All this time, his father had been proud of his martial son and boasted that his boy would retire as a Captain — at least. The mystery of the helicopters and the smoke made him take fright. He quarrelled volubly with his son for several days. He now wanted the boy to join the water board instead: they would give him a safe clerical job, he knew they would, a father’s job often passed to the son. “What’s good enough for your father is good enough for you, you fool!” I heard him shout. “The Army is not fun and games. You’ll thank me when you see your friends being sent off to die!”
One inexplicable consequence of the helicopters was that the post did not come for a week. Perhaps the two things were not connected; later we came to know that a postal strike had begun in the plains the same day. But rumbles began after the second day without the post and we heard that our letters were being looked through for clues, that the postmaster was involved in the trouble, and that the post office was the terrorists’ next target. I was unconcerned, but Charu grew more anxious with every passing day. The postman arrived in the late afternoon, sometimes in the evening: ours was his last call because he lived across the stream from us. Charu hovered nearby as the time of his homecoming approached, waiting for him to go limping past. She did not dare ask him if there was a letter. She had only received one letter, in May, soon after Kundan Singh had reached Delhi. Since then, there had been silence. Charu behaved as though an eternity had passed.
2
“How are you? How is your family? I hope all are well. I am well.” So began the second letter Charu received, which arrived when she had all but given up hope.
I had brought a Hindi primer from school, with the alphabet and brightly-coloured pictures, and some exercise books. After I read out the letter from Kundan, I opened the primer and made Charu find each letter he had used. I made her write the simpler words from his letter into an exercise book. His spellings were often not correct, but at that stage I did not pause over spelling. She sweated and muttered and pushed away strands of hair in her effort to concentrate. She had only the foggiest recollection of reading and writing from her classes of long ago, though there were unexpected shafts of clarity. Charu’s delighted giggles at such times were so infectious that we sounded more like two teenage conspirators than a teacher and her young student. These occasions were not frequent. She had forgotten much of the alphabet; it was coming back, but slowly. She had forgotten all her numbers.
I drew her cartoons of the letters as people and animals. I made her write them again and again. I brought back different books of nursery rhymes and stories from the school’s library cupboard every few days. I made her read the larger print on biscuit packets and soap bars. I was possessed by my task: it had become a mission. I had failed with Charu all those years ago when she was a little girl in my class. This time it would be different! I let no opportunity pass. Once Mr Chauhan came upon us when I was trying to make her read one of his Hindi signs as she grazed her animals, and he exclaimed overjoyed, “I knew it, Mam! I knew it! You have a velvet fist in your iron glove. That day when I told you the peasants need education in civic sense, I thought you were annoyed. I thought you walked away in anger. But no, you took my words to heart. Mam, you have given me a fresh lease of life! Now I will charge ahead with my mission — on a war footing.”
Charu applied herself to this new chore in her life with resolve, and often, when I saw her pressing a piece of chalk to a slate I had bought for her, her skin glowing in the honey-coloured sun of evening, she looked to me less an ordinary peasant girl and more a heroine from a folktale, even if her battle was not with fabulous monsters and wicked witches but only with the alphabet and absence. I would see her sitting in her courtyard with an intent look in her eyes, chin resting on knees, tongue sticking out, writing on the ground with a twig as she waited for the evening fire to catch or the hens to come in. She swore in frustration if, despite re-tracing the letters in the dust with her own fingers, she could not tell what they added up to. The “ba” and “ka” and “pa” confused her. The lines wobbled and dissolved and swam into each other. The letters flipped over as if they had a life of their own. She had to stop herself from tearing the page up in her fury at her own slowness. But still, evening after evening, she came back for her lessons.
* * *
“I have to go every afternoon to Sa’ab’s hotel,” Kundan’s second letter said.
They do not like eating hotel food. They like daalroti-sabzi, food from home. They like it hot. So every morning I cook it and then pack it all in a special tiffin carrier that keeps it hot. Then I cycle with it to the hotel. It has been built very recently. Your eyes would be dazzled by the hotel. It is like a magic palace. I am not allowed to enter it. I have to go to the back entrance and hand the food to someone. But when I pass the main door I can see how shiny everything is. It smells different. Music comes out of there when people go in and out. I saw a pool of totally blue water. People swim in the water, with hardly any clothes. You would laugh to see them. Mostly the people are dressed like kings and queens. But none of them look as beautiful as hill people. I think of my parents in Siliguri. But more than that I think of Ranikhet. Send me something from the forest.
Your friend.
When I finished reading a letter, Charu would ask me to read it again, sometimes three times, and listen carefully, frowning, as if trying to memorise it. Then she would take the letter from me and hide it in her clothing. Charu’s living quarters were so cramped she could not find a place to hide the letters there. Ama, Puran, and she had two small rooms, one of which was partitioned in half: one half was their kitchen, the other had bright blue walls and a black-and-white T.V. covered with a crocheted cloth. A vase with pink plastic roses stood on top of the T.V. and on the wall was a picture Charu had painted, of purple and blue flowers that might have been irises. There were two chairs and a bed and a trunk made into a table. Through patterned plastic curtains you could glimpse the second room, which had a bed. Of course, Charu did not have her own room or cupboard; it was sufficient if she found the same corner every night to sleep in. After two near misses, when Ama very nearly lighted upon her letters, Charu now put them in a plastic bag and tucked them into a rafter in the cowshed, along with her magpie feather and bead necklace.
It was a problem finding the time for her lessons. We were both busy. Charu was forever rushing back and forth between her chores at home and her part-time job at the factory. Even when she managed to come to my house, she had to leave if her grandmother yelled for her: “Where did you put the spade?” “Run to Mall Road and buy some oil.” “Who do you think will put in the hens?” “God knows where the girl is, or her dog. Charu!”
I had to divide my time between taking classes at St Hilda’s and overseeing jam making, bottling, and accounting at the factory. May and June were our most crowded months: all the soft fruit of summer — plums, peaches, apricots — arrived from distant villages, baskets and crates of them together, and they had to be dealt with at once. Some days, neither Charu nor I got home from the factory till after dark. At times it was late afternoon when I reached Diwan Sahib for my newspaper session and on the rare days that he decided to work on his book with me, I was lucky if I returned in time for the sunset on my veranda.