I curled my body into a tight ball of aloneness. Diwan Sahib had been world-weary when I told him I wanted to go to the police about Beena. “Nothing’s ever going to change,” he had said. “No policeman will be interested, no new politician, no elections, nothing will ever make a difference.” He had slumped into his chair and dozed off after a while as he often did nowadays, even midway through conversations. Veer was in Dehra Dun, from where he would leave on another long trek with a new lot of clients. We had not been able to find the space or time for days to be together. He had not appeared remotely regretful at our parting, and when I had announced with blithe nonchalance that I would go to Dehra Dun with him, we had had another quarrel. “You in Dehra Dun with me? Forget it,” he had said. “I’ll be at work. It’s not a holiday for me.” He had shoved things into his rucksack, hoisted it into his jeep and driven off without a proper goodbye. He had not telephoned since.
19
In winter the barbet calls all day from its lonely perch high in a leafless tree. Its plaintive, monotonous cry is the distillation of solitude and sadness. The tourists have gone, and the summer visitors with them. Only now does our town feel truly ours, as if it has been rescued from intruders and returned to us. The earth is hard with cold, the air stings ears and eyes and makes noses water. The tree-darkened roads looping the hillsides are deserted, there is no fear of tourists’ cars careering round the bends. The big old houses in the cantonment area are empty again. Waiters and cooks are playing cricket on the lawns of their hotels. They have planted three somewhat straight sticks as wickets. One of the waiters, Chandan, is teaching himself to ride a bicycle and he lurches dangerously as he lets go of the handlebars to join his palms and say, “Namaste, Maya Mam,” as he passes me. I taught him when he was a boy of twelve or fourteen. Another of my relative failures, but at least he mastered the alphabet, and he learned to add, though he never managed multiplying or dividing.
Mall Road in this season has a lazy air. In the morning when the sun bakes the other side of the road, every shopkeeper at the row of cupboard-sized shops below Meghdoot Hotel deserts his post, and customers have to seek them out on the opposite parapet. Men slurp tea at Negi’s shack. Next to the lamppost, people sit on their haunches at a charcoal brazier munching the warm peanuts roasted on it. Dogs amble around, occasionally snapping and snarling at each other. When the sun starts to go down, swallows knife through the air into their perches at the candle-lit grocery shop. A squad of monkeys clambers over the tin roof of Pandey-ji’s vegetable shop, dividing into ones and twos to attack the vegetable baskets from many fronts. Pandey-ji’s mother, a woman with gold nose studs and a large bun, chases them with a stick, screaming at the top of her voice. Two soldiers polish the already gleaming brass plate that says officers’ mess next to an imposing pair of gates, while dozens of cadets, hair shaven to their ears, file past to their barracks further down.
In winter, the air is clear enough to drink, and your eyes can travel many hundreds of miles until they reach the green of the near hills, the blue-grey beyond them, and then the snow peaks far away, which rise in the sky with the sun, and remain suspended there, higher than imaginable, changing colour and shape through the day. Every hour, they come closer, their massive flanks clearly visible, plumes of cloud smoking from their tips. After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.
These are secrets hidden from those who escape the Himalaya when it is at its bleakest: the mountains do not reveal themselves to people who come here merely to escape the heat of the plains. Through the summer they veil themselves in a haze. The peaks emerge for those devoted to them through the coldest of winters, the wettest of monsoons. The mountains, Diwan Sahib said in an uncharacteristic rush of sentimentality fuelled by a