who had grabbed Charu yanked the engine handle again. This time the engine held and he swivelled the auto in a sharp circle and accelerated, charging past the men still yelling after him. Charu cowered in the seat, rigid with terror. She clutched her bag and began to pray in a fast mumble to Jhoola Devi. “I will tie a bell if you keep me safe,” she said, again and again. “I’ll tie a big fifty-rupee bell.”
When they were well away from the bus terminus and on a wide road, a traffic-light forced them to stop at an intersection. Small children ran from car to car, begging for change. Charu turned away, afraid they would demand money from her when she had nothing to give them. She studied the rough black hair on the back of the auto driver’s head, and noticed that his ears were pierced. On the panel above his head, were three words in Hindi, painted in red. She stared at the line and tried, letter by letter, to see what the phrase added up to. “Ga,” she mouthed, “Oh-lah-Uuh” She understood at length that the letters made up the words: “Jai Golu Devta”. All hill drivers prayed to Golu Devta for safe journeys. She began to feel a flutter of hope. The man driving her turned around. As soon as she saw his face, relief surged through her. But still, she could not be absolutely sure.
She asked him, “Are you a Pahari?” She could see from his facial features that he might be from the hills.
“What did you think? That I run to rescue every girl those guys harass this way?”
She said nothing, but could not stop a radiant smile. So he said, “Why alone? They would have made you vanish and robbed you before you knew what was happening.”
“I am visiting a relative,” she said. And partly to change the subject, and partly out of curiosity, added, “Where are you from? Kumaon or Garhwal?”
The light turned green and the auto tooted and puttered through the huge din of moving cars, buses, tempos, scooters. Charu shrank behind its fluttering window shades each time a car tore past them as if it would run them over if the flimsy little three-wheeler dared stand in its way. Buses towered over them, honking at their slowness. With the breeze sweeping through the two open sides of the auto and the noise from the road, she could hardly hear one word in ten of what the man was saying, but his reply, which he shouted, was: “I’m from a village near Almora. And you? Where are you from?”
She could have cried or danced with joy. Almora! The town closest to her own, where so many people she knew had been. To which she had often been told she would be taken. The Almora whose famous Singhori sweets she had eaten, the ones that came individually wrapped in fresh green leaves.
“Ranikhet,” she breathed, her voice caressing the familiar name. “I am from Ranikhet.”
17
Diwan Sahib came home from hospital at the end of October, after more than a month there. Veer, who had just come back from the Valley of Flowers, wrapped him in a thick blanket and carried him for the few steps Diwan Sahib would have had to walk to reach the jeep parked at the hospital’s entrance. And whereas it was Veer’s habit to drive on twisting hill roads as if he was on an arrow-straight highway, today he eased the jeep watchfully over every bump and pothole, and took the loops at a crawl.
Some of the joyousness of our earlier days was restored. Diwan Sahib was as fragile as a dry leaf, but revived enough to go back to a gin in the morning and his evening rum. He was hungry for all the news of the hillside. When he heard how Charu had eloped and married, he laughed until he coughed and laughed again, telling me I had done my life’s one good deed. He insisted on hearing the story from Ama as well, chuckling at her embellishments. His durbar and our newspaper sessions resumed. Mr Qureshi once more became a fixture at the Light House, cradling his steel glass, and shaking his head when he thought back to the day he had taken Diwan Sahib to hospital. “I never thought I would reach the hospital in time,” he said. “Truly, I thought Diwan Sahib would – ”
Diwan Sahib wanted us near him all the time as