Your Loving Friend.
Kundan Singh’s large-lettered scrawl covered all three sides of his inland letters, and all the space on the flaps, as if he were determined not to waste a millimetre. His letters were in simple language, and crowded with vivid details from his days. The landscape of his life became clearer with each blue inland that arrived. He described his room: it was a small one over the garage. From it, he could sometimes hear a lion roar at night — the house was close to Delhi’s zoo. Not far from the house was Purana Quila, the ruins of an ancient fortress. He had never been on the boats that sailed around in the fortress’ moat, but he dreamed of doing so one day, with his “dear friend in Ranikhet”.
Kundan Singh was originally from Nepal, and had a sister, for whose dowry he was saving. His family lived on the outskirts of Siliguri, a town in the plains at the eastern end of the Himalaya. His father made a sort of living as a gardener, odd job man and chowkidar. He had struggled all his life and dreamed that some day his son would get a government job. But Kundan Singh had skipped school and joined a local hotel instead, as a helper, from where he had progressed to his present job.
His employers appeared to be fond of him. The woman (whom he had nicknamed Jhadu because she was very thin and particular about cleanliness) often bought him clothes and gave him extra money to send home. Their house had a deep veranda shaded by chiks made of khus. I had to explain to Charu that chiks were blinds made of a kind of grass, khus, which became fragrant when dampened. The other servants sprinkled the khus with water before guests arrived. They filled tall vases with scented white tuberoses and dusted the pictures. On summer evenings, Kundan’s employers and their friends sat in the veranda looking into the large old trees that shaded the lawn, with a big cooler whirring at them. The tables around them began filling with empty bottles and glasses as the evening passed. One of the frequent visitors was a woman who dressed in very short skirts and long earrings; she drank the most, and also smoked long cigarettes. “She looks like a Nepali,” Kundan had written to Charu, “but she may be Chinese. She wears strange clothes. You can see her legs from top to bottom. She drinks five or six bottles of beer in one evening.”
The short-skirted woman wanted one day to learn how to make mutton the way hill people cooked it. She had demanded a lesson and Jhadu had told him to be ready. Kundan, who had seen cookery shows on television, placed all the ingredients he would need — chopped, diced, ground, or powdered — ready in a line of little bowls. He had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly and cleared all the surfaces so that it looked as much like T.V. kitchens as he could make it. But when the guests arrived, he felt shy. “I did not want to teach anyone anything,” he wrote in his letter. “I stayed in my room. Then Jhadu sent for me.”
When he came into the kitchen, still reluctant, the woman laughed and said, “What, you don’t want to teach me your secrets?” She stood by him and watched and took notes as he cooked the meat. She kept dipping in a spoon, blowing on it and tasting the gravy. One of the other friends took pictures of them cooking. They gave Kundan copies of the photographs, one of which he sent to Charu. It was the first photograph he had ever sent her.
I looked at it before giving it to her. The kitchen in the picture was shiny and new, like something from a magazine. The friend, a pretty young woman with slanting eyes and high cheekbones, was in a slate-grey mini-skirt, very chic. Earrings dangled to her shoulder and a long silver necklace slid down the centre of the low-cut, ivory-coloured top she wore. She was smiling at the camera, a lovely smile. Kundan too was smiling from over the steam in his cooking pot, which had made his face shine. His mop of hair had grown and the brass amulet at his neck blazed in the camera’s flashlight.
When Charu looked at the picture she did not smile. And for the first time, she did not spring about light-footed, humming and chattering, as she usually did after receiving a letter. The next few days she went to the market with her canisters of milk banging sullenly against her legs, and on her way back with the sack of rotting vegetables on her head, she slashed at every bush she passed with her stick.
6
The long summer turned the hillsides to tinder, the rains would not come, and there had been no letter from Kundan since the one with his photograph. Charu was too anxious for anything beyond the mechanical performance of her chores. In earlier times she had always kept a caring eye out for Puran. She was adept at stealing grain from Ama’s stores for his deer and because she knew he fed much of his own food to the animals he made friends with, she made a few extra rotis smeared with salt and ghee to give him when Ama was not looking. Now, more often than not, she forgot and Puran began to go hungry.
He did not ask anyone at home for food. Food had a way of coming to him, he had discovered, if he went up to Negi’s tea stall on Mall Road. That was where Mr Chauhan caught sight of him every other day, and then his long-nursed rage against Puran took on an inexplicable intensity. “This beggar and all these dogs! Just wait, Mam, and you will see what I mean,” he said to me in a hiss one evening when I encountered him on Mall Road. At that moment, Puran was sitting on Negi’s crooked bench, looking innocuous enough. At the road’s edge, boys were arguing over a carrom board, and another group was cheering a volleyball game in the waste-lot next to Meghdoot Hotel. Girls in their brightest, tightest clothes walked up and down in pairs, casting sidelong glances at the boys, who stood around slapping each other’s shoulders, running fingers through their hair, laughing and talking louder when the girls passed. A jeep drew up from the bazaar, roof loaded with sacks and bundles, spilling out people and goat kids and black diesel smoke. Mr Chauhan covered his nose with a white, ironed handkerchief.
The younger Negi came to Puran with an expression of exaggerated patience. “Back again?” he said, and handed him a glass of tea and four fat slices of bread. Puran scurried away with his tea and bread across to the low parapet that ran all the way down the western edge of Mall Road, and sat on it eating in a hurry as if the bread was in danger of being snatched away from him. A ring of woolly dogs formed around him, looking up with pleading eyes and drooling tongues. Puran dropped them scraps and the dogs snarled and yelped as they fought over the food.
Mr Chauhan turned to me in triumph and said, “See? See what I mean? Yesterday I told my secretary — we were in the car — please make a note, I said, too many stray dogs. I would like a list — all dogs’ descriptions and names in one column and owners’ names in the second column. Any dog that does not have a licence must go. We will draw up regulations for licensing dogs and this … beggar? There should be no beggars in an army cantonment. We must be an example for the rest of India. I’ll fix this man. That is what I said.”
He returned to the door of his white Gypsy, whose bright red beacon had been spinning like an angry top all through our conversation. The car roared to life and took him away down Mall Road. Puran sat on the parapet oblivious. The stray dogs lolled at his feet, contented after their snack. The darkening mountains behind him began to swallow the blood-red sun as it turned from a disk to a sliver, slowly disappearing from view.