Whenever she sighted me, her eyes, already creased from years of battling sun and wind and cold, creased up more, and she smiled a mouthful of stained, brown teeth and shouted, “Namaste, Teacher-ni!” That is what she called me, tongue-in-cheek: Teacher-ni. Everyone else called me Maya Mam.
“Why do you pay the fees if you can’t make Charu come to school?” I had asked her that afternoon. “Why not send her to the government school? It’s free.”
“I can put grass before the cow,” she said. “Can I make it eat? But it is still my cow, so I have to feed it, don’t I?”
“Charu is hardly a cow,” I said. “She is your granddaughter. And I am not fodder.”
The old woman laughed loud and long. “I know who Charu is,” she said. “Now you tell me, what can I do? I get her ready every day, I send her off, and then — where she goes — how can I stop her? Should I chase her with a stick all the way to the school? She will learn when the time comes. A girl learns what she needs to know.”
I gave up on Charu after a while, and stopped scolding her about her truancy. She did not altogether stop coming: on the days when she felt her uniform needed an airing or she wanted to see her friends, she would turn up, smile angelically at me, settle down at her place on a bench, and draw five-petalled flowers throughout the class. On some evenings she came to my veranda, which had a smooth red floor, to play gitti, her pebble game. Often she brought with her two girls, Beena and Mitu, twins who lived down the hilclass="underline" neither of them could speak or hear, but we managed. They had shy smiles, light-brown hair, and improbable blue eyes: Ama said their mother, Lati, also deaf and mute, had slept with a wandering firanghi who had eyes as blue, and here was God’s punishment: two girls. “Deaf and mute as well!”
Charu taught me her game: it involved five pebbles that you had to do dexterous things with, throwing up one, scooping up the others, then catching the one in flight before it hit the ground. I was new to the town, I hardly knew anyone, and had nothing very much to do apart from the school. Many evenings she and I sat with the twins, playing with the stones, watching evening fires being lit outside nearby hutments as the neighbourhood dogs were called back from creeks and bushes before leopards slunk out from the shadowed forests to feed.
I could have chosen differently. I could have found a better-paid job elsewhere. I could have returned to my own family. It had been a source of bewilderment to my mother why I did not go back to my old life at home after Michael’s death. The edge of my father’s anger was blunted now that Michael had left my life. All I had to do was to tell him that I had been wrong and misguided, and beg him to trust me again. My mother was tearful and imploring. I did not need to teach in a school, so far away, hard up, all by myself. We could be together again as before.
My mother died two years after Michael, uncomprehending to the end about my stubborn refusal. In one of her reproachful letters, she accused me of being as unforgiving as my father: how could a girl punish her parents and reject her home this way?
But I was at home. I had got used to thinking of Charu, her grandmother, her half-witted uncle Sanki Puran, and my landlord Diwan Sahib as my family now. I could no longer imagine living anywhere else. Though I cannot know precisely when it happened, a time had come when I became a hill-person who was only at peace where the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea.
6
It was six years after I began to live in Ranikhet: I remember it was a December afternoon, about three o’clock, the sun already too weak to warm anything, and I was on my way back from work. As every day, I went first to my landlord’s house. Unusually for that time of day, he was not alone. I found him with a man I had never met before and they were so engrossed in conversation that they hardly noticed me as I laid a bundle of newspapers on the grass and stood behind Diwan Sahib’s chair.
It was a daily ritual. On my way back from school I picked up the newspapers from Negi’s tea stall on Mall Road and walked home with them to Diwan Sahib’s. His Man Friday, Himmat Singh, would make tea for us and we would sit and read the papers together. Diwan Sahib got the Statesman for a column it had of odd news from around the world. Once he told me of a woman in Texas who had to be detached by surgeons from a toilet seat she had sat on for two years. Her boyfriend had humoured her and served her meals in the bathroom for all of that time. “I have been told women take forever in the bathroom!” Diwan Sahib said. “But I didn’t think they took this long.” He had the habit of chuckling for ages over such nuggets of information before making neat clippings of them with his nail scissors and gluing them into a bulging leather-bound diary.
Afterwards, if Diwan Sahib had made some progress with his biography of Jim Corbett, he gave me the additions to his manuscript, and I would type them up on his chunky Remington. I had by painful degrees grown used to his long-limbed scrawls and learned to make sense of his arrows, brackets, lines-between-lines, looped scribbles. I had learnt a great deal from the manuscript about the hills in which I now lived, for before Corbett turned writer and naturalist he had been the Kumaon’s most famous hunter, an affable-looking man in khaki shorts and sola topi whose particular skill was the slaughtering of man-eating tigers and leopards. Over his several drafts, I thought I had become almost as much a scholar on the subject as Diwan Sahib, and if I felt brave enough I ventured comments on the book that, on the whole, he ignored.
Diwan Sahib regularly rethought the structure of his book. The first draft, which I had typed three years earlier, began with Corbett’s ancestor Joseph, who was a monk, and Harriet, who was a novitiate at a nearby convent. They met, broke all their vows, and married. I thought this a good romantic prologue for their descendant’s life, which, by contrast, was all celibacy and hunting. I had typed fifty or so pages with great care. We had scarcely reached the young Corbett’s first hunting exploits as a child, however, when Diwan Sahib changed his mind and began to organise the book thematically. In the new plan, the chapters were entitled “Scholar Soldier”, “Tiger-Killing”, “From Gun to Camera”, and the narrative moved back and forth in time within each chapter. The nun’s and monk’s story was abandoned. We were now on our third attempt, a plain chronology beginning with Corbett’s birth in Nainital, which was only two hours away from us. Bundles of discarded typescripts lay about the house. The “a” and the “s” keys on the typewriter had worn away long ago. Nobody in Ranikhet knew any more how to repair a typewriter so the manuscript looked as if it were written in code.
That afternoon, as I stood behind his chair and listened, Diwan Sahib was sitting with the stranger under his weeping spruce, and talking about the Nawab of Surajgarh, whose finance minister, long years ago, he had been. The Nawab had kept beautiful Arab horses, Diwan Sahib was saying. They were his passion. He spent more time with them than on his royal duties. He loved wildlife and went off on horseback for long days to the jungles where he slept on machans with no more than two servants to attend to him. Although he disapproved of hunting, he was a very good shot. He believed in keeping his guns oiled, and his finger and eye steady. He had been schooled for a world in which every self-respecting warrior had to be capable of firing an accurate shot in all situations, even when startled from deepest slumber. Every night, an alarm clock was set for five o’clock the next morning, and hung on a wall, or placed on the head of a stuffed tiger some twenty paces away across the room. The instant it rang, the Nawab sprang up, and “with one eye still asleep”, as he liked to boast, he aimed his revolver at the clock and fired at it to stop it ringing. In twenty-five years, he had never scarred the wall around the clock, or singed a whisker on the tiger’s head, and had slaughtered some fifteen brands of clocks: imported wooden and gold ones — Ansonias, Smiths, Junghans — as well as clocks locally made. He had shot wall-clocks and small brass timepieces. He had once executed a Bavarian cuckoo clock, Diwan Sahib said, and got the cuckoo itself when it popped out the third of its five times. On one occasion, when he had run out of alarm clock supplies, he had made a khidmatgar wait in the room all night. At exactly five, the shaking man had had to hold a wristwatch at head height, ringing a brass bell with his other hand so that his master could shoot the watch.