what about that lease for the house? It had not been renewed in the end. I would have to find Ama and Puran somewhere to live if the house had to be returned to the cantonment. And where would I live? My mind went over and over the same thoughts, but all of them were punctuated by one question as unending and softly insistent as the Scop’s Owl’s hooting: where was Diwan Sahib’s Rolls Royce cigarette case? Now that he was gone, it was imperative that I should have it. There was no other object I associated more closely with him. I needed to find it. I would turn the house inside out if I had to.
But first I had to finish with his room. I folded Diwan Sahib’s worn-out blankets and put them in a cupboard. Stripped the bed of its sheets. Busily I reached for his pillow. That was when I saw that it still held the hollow of his head and a few white strands of his hair.
I sat down on his sheetless bed. I had not lost my composure when he died, or at his cremation, despite the incongruous cascade of red roses at the cremation ground, and the thrush that insisted on whistling in accompaniment to Mr Qureshi’s noisy tears, or even when the blue-yellow-red paragliders performing for the Regimental Reunion floated past us over the smoke from Diwan Sahib’s pyre like two brilliantly-coloured birds. At the sight of that pillow and the strands of his hair, I became un-joined.
I left the house and went down to my cottage. A deadening inertia closed its fist around me. I began to feel sleepy all the time. I stopped going to work. I do not know what I did. Things rotted, dust settled, the alarm clock clanged every day at six in the morning, but I did not get out of bed, nor did I bother to change the clock’s setting to stop it ringing the next day. Maybe I slept. I think I ate at times. I had no memory of it, nor any recollection of crying, yet when I woke up at odd times in the middle of the day or night, my face was wet with tears. In my dreams, my mother, Michael and Diwan Sahib were trapped in unlikely, fear-freighted situations. We could not find each other at crowded stations. Someone was left behind on a boat at sea which had glided far out into the water. We were in different rooms of the same house, I called their names but nobody answered. An enormous bird with a curved beak and sharp talons came and sat on my arm in one of my dreams, making me wake up in a panic, rubbing my arm where its claws had been. Sometimes Veer was there, but we were in rooms filled with trekkers, rucksacks, strangers sending us off in two different directions. I heard Ama calling my name or Charu saying, “Did the postman come? Look, here is a letter for me, read it out,” but when I unglued my tight-shut eyes, I knew I had dreamed their voices.
One morning I heard a banging sound that went on and on, and struggled awake. I managed to sit up, understood that this time someone really was knocking. I stumbled to the door and found Ama there. She had been calling me for days, she said. “Today I was ready to bang the door down. I thought, ‘Teacher-ni will die of starvation if not grief.’ Look at yourself: thin as a stick and old, your head like a dry coconut. Why? Is it your father who has died, or your husband?” She stood over me while I washed my face and then thumped a steel plate down on my table. It had three fat, dark madua rotis soaked in ghee, a steaming spoonful of lai saag, the greens I loved, some raw onions and a green chilli. I ate without a word, as if I had never eaten before.
After I had finished eating, Ama and I sat in the veranda, where she settled at her favourite place on the stairs and said, “You were sleeping, but someone’s been very busy while you were dead to the world.” She tucked a wad of her chewing tobacco into her mouth to create the space for a dramatic pause. Diwan Sahib’s house was a mess, she said, every single trunk and cupboard was inside out, the pages between every book