He blinked as if he had been asleep. His face was etched with pain, but he rearranged it into an imitation of his usual half-seriousness. “Because of Edwina’s dog, entirely because of her dog,” he said. Edwina had a dog called Mizzen. She did not know what to do with it when the time came to leave India. Given England’s quarantine rules, the dog would have had to be isolated for several months before being allowed to re-enter the country. Edwina consulted Nehru and they agreed it was better to put it down than make it suffer quarantine; the dog was too old to survive it, they thought. “That did it for me,” Diwan Sahib said. “All those gardens at his prime-ministerial doorstep and the man didn’t offer to adopt it and let it live out its remaining years in peace? How do you think an old dog like me feels about that? You won’t put me down, will you, if I become inconvenient?”
“Do you really have any of their letters?” I asked him. “Couldn’t I see them once?” I had had a hunch all along that he had made it up to amuse himself watching people like the woman from East Anglia pay him obeisance.
“Maybe I have them, maybe I don’t,” Diwan Sahib said. “Maybe, maybe not. You’ll find out.” He had shut his eyes again. “I should chop this house into firewood,” he said, his words slurring. “Too big for me, too big — ”
He was drowsy now. He slouched in his big armchair, and in the dim light he looked shrivelled, old and haggard, all bones and loose skin. Above him, the photograph of his dogs in silhouette was scarcely visible, but it made me think of Veer’s stories of Diwan Sahib’s youth: his parties, his horses, the music, his women. He was receding before my eyes, fading out of reach.
I felt the need to do something to stop him disappearing from my life. I pulled a few pages from one of the old bundles on Corbett that had emerged a month ago and said, “Tonight I’m going to type up a few of these and we’ll go over them tomorrow. O.K.? We’ll start again. We’ll find out if we missed anything in the third draft.”
He did not answer. He was lost again in his own thoughts, staring into the sputtering flames.
* * *
That night, I sat up with his papers, and the sound of my typewriter clacked into the night. I typed page after page, overcome by a sense of loss, which, if it had not been overpowering, would have struck me as absurd. How had I missed knowing the man who wrote those words at the time he wrote them? And if his time was short, as he insisted more and more often these days, could I bring myself to look into the abyss of Diwan Sahib’s certain absence?
This is what I typed from Diwan Sahib’s manuscript that night: it was his statement of purpose, his optimistic, tongue-in-cheek plan for a biography — when he had not known the project would take him forty years and still remain incomplete.
Being petrified ever since birth of even the most minor forms of physical injury, it is conceptually difficult for me to grasp something as foolish as bravery. I can only gape in wonder at people who do not require wild horses to drag them onto a cricket pitch, at batsmen who face fast bowlers without being shackled by iron to the wicket. I am similarly bowled over by the idiocy of people who go walking of their own free will in forests where they might be eaten by bears or be clawed by tigers whose talons can sometimes be as sharp as those of certain women I have known. Next to schoolteachers, a tiger seems to me the most terrifying thing in the world, and its immediate extinction (or at least caged enclosure) is a wild inner desire that I have to keep suppressing, given that I am writing a book on Jim Corbett. One look at a tiger’s dental arrangements is sufficient to convince anyone that vegetarianism is not a notion likely to have been entertained even by its remote ancestors. In early youth I was regularly carted off into a forest by my employer, the Nawab of Surajgarh. I was informed by him that the object of these expeditions was to try and glimpse one of these beasts. After I had got over the feeling that either he was joking or lunatic, I transcended the condition of fright in which one merely sobs uncontrollably, and was restrained from the suicide I was attempting by jumping off the swaying pachyderm transporting us in the direction of Blakean fearful symmetry. The Nawab had a profound effect on my early predisposition towards being separated, via a stout iron cage, from all species of four-legged life larger than myself. In part, this accounts for my fascination with Jim Corbett, who seems to have been braver even than the Nawab of Pataudi when he captained our national cricket team. His life was years of shunting and hooting, then hunting and shooting — he was a railwayman before he became a celebrated shikari. By his own account Corbett voluntarily, even assiduously, did the very last thing I would ever do, namely “get in touch” (as he sweetly puts it) with man-eaters. As we know from his riveting tales, the man-eaters were not equally keen to get in touch with him. Once he was on their tails, so to speak, they found it hard to shake him off — which we can’t either, once we get hooked to his tales. Man-eaters of Kumaon looks to me like India’s third greatest storybook, after the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. How did Corbett acquire the art of writing so brilliantly? He read James Fenimore Cooper; Jack London and Mark Twain may also have influenced him. He seems to have read fiction set in frontier territory; novels of exploration and adventure. In my book on Corbett, I want to model myself on Corbett’s tales, telling a sequence of stories that provide a picture of Corbett along with glimpses of his context. I want to give a sense of original, archival fact-finding. There will be entertaining digressions that show how Corbett’s immersion in wildlife was a substitute for the wilderness he suffered in relation to women because of a possessive and devoted sister. The chief source of information on Corbett is a sheaf of notes — thirteen pages dictated by the same sister (whose name was Maggie) to her friend in Kenya, Ruby Beyts, where she and Jim spent their last years. Maggie functioned for India’s greatest naturalist as a mother, sister and wife, much as Dorothy did for Wordsworth. I am starting this book today — the 13th of September, 1967. I plan to finish the book in two years, at most three. But will anyone ever publish it?
5
Charu hovered at home around the time the postman made his rounds, pretending she had work to do there. She looked up each time she heard Bijli bark and subsided when she saw there was nobody in particular the dog was barking at. For a few days after a letter from Kundan Singh, I could hear her happy voice everywhere. She tripped down the shortcut through the forest to the bazaar with canisters of milk for regular customers, and when she returned, her face would be wreathed in smiles, although her shoulders were bent with the leaking sackfuls of rotting vegetables that she collected from the market for her cows and carried home on her head. Then as the days passed, and the gap between letters lengthened, her ebullience dwindled.
Each time a letter came, I asked her if she wanted me to write a reply and she shook her head. One day she said, “I’ll write when I can write by myself.” She was improving. She no longer forgot spellings from one day to the next. To begin with I was teaching her words like “hum”, “tum”, and “theek” that I thought would most quickly help her frame her first independent letter. Meanwhile she made me write Kundan’s address on stamped envelopes once in a while and she posted him things — leaves, pine needles, pressed flowers — that I came to know about when he mentioned them in his replies.
“It is very hot here,” the letter I read to her that June said.
You will never be able to imagine how hot. In the afternoon I can see flies falling dead out of the air. When I come back to my room my bed has dead flies on it. There are dust storms here instead of rain. The wind picks up dust from the ground and blows it around. It looks dark with the dust as if it’s very cloudy. It stings your eyes. It is very hard to cook in this heat. The kitchen is as hot as a pot on the fire. The water in the tap is hot enough for tea. Yesterday I went to a fair after work. There were dancers like in movies. It had bright lights and a giant wheel like we had seen once in the army grounds. But I remembered that wheel and did not want to climb into this one alone for a ride. I walked around and thought of walking in the mountains. I bought earrings with red stones. It is pretty, but not as pretty as the one I have, with a green stone. I will write again.