I was nineteen when we married, still at college. I returned to classes a week after our wedding. I would stare at the neem tree by my classroom window, and in the middle of a lecture on the Delhi Sultanate I would lose myself in daydreams until at length the professor’s voice once again became audible, hammering at me from somewhere far off: “Can you repeat the assessment I just made of Qutb-ud-din-Aibak and the Slave Dynasty? I’m speaking to you. To you, Maya.”
Michael used to grumble about the size of our two rooms. “It’s a shed,” he said, “they must have built it as a garage.” The place did look smaller with him in it. The ceiling was low, the bathroom was a little box where your elbow knocked painfully against a tap if you turned. He was tall and somewhat clumsy, so he tended to bang into things. I would lie back in bed and watch him, filled with adoration as he puzzled his way through making coffee in our new kitchen, on our new gas stove. Mostly he gave up, and walked back towards our tousled bed, his eyes on me with a look of yearning so distilled, so intense, that I had to turn away for fear of its strength.
In those days in Hyderabad, if Michael tossed and turned, I got up to sprinkle water on our sheets to cool the room. If the electricity went, I would sit up, fanning us both with a newspaper. He slept through it all, exhausted by his long day at work rushing through the burning summer air on his motorbike, wherever his newspaper sent him to take pictures. I would look at his helpless, sleeping face and though he could not hear me, I whispered endearments so tender that they would have curled away and died if exposed to the light of day.
“I couldn’t say them to you then, but I wish you knew,” I said now, and tried to hear his voice replying. But all I heard was foxes calling to each other and pine needles sprinkling down on the tin roof, making a sound like rain.
4
In colonial times, the summer months in Ranikhet meant horse races and moonlit picnics, and even now we have a “season” when the town is crowded with people who come up from the plains to escape the heat. They are everywhere for a few weeks: tourists, summer residents, day trippers. Scholars would turn up to see Diwan Sahib. Trekkers heading for the high Himalaya paused in Ranikhet en route; all kinds of people wandered in and out of the Light House as if it were a public monument. If they found Diwan Sahib in the garden they stopped to pump him for information about the hills or to photograph him as a relic of the Raj, a bona fide old Indian nobleman. Sometimes supplies would arrive for one of Veer’s trekking groups, or middlemen tasked with requisitioning porters in the Ranikhet bazaar would come and stay for hours, poring over details. There was a young assistant Veer had employed, who was stationed at the house from time to time. He hovered all day, appearing to do nothing more substantial at all.
Ever since Veer had taken up residence at the Light House, Diwan Sahib’s writing had barely progressed. If I asked him for new chapters to type, he waved his hand at whoever happened to be visiting and said, “I can’t write when there are so many people. I’ll wait till the season ends and then we’ll finish chapter seven. I’ll get the book done this year, that’s a promise. I don’t have much more time. That Welsh poet, what was his name? We learned his poem in school — ‘Job Davies, eighty-five/Winters old and still alive/After the slow poison/And treachery of the seasons.’ — did you have to learn it too?”
“No,” I said.
“You should. Good poem. I’m like Mr Davies — worse — I’m eighty-seven! Every morning I wake up and tell myself, ‘What, still alive?’ I truly don’t have long.”
“You don’t want to write any more,” I said. “There’s too much else to do.” I pointed to the bottle on the table next to him. Now that Veer kept him supplied with superior alcohol, Diwan Sahib’s durbar began soon after breakfast and went on long into the afternoon. He would keep postponing lunch, pouring himself yet another drink, waving Himmat Singh away each time he said, “Shall I serve lunch, Sa’ab?” Mr Qureshi too was under the spruce tree nursing his steel glass on most days. He seemed to have abandoned his workshop to his son.
“Maybe if you wrote for an hour or so in the morning before starting on the gin?”
“What nonsense,” Diwan Sahib said, and poured himself another large measure. “Don’t be such a schoolteacher. My taste buds feel as if they’ve come back to life after twenty years dormant.” He turned to Mr Qureshi and said, “You were going to tell me something. This girl interrupted you.”
“Yes, yes, Diwan Sahib, as I was saying, mysterious are the ways of man.” Mr Qureshi smiled, round-faced, and red-nosed, already a little tipsy. “Do you know, Maya, a car came in for servicing yesterday — a Honda City, belongs to that new doctor at the nursing home, what’s his name? Sharma or Verma. Anyway, the boys started work on the car. They’re strapping young fellows, foul-mouthed and stoned half the time. When they opened the boot to get the spare tyre, right there, one of them almost fell over with fright. There was a head in the boot. Long hair and all.”
“A human head?” I said. “You mean a dead body?”
“Aha, Maya!” Mr Qureshi chuckled. “Scared you, didn’t I? No, when they looked again they realised it was a plastic head, a stand for a wig. There was a wig on it: long curling red hair. Even had two blue hairclips. So what do we do then? Of course we phone the doctor and we say, ‘Sir, you left a wig in your car.’ And the doctor shouts, ‘What wig? What do you take me for? Are you trying to insult me? I have a full head of hair and it’s my own, I’ll come to your workshop and you can pull it if you like and see if it comes off,’ he says, and bangs the phone down, so angry. There is no explanation. None, Diwan Sahib. Correct me if I am wrong, but mysterious are the ways of mankind. I have kept the head in the showroom of the workshop. Maya, you can come and see it if you don’t believe me. What was it doing in the boot? No idea.”
Diwan Sahib said, “Why won’t we believe you? Stranger things than this happened in Surajgarh in my time. Now let me tell you — ”
And Corbett was filed away for another day.
One afternoon, when I came to his lawn with the newspapers, I found Diwan Sahib smoking. I said nothing, but a look passed between us. He took a long, defiant drag and after a pause blew out a lungful of smoke. He tapped his Rolls Royce cigarette case and displayed a neat row of filter tips. If he had been a child he might have stuck his tongue out at me. He had stopped smoking with great difficulty three years earlier. He had sworn then that he was free of the siren call of addiction, and that he would never put himself through stopping again.
I marched into the house and found Veer’s assistant there. He was a limp, shy young man from Dehra Dun, who spent most evenings pacing in the garden murmuring to his wife on a mobile. He was a follower of the Radha Soami sect and cooked his own vegetarian meals, minus even onion and garlic, on a separate gas stove that he had set up on a back veranda. If chicken or fish was cooked in the house, he lit incense sticks by the dozen and his face assumed a rigid expression of martyrdom. He regarded cigarette packets and bottles of gin as objects that had been planted in the house by the Devil in person. He looked horrified when I asked him how Diwan Sahib had laid his hands on cigarettes. “None of us smoke, Maya Mam,” he said. “Some visitor must have left the cigarettes in the house.” They happened to be Diwan Sahib’s old brand too. “What’s a couple of cigarettes after three years?” Diwan Sahib shouted towards us. “Do you think I have no self-control?”