Presently, the school appeared, to which all the children had been heading. It was perched between shimmering rice fields, a single small building on a flawlessly clean lawn, with a red corrugated-iron roof on which the school’s name had been painted in wavering white letters. A deep gorge appeared on our left, the river in it seemed to sneak shyly past all obstructions. The illusion was broken when, after an hour of travelling down into the gorge, the river appeared roughly parallel to the road, and all the bus’s relentless grumbling and rasping and clanking could not muffle the thunderous boom of thick white jets of water pummelling the huge white rocks squatting in its way. Away from the angrily frothing river, the thinner, humbler streams flowed into small quivering pools on whose banks grew delicate irises.
Slim, tall waterfalls draped the hillside in many places; old grimy snow lay in shaded gullies, from under which water leaked out in muddy trails. Overhead, the hills were all sheer rock, with young shepherds perched on the serrated slopes, sheep grazing on grassy narrow cornices. The gorge widened into a valley with dry riverbeds, smooth white boulders piled up on the side of the road. The bus rambled through forests of pine and oak, the river lost from sight, the sky reduced to a patch of blue pawed at by the tops of pine trees. More snowy peaks came into sight; the valley narrowed and the road rejoined the river and almost immediately deteriorated. Fine chalk-white dust rose into the air as the bus lurched across the rock-strewn flinty surface. Finally, at the end of the dusty track was Kalpi, a scattering of slate-roofed huts on a green meadow, deserted on this drowsy late afternoon, with long cold shadows creeping down from the snow-clad peaks towering above the raging river on both sides.
There wasn’t a single person in sight. With stiff legs and humming head, I followed Catherine over a rope bridge across the river and up to the only solid-seeming building in the vicinity. It was a forest bungalow, with wooden lattices in the veranda and a small patch of lawn, now covered with snow. The chokidar was asleep in one of the outbuildings, in a squalor of firewood logs, old smelly clothes and charcoal braziers. His eyes were red, his speech was blurred and he smelled of cheap rum. He said we were the first visitors of the year, and the bungalow wasn’t ready to be lived in yet, except for one room. The room that he unlocked for us contained the sullen chilly dampness of many airless months. The damp seemed to come off the walls and penetrate the several layers of woollen clothes we wore. There was no power. The mattress on the sole bed was bare; the coir rug on the floor gave off a sour smell of old dust. Stiff, tiny morsels of rice from the last dinner lay on the oilcloth top of the dining table. In the bathroom, with a skylight that framed the white peaks, the taps rattled and shook at first and then, after some noisy expostulations, settled down to produce a steady stream of muddy, hand-numbingly cold water.
Gradually, with many incomprehensible mutterings, the chokidar brought in candles and logs of firewood, fresh sheets and quilts smelling of mothballs. Catherine knelt before the stone fireplace for a long time, striking matches one after another, before giving up. The wood was too damp. ‘We’ll have to do without the fire,’ she said, smiling, and gave a mock shiver.
The long drive had filled her with high spirits; she was amused by the chokidar — his slow mincing gait, his slurred speech — and attempted to mimic him when he was out of sight.
I was tired, and when Catherine went to the bathroom for a bucket-bath I lay down on the narrow double bed and soon dozed off.
I woke up to find the room in pitch-darkness — Catherine had blown out the candle — and Catherine next to me, her face buried deep into the pillow, the back of her neck with its delicate down gently rising and falling.
I lay there stiffly for a while, not daring to shift position lest I wake her up. The exhilaration of the ride hadn’t done away with the peculiar tension I had known in Mussoorie the day before, and I now felt even more keenly, lying next to Catherine, the somewhat comic strangeness of my situation: a Brahmin student from Allahabad all alone with a French woman in a room at the edge of the world.
This wasn’t how I had imagined ourselves when we first set out from Benares. In days past, when such vague and exuberant hopes accompanied me repeatedly to Catherine’s house, I hadn’t gone on to visualize such perfect proximity to her. Something had held me back: a puritanical fear, perhaps.
But it was a situation that seemed to have its own odd logic and momentum. I felt I had already surrendered to it, was no longer in control. My nervousness had been replaced by a quiet excitement.
*
I must have drifted back to sleep at some point. I opened my eyes to find Catherine moving around the room, searching for something, her shadow dark and looming in the light from the candle.
‘Would you like to go out?’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful outside.’
It was wonderful outside, the day dying in a sea of indigo ink; the snowy summits in front wreathed in cotton-wool clouds that caught the last light of the day and held a pinkish tinge; the tall hills behind us silently silhouetted against the darkening sky, where a star or two had begun to glimmer.
We walked up to the temple we had seen on the way up to the rest house. It was very small, shaded by an old oak tree, with elaborate and elegant wood carvings on the eaves. There was no one around, but the gate to the sanctum was open and the sequinned idol inside was of Krishna, purplish instead of the normal dark blue. A smell of freshly burned incense hung in the thin air. Moths whirled around the lantern that stood on the brick-paved porch. On the left of the temple was a storeroom of sorts, on stilts; behind it was a wooden lion’s-head gargoyle from which water, fed by a stream, gurgled out into a narrow drain.
Someone finally emerged out of the darkness. It was the priest; a young sadhu, an unexpectedly handsome man. His well-muscled torso was uncovered — astonishingly so, for the cold was intense. He wore a white dhoti over bare feet. There were marks of sandalwood paste on his broad forehead. His long black hair hung down over his shoulders. He saw us; his eyes lingered slightly longer on Catherine, but not a flicker of surprise crossed his fine sharp-featured face. We had come late for the evening puja, he said; it had just finished.
He spoke Hindi with a strong Sanskritic emphasis. There was grave courtesy in his manner. He invited us to sit on the porch and share his evening meal. Catherine hesitated, but he assured us there was enough food for all. In a few brisk precise movements, he brought out brass thalis from the storeroom and ladled out dhal and rice from large steel containers and filled chipped enamel cups with water from the gargoyle. We ate with our fingers. He apologized for not being able to offer us spoons or forks; he said the water came from a nearby spring and was safe to drink. He said little more of his own accord; he asked us no questions — no questions about where we came from, and what we were doing in Kalpi.
I asked him how long he had been at the temple.
‘For five years,’ he said, his head bowed over the thali, fingers nimbly mixing dhal with rice.
And where had he grown up?
‘Lucknow,’ he said, his mouth full. He then paused in his chewing and looked up at me with his clear confident eyes and added: ‘But that was another life, less meaningful, less substantial.’
He bowed his head; he went on eating. So beautifully he spoke, with such resonant Sanskrit phrases: they weren’t something he could have picked up in Lucknow; they spoke of a different kind of training. Intrigued, I asked him more questions. Slowly, the details came out, sketchy but significant; and it was with some difficulty that I translated them into English for Catherine’s sake.