in our town. The hotel’s manager was to live in Aspen Lodge. “He will be driven out in a week,” it was declared. Mrs Mispeller would see to that. She was said to walk about the house at night, sitting occasionally to play a ghostly piano.
Charu knew nothing of Mall Road rumours, nor did she believe in ghosts, so she often brought her cows to graze at Aspen Lodge. In the rainy months, she had come every day and cut tall grass from those slopes with her sickle, looking like a bush with legs as she carried enormous bundles of it home on her head. On this sun-browned winter morning, she loosed her cows on the grass that had survived the cold and sat on a boulder to fiddle with a flaming-orange sweater she had been knitting for weeks.
The cows grazed on the slopes, her goats scampered about, brass bells tinkling at their necks. Charu’s dog Bijli scurried up and down the slopes, the russet of his coat merging with the pine needles on the forest floor. The cows lumbered away, shaking their horns at him. He trotted back to Charu, parked himself next to her, and wedging his bottom against her for warmth, nibbled his paws one by one.
Charu hummed a tune that she interrupted at times with a yell to stop straying cows, then returned to her wool and knitting needles. The December sun and the soft weight of Bijli on her feet made her drowsy with the comfort of being warm after her cold day’s work milking cows, filling water and washing clothes. Usually her uncle Puran shared the chore of grazing the cows, but the last few days he had been subdued and withdrawn, disappearing into the forest, smoking grass, hardly eating. Charu was used to Puran’s eccentricities and made excuses for him to her grandmother, but it tired her out doing his share of work too. Her eyelids dipped and the sweater-in-progress subsided on her lap.
For once, however, the Mall Road rumours turned out to be true. Sometime in the night, when nobody had been looking, the hotel manager had moved into Aspen Lodge. And now a tentative voice above Charu told her she needed to take her cows away.
“And never bring them back,” the voice went on, sounding a little more determined. Flowers were to be planted now, Sa’ab had ordered. The garden was to be protected from all cattle.
She looked over her shoulder and stood up. She squinted at the boy speaking to her. The sun was in her eyes, she had to shade them with her palm. She saw that he was tall and had curly hair. His eyes had the colour and shine of the horse chestnuts that fell from trees in the autumn. When she frowned, he smiled at her in apology. It was a lopsided smile. His clothes were what anyone wore, but his face looked to her as if it had come off the pages of those magazines that were hung with clothespegs at the newsstand.
She felt herself smiling back and stopped, with some difficulty. He pleaded, “It’s not me, I have to tell you what Sa’ab says. I am only the cook.”
His voice, though young, was richly rounded and deep. She felt she could roll his words on her tongue like smooth river pebbles and taste them. Just like those pebbles, the voice had faint rough edges that her tongue paused against to feel their grain.
She said, “You are not going to cook your Sa’ab the grass, are you? Or has he brought cows with him from the city?”
Like most hill girls, Charu could be tart when crossed and did not take kindly to being told what to do. The boy stammered, “This morning I found a very nice patch down the hill with grass. It has a stream; the cows will have water as well as food. I’ll show it to you, and you can take them there.”
She shrugged in scorn. “You don’t have to show me any grass patches on these hillsides,” she said. “I know them all. The way down to the stream is too steep for cows. But I have many other places. I don’t have to bring them here.”
For two days she stayed away. But on the third or fourth day, something made her leave her house again after she had tethered her cows in their stall. When her grandmother asked her where she was off to, she said she had to