Charu disappeared for long hours with — and sometimes without — the other cows and goats. She often left Bijli behind too, tied to the door-post, indignant and restless, barking all afternoon. She left Ama to do all the work in their vegetable patches. When she ate at all, she poked at the rice on her plate, pushing much of it away. I heard her grandmother’s strident voice shout at her. “You think food grows on trees? Half your rice is thrown into the cow’s feed every day. You need to starve a day or two and then you’ll know what food is about.”
I did not know it then, but Charu did: Ranikhet appeared to be a dead end to the hotel manager and he had decided to move back to Delhi. With him would go his cook, her Kundan Singh. Charu had never been to the city he would go off to: she had no way of picturing his future life far away. What unimaginable lures and temptations did it hold? She did not know if she would ever see him again.
Later, when things fell into place, I was able to understand what I had seen that summer when I went deep into the forest one afternoon. I had followed my usual route to the temple until, near Westview Hotel, I decided I would walk along the stream instead, to see where it led. I went down a low slope and with every step seemed to leave a little more daylight behind. There was a path of sorts, beaten by human feet for some of the way, then the undergrowth grew dense and thorny bushes began to catch on my clothes. Somewhere I could hear a whistling thrush. Its piercing, clear song cut its own path through the forest, each surge of melody punctuated by a few seconds of rustling quiet.
I had not thought of it for years, but the air, the trees, the aquarium-green light all around, took me back to a forest near Hyderabad where I had once gone with Michael. It was a wilderness with a half-dry stream somewhere in it and we had chanced upon it during one of our joyrides on Michael’s motorbike. He had been teaching me how to ride it, seated behind me, putting his hands over mine on the handlebars to guide me. For several days we had had nothing but painful falls, collisions and quarrels, but that day I had finally got the hang of it and was speeding down the empty road, jubilant, when Michael suddenly said, “Stop!”
The sound of the motorbike died down, I parked it at the edge of the forest, and we walked into it, hand in hand, as if we were children in a fairy-tale entering an enchanted wood. Broad-leaved trees, stacked close and deep, blocked out the sun, their green looking black in the shade. There was dark earth and mulch underfoot, and a drumstick tree with a furry blanket of caterpillars over its trunk. The air was sweet with the dense scent of the tiny white flowers of wild curry leaf plants. I picked up a dead branch to use as my machete, but it broke in half with my first swipe at the brush. I plucked a red wildflower and stuck it behind my ear. We laughed a lot. I felt beautiful. My hair was loose, it fell to my waist. We found a small, dead bird on our path. I mourned for the loneliness of its mate. Michael had a smile in his eyes when he said, “The mate is happily mating with a newer, bluer, larger bird.”
“If I died,” I had said, “you would find a newer, bluer bird within a week, men are like that.”
And Michael had said, “You wouldn’t wait for me to die to find another man, look at the dozens humming around your ears like butterflies on a flower.” He had stopped walking then and kissed me everywhere, his urgent hands inside my clothes.
* * *
I was summoned to the present by the call of a fox. It was some distance away, invisible in the undergrowth. Its cry made the forest seem quieter and more deserted than I had noticed, the road very distant. The canopy formed overhead by the trees hid most of the sky. In the stillness, I heard voices, and then saw them: Charu and Kundan Singh. They were a little way ahead, in a clearing, the sun giving their hair golden halos as if they had stepped out of a painting. I stopped, hardly daring to breathe. I noticed every detaiclass="underline" his white and blue shirt, his mop of hair, the way his eyebrows overhung his deep-set eyes, her dupatta, the green of a tender new leaf, his young man’s Adam’s apple, the brass amulet tied to his neck with a thick black thread, the sparkling green glass studs in her ear lobes, the look on her face of desperation.
Her back was against a giant chestnut tree. He stood facing her, barricading her between his arms against a tree. I heard him saying, “I will be back, you’re not to worry, I will be back. You must wait. I’ll write to you.”
She said, “You’ll write!”
“Yes!” he said, fervent. “Every week. Every day.”
She turned her face up to him and I could see tears in her eyes. In a mumble so quiet I could hardly hear it, she said, “But I can’t read. I can’t read or write. I never learned.”
He looked flummoxed for a second. Then in a pleading voice he said, “I’ll do everything else. You just have to learn to read and write. Or find someone to read for you.”
She laughed despite the tears. “And how will I get someone else to read out your letters? What will you write about? What you cooked for lunch, what the manager said to you?”
He buried his fingers and then his face in her hair. “I’ll write in riddles,” he said. “It is only you who will know what I am saying.” He twisted the studs in her ear and said, “Give me one of these, and when we meet again, it’ll be back with the other. It’ll be our lucky charm.”
It was about a fortnight later, early in May, that Charu came to me with a letter from her friend “Sunita” and asked me to teach her to read and write.
PART TWO
1
It was early one morning that summer, Diwan Sahib still rumpled with sleep, holding his mug of tea, and I on my way to school, cutting through his lawn. A distant humming sound that came closer every second had stopped me in my tracks and brought him out from his bedroom in his night-clothes.
The sound resolved itself into an olive green helicopter and I said, “It’s just a helicopter.” As I started on my way again, Diwan Sahib said, “It may not be just a helicopter. Not in an army town. Have you any idea what goes on here? This is a town that lives by secrets. State secrets. Army secrets. Grubby little personal secrets.”
He looked more ill-tempered and bleary-eyed than was usual for his early mornings, and looked set to embark on a long story I would not be able to interrupt. I quickened my pace and shouted over my shoulder at him, “It is just a helicopter, and I’ll see you after school.”
That day however, the helicopter noise was insistent, and there were two of them: circling the forests, first coming down very low, then swooping away in another direction, chopping up the sky with their blades. Was it a General visiting, or did a forest fire needed monitoring? Each time the sound approached, people paused in whatever they were doing to look up and puzzle over it.
The restless sound echoed through the skies all day. By mid-afternoon we noticed dark plumes of smoke in the distance, and some people claimed they had heard an explosion. At Bisht Bakery, both customers and bakers were agreed that the Army was trying to find a Chinese spy who had slipped in through the northern border. By the time I reached Negi’s tea stall, the consensus had changed: an escaped terrorist was on the run and had set fire to something important.
On my way back from Negi’s, at about three o’clock, I saw Veer’s jeep turning a bend. I paused, waiting for him to stop and pick me up to drive me to the Light House, with a long detour for samosas. This was our ritual when he was in town. But today he drove past without even a wave. The road was empty. It was narrow. I had to stand aside to let him pass. He was close enough for me to see that he was wearing his dark glasses and a white shirt, that his backpack was on the seat next to him. I stayed where I was, sure he would realise his mistake and slam on his brakes further down the road.