The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as you do in dreams. It was only when a face rose from the water close to my feet and in a French accent said, “Are you alright?” that I realised my face was wet with tears, my nose was running, my hair was dishevelled, and I was late for Michael’s priest.
I ran up the stairs to Father Joseph’s room and burst in without knocking. I stopped and held the back of a chair to steady myself. A house with a trident-shaped peak framed in its window, Michael had said: a house that looked out at the Trishul, and at its base Roopkund, the phantom-lake. He had seen such a house once, he had told me where it was. He had dreamed we would live there and wake each morning looking at the Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit its three tips one by one.
“Father, find me work in Ranikhet. Please,” I said. “I can’t stay on here a single day longer.”
* * *
Four months after Michael died, I climbed into the train that had taken him away from me. It went from Hyderabad to Delhi, a northward journey that took a day and a night. One more night on a different train brought me further north, to Kathgodam, where the train lines stopped and the hills began. It was another three hours by bus over twisted, ever-steeper roads to Ranikhet, a little town deep in the Himalaya. In my bag was the address of the school in which Father Joseph had fixed me a job. I was going to be two thousand kilometres from anything I knew, but that was just numbers. In truth the distance was beyond measurement.
4
The sky over our heads here in the mountains has not the immensity of the sky I grew up with in the Deccan, where it spans the entire planet, broken only by the building-sized boulders that sit here and there on the open flatland of the plateau as if a giant’s child had collected them from the giant’s river and dropped them like marbles on a playing field. In the hills the sky is circumscribed. Its fluid blue is cupped in the palm of a hand whose fingers are the mountains around us. We too are cupped in its palm and while there is a feeling of limitless distance, we have at the same time the sense that here on our hill is where life begins and ends. Here is where sky begins and ends, and if there are other places, they have skies different from our sky.
Our town spans three hills. It is far away from everywhere and very small. If you look at it from the other side of the valley at night, you see darkness dotted here and there with yellow lights half-hidden by trees. On every side there are mountains and forests, stretching many miles, interrupted only by tiny hamlets and villages so small that they might have just five houses and nothing but a foot-beaten path connecting them to the main road miles away. To the north of our town is the high Himalaya: ice-white peaks on the other side of which lie Tibet and China. On clear days, eastward, you can see the five pyramids of the Pancha Chuli, which are at Nepal’s door.
When you come up to our town from the plains, the dust-gloomed, table-flat land begins to slope upward at Kathgodam, folding itself into hillsides, and in less than two hours the trees change from banyan, mango, banana and sal, to pine, oak, cypress and cedar. Everything looks sharper-edged in the clear air, as if your bad eyesight has been inexplicably cured. Ferns fountain from rockfaces, flowers blossom on stone. In fertile areas, the hills are terraced into green and brown circles of wheat fields with squares of white, where the peasants’ slate-roofed cottages are. The dishevelled small towns are soon left behind, and then you pass gushing mountain rivers and barren cliff sides pincushioned with cacti, deep forests and still grey-blue lakes. By the time you are in Ranikhet, you have travelled from the tropics to temperate lands.
This was the town to which I came after I lost Michael. Father Joseph used his network to get me a job at St Hilda’s, a church-run school. I found a cottage to rent, on an estate called the Light House because it was so situated that the mansion on the upper grounds caught the first rays of sun on its eastern windows, and the last of them on its western lawns. My landlord, whom everyone called Diwan Sahib, lived alone in the crumbling mansion. Down the slope there was a set of brick and mud rooms clustered around a beaten earth courtyard and cattle sheds. Charu lived here with her grandmother and an uncle, Puran, who was often called Sanki Puran because he did not seem to have all his wits about him.
My own cottage, close to theirs, had once been stables where herders were housed in a room above the stalls for horses and cows. The cottage now had two whitewashed rooms of stone, one above the other, and a small veranda. The wooden planks of its floors creaked and shifted with age. The kitchen and bathroom, tacked on later, stood at odd angles to one another and to the house. None of the windows or doors fitted well. Icy draughts surged through the gaps in winter, and in the monsoon insects took up residence in the corners of the rooms: slow-moving black scorpions, confused moths that banged into lights, green-eyed spiders whose legs could span dinner plates.
My cottage was at the edge of the spur on which the Light House stood. When I lay in bed, what I saw framed in the window was the Trishul. At its base, invisible at this distance, was the lake where Michael had spent his last hours. Nothing but miles of forests and wave upon wave of blue and green hills between us.
5
St Hilda’s is not really a convent, but since people think of convents as places where their children will be taught good English, that is what the church which owned it had decided to call it. The children would come to learn English, they reasoned, and would be taught a little bit about Jesus, which they could keep or cast aside as they pleased.
Charu had been one of my students. She was twelve when we met, and came to school pig-tailed, face shining, hair reeking of mustard oil, in navy and white, scrubbed clean, exercise book and pencil in hand — and she daydreamed in class all day. She barely learned to write even the alphabet. Many days of the week, she simply did not come. Later, walking home in the afternoon I would spot her grazing her grandmother’s cows. Or I would hear her high voice from across a hill, calling one of them, “Gouri! Goureeeeee-ooo!” In the summer months I could be sure of spotting her navy skirt halfway up a kafal tree and if I called at the tree, “Why weren’t you at school?” she would clamber down, thrust at me a handful of red, just-plucked kafals, and vanish into the forest.
One late afternoon in my first year in Ranikhet, I saw Charu’s grandmother sitting outside their house, sunning herself on a mat. She was a bony woman with hollow cheeks, her skin raisined by years of hard labour in the sun. Her eyes had a quiverful of lines at their corners. Everyone called her “Ama” and she was renowned for having been the most beautiful woman of Ranikhet. She was not afraid of anything or anyone, and had thrown Charu’s father, her younger son, out of her house for being drunk every day and beating his wife to death in a drunken fit. She would bring up her grandchild alone, she had said, they did not need a man around the house if it was a man like him. He still visited, a weedy fellow with a ravaged face, and a beedi tucked behind each ear. He sat glumly in the courtyard and smoked while his mother scolded him about keeping a mistress and demanded money for his daughter’s upkeep. Meanwhile somehow she fed and housed yet poorer relatives who arrived without warning from remote villages and stayed for days, sometimes weeks.
Ama had a voice that could carry across several valleys and a laugh I could very often hear from my own house nearby. From here and there, she had picked up English phrases and words with which she seasoned her talk. If I had a cold, she would insist, “You must breathe in steam from water boiled with Eucalipstick.” Every time prices rose, she said, “Does Gormint care if we live or die?” Government was a person who lived far away and grew fat while her cheeks hollowed with too much work and too little food. “One day,” she said, “I will find a Gormint babu for Charu to marry and then we’ll kill a hen to eat every day.” As she said this, she shook with laughter at the improbability of her dream.