That evening, when I told Ama about the cigarettes, she gave me her all-knowing look and said with a cackle of sarcastic laughter, “Life’s improved for Diwan Sa’ab ever since his nephew came back! So much more to drink, and now cigarettes! The nephew will kill his uncle with trying to make him happy, just you wait and see.” I pretended not to understand what she was implying and busied myself with other work. I did not want her to suppose I was encouraging malice. She had never liked or trusted Veer, and she had told me so in the early days, not thinking he would actually start living at the Light House or that he and I would become friends. She was too politic now to be open about her dislike, but sometimes the temptation was irresistible.
Diwan Sahib lost weight because of eating less and drinking more, and that made him look both younger and frailer. However his eyes, spider-webbed with wrinkles, retained their wicked gleam. One afternoon, a buxom woman from somewhere in East Anglia arrived out of the blue, saying she was writing a love story based on the lives of Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. “It is vital to my project, Sir, that I see the letters I believe to be in your possession. If you allow me a day’s access to the papers, I’m willing to share my royalties with you.” She came in a flowing silk sari that repeatedly slid off her shoulder to bare her cleavage, so that, Diwan Sahib later said, two roads converged in a low silk blouse, and he wished he could have travelled both.
When she met with no success the first day — she had installed herself at the Westview Hotel — she returned on each of the next two mornings. Her long black hair was in a bun crested by a red rose one day, a creamy magnolia the next. She sat very straight, adjusted the flower, and looked at Diwan Sahib, focusing her energies through her large pleading eyes. She gifted him a shawl from the local army widows’ co-operative, and, the next day, a bottle of rum.
She tried to talk about Nehru, but Diwan Sahib remorselessly steered the conversation to Corbett. “Did you know,” he said, “that he died the day before Einstein? Einstein stole his thunder. Was Corbett a lesser man than Einstein? If I were lost in the jungles here” — he waved a hand this way and that — ”I hope you are careful when you walk around after dark? And that you know that a slow-moving snake that wriggles as it approaches is very likely a poisonous one? That is when you need Corbett with you, Madam, and not Einstein — when you want someone to be able to tell from looking at scratch marks on rocks, which animals have passed, how far they are from you, why the langur is calling from that tree, why the barking deer leaped away across the path. Do you follow me?”
The woman’s eyes had glazed over, but she nodded.
“But who remembers Corbett now, other than a few senile ancients like me?”
It was only on the afternoon the woman was leaving and had come to say goodbye that Diwan Sahib chose to relent. “Oh, I forgot,” he said, “Nehru came here to Ranikhet with the Mountbattens. He dropped in to see me too — that chair — your chair? He sat on that very chair with a gin and bitters in one hand and a cigarette in the other.”
The woman jumped from her chair, stared at it in disbelief, and scrabbled in her handbag for her camera as Diwan Sahib continued, “Why don’t you drive down to Holm Farm? They have a framed picture there, of Edwina, Dickie, Nehru and Mr Upadhyaya, who presided over the place.” He returned placidly to his newspaper while she gave him a look that combined excitement, impatience, and irritation in equal measure, before rushing off to her driver to consult him about the practicalities of a detour to the Holm Farm Hotel on her way to the station.
Diwan Sahib watched the car disappear into a cloud of dust, then went inside. He poured us both a rum and we sank into our usual chairs. For a while, exhausted with talk, we did not speak. Above the fireplace was a tall vase filled with half-dead pink roses into which Himmat Singh had stuck a few blood-red Aztec lilies. It was so quiet that I thought I could hear when, from time to time, the decaying rose petals dropped onto the mantelpiece. Flames ate at a small log in the fireplace. A fire was lit in that room every day, even on the hottest summer evenings, to kill the damp and protect the books from silverfish.
“The prime minister of a newly independent country,” Diwan Sahib said after a long spell of silence. “Devoted to the wife of his departing Viceroy. Is it a surprise that this woman wants to turn it into a lurid romance?” He emptied half his glass in one gulp. He sighed, tilted his head back on his chair and shut his eyes.
When after a long pause he began to speak, it was half to himself. His eyes were still shut and his voice so low that I had to lean forward to catch his words. It was a strange relationship, he said. They began to feel a closeness to each other at the end of Edwina’s time in India, on the brink of her departure, and after that they could hardly bear to be parted for a single moment. Some of their letters were written when they were both in the same room, some were written moments after they had left each other; there was one scribbled across an official banquet’s menu card. In the years to follow, they were rarely alone together, and saw each other only for brief snatches when one of them visited on the way to somewhere else. They were constantly among other people. Yet they wrote to each other every day for several years. The letters came and went by diplomatic bag. Each one was numbered because they were afraid the letters might fall into the wrong hands. And why should they not have feared that eventuality? So much in those letters was dangerous for people in public life. Nehru had called his friendship with Edwina a battle between convention and chemistry in which chemistry had won — more or less. It could not be allowed to win entirely. Public life is relentless, it is unforgiving, it is held together by conventions and the fear of any threat to them. “I should know,” Diwan Sahib said.
His voice took on the tones of someone reciting a poem: “I lose myself in a dreamland, which is very unbecoming in a prime minister. But then I am only incidentally a prime minister.” A man willingly imprisoned by his political destiny, said Diwan Sahib, separated from the woman he loved by duty, distance, necessity, even instinct. If either of them abandoned their own orbits, Nehru had told Edwina, they would both be terribly unhappy. The impossibility of their love was also what sustained it.
Diwan Sahib’s brow remained furrowed in thought. He stared at the fire as if reading from it. I hardly dared say a word, never having seen him so lost to the world around him. He had not once sounded like this talking about Corbett. I could not understand it. The story was startling, of course, but surely so well known and often repeated that it had lost its power to move anyone, especially someone as unsentimental as Diwan Sahib. You are starting to sound like a romance writer too, I would have said, if he had not looked so unlike himself.
“There were letters in which Nehru said he felt Edwina’s presence like a fragrance in the air,” Diwan Sahib murmured on. “She said she felt a sense of peace and happiness with him as she did with no-one else. He sent her things to remind her of the country she had left: birch bark from Kashmir, leaves, stones. Edwina had even given him a ring before leaving India. When she died in her sleep, alone in Borneo, Nehru’s letters were by her bed. She travelled with them everywhere. It was what she read before she slept every night.”
“Why didn’t you write a book on this instead of on Corbett?” I said, when his next pause grew too long.