I slept badly that night. I missed the certainties of my life in Benares, the measured day, the focused mind. The long journey from Benares, the strangeness of my new surroundings, the hotel, the house, the maharaja, the manager, the Americans, the French tourists, the new complicated knowledge about Miss West’s past, Catherine’s unsettled and unsettling presence, her many alien, inscrutable emotions and preoccupations — I felt them beginning to work on me. Thoughts combined, interlocked, ramified. I felt tense, oddly exposed.
2
WE WOKE UP LATE the next morning and had to sprint down the hillside to the bus station. But the bus to Kalpi was already packed full by the time we reached it, with not an inch of sitting or standing space anywhere. The only vacancies were on top, and as other passengers — mostly peasants with sackloads of vegetables — gawked, Catherine and I clambered up to the tin-plated roof with our bags.
The bus started late and when it did I immediately felt the cold; the dry and bracing wind cut right through to the skin. I gradually took out all the woollen clothes I had brought with me. But I still shivered every time a fresh gust of wind blew across the roof.
As the bus groaned out of the ungainly clutter of downtown Mussoorie, wide unobstructed vistas opened up all around us: lushly forested foothills wreathed in early-morning blue mists; sharp-edged stripes of sunlight angled against the soft mulchy ground of pine groves; thin columns of smoke rising from the tiny houses with thatch or tin roofs scattered all across the hillsides and deep in the valley — the sallow gems of the previous night, now dwarfed by the huge immensities of space daylight had revealed; the vast landscape over which the snow-covered mountains to the north, resting on plinths of deep blue air, serenely presided, giant white mountains that often appeared in altered perspective and sometimes were obscured as the bus twisted and turned in tortuous loops, but which were always solidly, immutably present.
All morning, we circled down into a flat-bottomed valley, into the gigantic needlework of rice fields, where tiny bent human figures appeared as minute coloured stitches; then, as we descended farther, the bright red kerchiefs of the women and the water-soaked fields with their jagged reflections of the sky grew clearer. Another season, another kind of climate existed here; the air became less chilly. The bus stopped to let passengers off at little thatch-roofed tea shacks, where a smell of cooking oil and tobacco hung in the crisp air and ancient grey-bearded men in thick woollen vests sat coughing over hookahs, a pine-cone fire crackling away on the ground. Coming around a bend the bus would occasionally startle a party of hook-nosed Gujjars on their way to the high passes after the winter down in the foothills; with flailing arms and a stick they would herd their flocks, all curved horns and glittering eyes, to the side of the road and then, with wary red eyes, watch the bus sidle past.
At a raffish highway town, where we stopped to switch buses, Catherine was accosted by a young entrepreneur from Delhi. Thick-lipped, leonine-browed, with the beginnings of a paunch visible even under his bulbous warm jacket, he wore cowboy boots and levis and was standing at the paan shop combing his hair with rapid stylish flourishes. Hands dug deep in his jacket pockets, he sauntered over to where we stood waiting for the bus. He ignored me altogether as he spoke to Catherine. ‘You must be going to Kalpi,’ he said, ‘but it’s very inconvenient by bus. You can come in my car. It’s very comfortable, air-conditioned and all that.’ He gestured to the steel-grey Maruti parked before a paan shop.
Slightly taken aback, Catherine turned to me and rolled her eyes comically. She asked him, ‘Are you going to Kalpi, then?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I am going back to Mussoorie. You see, I have big business there, hotel-restaurant, whatnot. I have many big businesses in this area,’ he added, taking one hand out of the jacket pocket and waving it around. ‘But I can drop you at Kalpi. No problem. Honestly, no problem.’
Catherine said, ‘Thank you, but I’d prefer to go by bus.’
He looked crushed. He stared wordlessly at her for an instant, his face drained of all its assurance.
Then, as he turned to go back to his car, he asked, ‘Which country are you from?’
Catherine, toying with him now, replied, ‘India.’
‘India?’ Suspicion darkened his countenance; his thick brows twitched. ‘Which state?’ he asked.
‘Rajasthan,’ Catherine replied, still straight-faced, and then added, ‘District Ajmer, have you been there?’
His confusion was complete. ‘No,’ he weakly replied. There was a brief moment before the truth of his situation dawned on him, when he stared uncertainly at Catherine. Then, face reddening fast, he turned and lumbered back to his car.
*
We turned out to be the only occupants of the bus to Kalpi, apart from a few grey sacks of mail tossed in behind the driver’s seat where leaking diesel oil had blended with dust to produce a black paste of sorts. The road began to curl up steeply minutes after we left the bus station. Soon, the snowy peaks, temporarily occluded by mist and clouds, came back into sight, grave and majestic against the deep blue sky; the frothy river we crossed on a jittery, jangling bridge turned into a winding silvery trail; the fields we had raced through knitted themselves back into elegant patchwork quilts.
There were more flocks of yak on the winding road here, each flock carrying its own little cloud of dust as it scampered to the side of the road. Tiny monkeys with red, hirsute faces crouched and gawked at the passing traffic. The sacks of mail were heaved out and thrown on to the ground before tiny red-painted post offices. Little hamlets lined the road, houses with slate roofs and neat dung-paved courtyards with rose bushes and tulsi plants. School-age children stood at ramshackle bus shelters painted with signs for Four Square cigarettes, their white shirts and blue shorts and skirts unexpectedly formal in this setting. When they saw us, wide smiles would break out across their ruddy cheeks and they would start waving at us with hectic energy. I once turned to see Catherine waving back delightedly, her hair blown back by the wind, the tip of her nose red, her eyes streaming, a smile of pure happiness on her face.
She saw me looking at her and shouted: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to live here?’
‘Yes,’ I shouted back, ‘yes.’
The same thought had come to me; had, in fact, been with me from the time the bus left Mussoorie. It came out of the happiness I always felt among the Himalayas, a kind of private exhilaration that made the tensions of the previous days dissipate fast, made them seem part of another, not quite real or significant, life. It wasn’t just the beauty of these snow-carpeted mountains and broad green valleys and surging rivers — the beauty that could move even those with no aesthetic feeling. It was because so much of this landscape was marked for me; the peaks and valleys and rivers held so many associations. It was the first landscape I had known in my imagination, in the stories from the Mahabharata, where it was the setting for exile and renunciation. The Pandav brothers had walked on this ground, their presence commemorated by innumerable small temples across the ranges; great Hindu sages had made their home on the banks of its famous rivers. It was always oddly exalting to think that these secluded mountains and valleys were where, in unknown times, my own ancestors had wandered after long, fulfilled lives on the plains. They were linked to my vague but cherished sense of the past, my memories of Sunday mornings, rooms filled with the fragrant smoke of a sandalwood fire, my father meditating on his tiger-skin rug before a miniature temple, whose ascending spires, I knew even then, approximated the soaring peaks of the Himalayas.