at him as she passed. The Brigadier yelped and sprang away, and then, ashamed, said into the middle distance, “Pahari cows! It’s only hill cows that kick like this. Nervous beasts.” He glanced around to see if anyone was laughing at him, but everyone, all at once, had gone quiet. The hotelier stared at the cattle with a fixed gaze of horror, shredding a paper napkin into tiny pieces. Bits of white tissue paper settled on the lawn around him.
Mr Chauhan lost his composure. “Enough!” he shouted towards Puran. “Enough is enough! I’m going to lock you up! With your damned cows and goats!” He noticed people staring and lowered his voice. “Every single day since I’ve been posted here,” he said to the Brigadier, “I’ve seen this madman sitting on Mall Road in that dirty uniform, feeding stray dogs, and I’ve said, Is this the way? Can this be allowed? I pitied him because he is poor. No more, Sir, not another day! I will tackle this with immediate effect.”
Puran shuffled past them, uncomprehending. Touching his woollen cap in an improvised salute, he said, “Namaste Sa’ab,” in a hoarse voice that sounded as if it came from the depths of a barrel, then shambled after his cows and goats, retreating bit by bit until we could only see the bobbing top of his cap.
Charu was still in the valley below, miniaturised by the distance. She was looking up the hill in our direction, at nobody but Kundan Singh as he struggled with Pinki, who had remained there to chew one last napkin. Before Kundan came into her life, her uncle Puran had been her closest friend. He was as defenceless as a child, he had always been. He could talk to animals, but people left him confused and mumbling. He gave dead bats and birds tender burials and allowed monkeys to pick lice off his head. People might think him mad but Charu stood up for him if anyone harassed him or called him crazy.
Now she was shaking Puran by the shoulder and scolding him for dozing when he should have been watching. The clear mountain air carried her words to us. “They’re right to call you mad if you can’t even manage a few cows! I told you they were not to go to that garden any more!” She walked rapidly off into the valley, then up the slope on the other side, swatting Gouri Joshi with her stick. I had never seen her strike an animal before.
11
About six kilometres downhill from the frayed glories of the cantonment is the commercial centre of our town, the main bazaar. Houses are stacked five deep up the slopes of the bazaar hill, tumbling down on each other, threaded through with narrow, dirty alleyways and stinking open drains. The ground floors of the first row have shops with wooden shutters and shelves knocked together out of cheap plywood. Through the doors of the shops, you can see a cobbler stitching soles, a picture-framer measuring glass. There is Bhim Singh who sits walled in by steel and copper in his shop all day, selling everything from saucepans to nails and hammers. There is the one-eyed old Gopal Ram who repairs watches, Jewel Tailors which always ferret away bits of our cloth. There is the rheumy-eyed drunk in a beret who darns with such skill that old and new cannot be told apart. There are rows of villagers on the road in front of the shops; they sell their produce from gunny-sacks and handcarts. One man has a sack full of onions, another just has tomatoes, or misshapen oranges. Coolies trudge up and down between the cars and crowds, bent double under gas cylinders, crates, and metal trunks that they carry on their shoulders. There is a petrol pump, Mr Qureshi’s car workshop, and Bisht Bakery, with its “We Bake Memories” sign at the entrance. At the mandi, vegetables are sprinkled with water to make them seem fresher than they are. Its concrete floor is slippery with rotting peel and water. The two butchers’ shops are behind the mandi, and people hurry there for the marble-eyed heads of slaughtered goats, the cheapest meat you can buy.
Our school’s jam factory is in the grounds of the church in the cantonment area, but St Hilda’s itself is in one of the back lanes of the bazaar and I walked there almost every day of the week for staff meetings and the classes I still took