The Folded Earth

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.