow, or an evil wind is blowing curses over it. Or else why did it wander so far this time?”
“Yes, only the Ohjha can do something,” the clerk nodded in sombre agreement.
I said, “Don’t let Charu stay out there all night, it’s too cold and too dangerous.” But her grandmother, realising it would be pointless, did not try calling Charu back home. That evening, she took down a stack of rotis for the cow and food for the girl, helped her make a fire, then hobbled back up. She would do all Charu’s share of the work herself and ask her no questions, however long the cow remained alive; and who could tell, perhaps Charu’s devotion would work a miracle?
The Ohjha came the next afternoon. He lit a fire near Gouri Joshi and threw all kinds of things into it. Little boys from the neighbourhood were made to run up and down the hill many times to cater to the Ohjha’s demands: Ghee! Turmeric! Some uncooked rice! A lemon. Green chillies! A piece of yellow cloth. And so on. He waved his peacock feathers over the cow, chanted, swayed, and shrieked again and again, shaking his head so hard it looked as if it would snap and fall off his neck. Then he went still and quiet. After an interval when everyone waited, respectful and expectant, he gave his verdict: “When the time comes to return to the world of ghosts and spirits, nobody can stand between death and life.” He shook out his robes and feathers, picked up his trident, and walked away. By then, he had deposited charms all over the hillside, eaten three meals at Ama’s house, and pocketed twenty rupees.
Charu remained with the cow all the next day and the day after that. During the day, between grazing their other cattle, Puran came and sat by the cow, stroking it, pressing his own concoction of ground-up herbs to its wounds, and muttering his gibberish into its ear. For some of the time that Puran was there the cow’s eyes appeared to flicker with a suggestion of life, its pain seemed briefly soothed. Then it sank back into a stupor.
Charu had another visitor too. Every evening, when there was no danger of other people, Kundan Singh came stealing down the slope to the forest and sat with Charu till it was time to serve dinner at Aspen Lodge. He collected wood to make a fire near her to keep leopards away. He bought noisy little fireworks from the market to frighten off animals. He went away at mid-evening to resume work and then, after he had served dinner, and his duties were done, he came back with a torch, down the dark slopes, weaving between tree trunks and brambles. He brought whatever food he had been able to squirrel away from the hotelier’s dinner and laid open steel tiffin boxes for her to eat from. He wanted Charu to have the best bits, things she had never eaten: meatballs the first day, chicken the next, then fried rice and egg curry. After eating, they held each other close by the fire, wrapped in a blanket thick enough for the chill of summer nights. Only when sunlight crept up over the ridge did he leave to serve the hotelier and his wife their bed-tea and Marie biscuits.
Kundan Singh thought he might never be as happy again, despite Charu’s tears, the gasping sobs that interrupted her numbed silence, and just below them, the pain-filled eyes of Gouri Joshi, which on the fourth day clouded over and closed.
16
My house was very small. It had two rooms, and a tiny kitchen with two doors. One of the doors opened towards a rockface that in summer was covered with wildflowers. There was so little space between the rockface and the door that you had to walk between them sideways. The larger room, on the ground floor, led out to a north-facing veranda where I had hung geranium overhead that trailed pink and red when it flowered. Every afternoon, after I finished with the school and factory and had had my tea with Diwan Sahib and read the papers with him, I would come back and sit in my veranda, waiting for the sun to set over the snow-peaks.
I was not a good housekeeper, but I could not bring myself to employ someone to clean up. I did not have the spare cash, and besides I had never liked people going through my belongings. The only time someone — a childhood friend — came to stay with me in Ranikhet, she was lecturing me by the second morning: “Maya, for heaven’s sake! You’re never going to use that broken lamp again! And this ancient toaster? Has it ever worked? Why don’t you throw out that ugly tin trunk and get a proper side table? And, my God, look at those cobwebs!” When I told her cleaning cobwebs had been Michael’s department because I was not tall enough, she gave me an exasperated look and climbed onto a chair with a broom in her purposeful hand. She kept picking clothes out of my cupboard, holding them up for display between a finger and thumb, and saying, “Hey, there are flood victims who would turn this down if you donated it to them!”
Sometimes I did have cleaning fits, but just as I was about to throw something out, I would be held back by a memory: that’s the chipped blue ceramic bowl Michael and I bought when we set up house, that patched and darned sweater I never wear is the one my mother knitted for me, and that’s the toaster Diwan Sahib gave me during my first month in Ranikhet — it fused in a blaze of sparks the very next week and resisted all attempts to repair it, but still. Over the years, the clutter had become part of the comforting topography of the house, and after I had locked up at night and drawn the curtains and sat down with my glass of rum, I felt the house sighing with me, as if it were unwinding as well.
The cleanest part of the house was the earthen courtyard around it, which Charu swept every morning as if it were an extension of her own yard. She would come early with a broom, her hair and mouth covered with her dupatta, sweep and rake and sweep again, and leave in a cloud of dust and dry leaves. She would return a minute later and sprinkle a mug of water before the door to settle the dust, and when the smell of damp earth reached me inside the house, I would know she had finished.
In the days after Gouri Joshi died, Charu did not come. I did not expect her to: her grandmother said she was moping and hardly managing her chores. Then she did begin to come once more, but the sweeping was haphazard and the leaves remained unraked in many places. I watched her listless movements and was reminded of Mr Chauhan’s despair over the filth in the cantonment and his promise to turn Ranikhet into a Switzerland. He had said he would do something about the vandalism at the graveyard where Michael was buried, but he had done nothing that I could see. The lilies had struggled back to life, however, and no more damage had been done.