I had made myself a new life in a faraway town after my husband’s death. What unnatural composure, what a swift recovery, they had said. Today it was as if I had torn off a dried-up scab with my fingernails and exposed the wound oozing for years beneath.
I had grieved for Michael’s death before. Now I would torment myself to the end of my days for my intimacy with the man who had walked away from him when he most needed help. How had I allowed it to happen? When had Veer dropped his last name and shortened his first? Even Diwan Sahib had never called him anything but Veer, and sometimes “Mr Singh”, or, when in a bad temper, “The Great Climber, Mr Singh”.
Where had the Rathore part of his name gone?
Perhaps Veer never used that last name except in formal documents. That was possible, even normal, as was the abbreviation of his first name.
Or maybe he had chosen to lose pieces of his names in the snow after abandoning Michael to his death.
I wanted to scour off my soiled skin with a rough stone. I wanted to tear out the long hair Veer had murmured endearments and promises into, playing on my sympathies with his bitter stories of childhood suffering and homelessness, the search for his identity. I had been held in thrall by the quietness of him – his enigmatic, troubling aura of unknowability. Now I knew his silence was no more than a shroud in which he had tried to bury his connection with Michael’s death.
20
It is December in Ranikhet. A pair of eagles wheel slowly through the sky’s ceaseless blue. They are above the Golf Course, circling the yellow-capped army caddies, the colonels and brigadiers and lesser beings ambling behind white balls, knocking them with misdirected clubs, sending them hurtling down slopes. The caddies look upward as the shadows of eagle-wings pass over their faces. They swing golf clubs in their direction and the eagles become faraway dots quicker than the eye can see.
Nearby, a dark olive convoy of army trucks is inching down the road. The line is unable to move fast for the press of people saying their last goodbyes to the young, shorn, uniformed boys packed into the trucks. There are reports of infiltrators on the remote icy border with Pakistan, and every day trucks leave with soldiers to be transported to the trouble zone. In one fortnight, everything has changed. The soldiers’ daily, morning training, their target practice, the camping in the woods in camouflage is no longer play-acting. They try not to see every familiar house, barracks, gateway, and shop as if it were for the last time. In his head, Gopal is already somewhere inside one of these trucks winding their way towards trouble. The clerk is too exhausted with anxiety to say to his son, “I told you so.”
The eagles fly unconcerned over the trucks filled with young men thinking their sombre thoughts. Further down, at Bisht Bakery, the staff are sunning themselves on the courtyard outside the shed with the ovens. They have decided not to bake bread that day because the old bread is still unsold. The tourists will only return next year. Christmas is just over, and Christmas pastries are getting drier and staler in the glass case. The eagles have their eye on a tastier morsel: they swoop down on the rubbish dump near the bazaar, having seen movement – a rabbit, or a mongoose. People leap away in alarm. The town’s local environmentalist takes a picture on his mobile’s camera and says he will send it to Hornbill. “What is Hornbill?” the friend asks.
Up the steep Alma Hill and away from the bazaar towards the cantonment, the eagles pass over the church and St Hilda’s school. There are women sitting outside the church in the sun, peeling fruit that has been heaped high, orange and yellow. Music plays, some of them sing. In another corner, women make earrings and bead necklaces. This is their new line of business. The elections are over, Ankit Rawat is installed in Delhi as the first-ever M.P. from Ranikhet, and nobody is any longer interested in the Christian mission of the school, not until the next elections. Miss Wilson has placed a larger portrait of herself on the wall facing the old one. Next to the laminated Pietà, she has added a portrait of the Pope, whom she dreams of glimpsing one day in the Vatican. She has