from the cold, the damp, the rain and snow, the calls of owls at night. I wanted the mango trees of my childhood, the visible heat of the afternoon sun, the creamy flesh of young green coconuts and their spring-sweet water.
I flung away my mass of blankets and sprang out of bed. I wriggled under it to where I stored things I might never need: suitcases, bags, cartons of books. I dragged a suitcase out and prised at its catches. It would not open. My hair streamed over my face. The dream was still vivid, my heart thudded with the certainty of knowledge. I ran down and brought up my box of old keys which I tipped onto the floor. Rummaged through the jumble of metal and tried key after key in the rusted locks of the long-unopened suitcase. I flung aside the wrong keys not caring where they fell. I found my hammer and smashed it against the locks: once, twice, three times, until the locks broke.
I opened the creaking lid of the dusty suitcase and pulled out the heavy, plastic-covered bundle inside it: Michael’s rucksack. It had been delivered a week after his death and I had never looked through it. Today, when I opened it, there was the generations-old smell of mildew. I pulled out the sweatshirts – the blue one with the dolphin that I had bought him days before he left, a red one with John Lennon’s face; other clothes that I recognised tumbled out, crushed into tight balls in these five years of storage. And then a carefully-folded packet in which I could see a book, a Tibetan good luck charm, and a letter that I had written and sent by courier to wait for him in Dehra Dun as a surprise before he started the trek.
I opened the packet and saw that there were other papers too that Michael had placed in it for safekeeping: a few pages torn from a first-aid manual, two maps, a few typewritten, official-looking sheets from the mountaineering institute with details of the trek: the list of things the trekkers needed to carry, meeting points, train connections. On a separate sheet, there were the names and phone numbers of the trekkers. Three names, as Michael had said – he and two others – one of them an experienced mountaineer, he had told me that night before he left, the other a porter.
I closed my eyes. I was certain I knew what I would see.
The names on the typewritten sheet were:
Michael Secuira
Ranveer Singh Rathore
Shamsher Bahadur Gurung
I went back to a time when I had woken from one of my nightmares gasping for breath. Veer had calmed me with slow whispered reassurances. I had talked to him until the night paled into dawn, about Michael’s death, about everything I had gone through that year – things I had never talked about to anyone. Veer had held me close, not once interrupting me. When I finished, he had described the terrain to me with a cartographer’s accuracy. But said nothing to suggest he had been Michael’s last trekking companion. He did not mull over what might have gone wrong. He did not list the many horrific possibilities – death by frostbite, death by falling, by injury, by brain damage, by pulmonary oedema. And not suspecting what his silences hid, I had been grateful for all that he had left unsaid.
He had not told me he even knew of Michael’s mountaineering institute.
He had not told me Michael had broken his ankle.
He had not told me he had left Michael to fend for himself in a snowstorm with a broken ankle when they both knew it meant certain death.
I sat on the floor holding the papers, fragments of Michael strewn around me. The bugle at the army barracks trumpeted to wake the cadets as on every morning. Window-squares lit up one by one and smoke rose from fires for the morning’s hot water. Birds sang to each other across trees and forests. The daily business of mornings that usually made me uncurl from my quilt with a smile now hammered nails into my heart. I felt utterly, absolutely alone. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I held myself as my body shook with sobs. I wept as if Michael had died the day before. I picked up thing after thing from his rucksack and flung them across the room in a rage. How easy to be dead! Everyone had marvelled at the way