his room. We heard him banging and thumping inside, then a bellow. “Where the hell does that fool put my laptop charger? Himmat Singh! Himmat! A different place every day. It’s just not possible to run an office in this madhouse.”
Himmat Singh scuttled past us towards Veer’s room as fast as his creaking legs could manage. Silence for a moment or two, and then Veer snapped, “Behind that curtain? Which hiding place will you think of next?”
“I won’t be back tonight,” he shouted from his room. “Going to Bhimtal for dinner. Sick of Himmat’s food. Greasy chicken curry and rice every bloody day.” After a pause, we heard a door bang and the fan-belt screech and whine as he started his jeep.
Himmat went past us on his return journey, now with an impassive face. He would not look in our direction but muttered, “All these years nobody could cook better in the Kumaon than Himmat Singh. And now the chicken is greasy. Just from this morning.”
Diwan Sahib was crestfallen. “What’s the matter with Veer?” He fiddled with his drink, trying to recover his temper. He sounded thoughtful when he began to speak. “Look at Veer, he’s the opposite of Corbett,” he said. “He climbs the high Himalaya, the mountains give him his living. Yet with all this climbing and walking, what does he know of the forest or mountain, its wildlife or its plants? There’s no sense of wonder in him. Lost. Gone, entirely. It’s a – what do you call it? – macho – thing for him: how high, how fast, how many peaks? The other day I pointed out the dog roses to him – the first flowers this year – and he hardly even looked up.”
“Maybe he was preoccupied with something else,” I said.
“Come, come,” said Diwan Sahib, “you aren’t the world’s most avid botanist, but you noticed those blooms before I said anything to you.”
We were quiet for a while, silenced by a shared memory. I knew we were thinking back to my first spring in Ranikhet when Diwan Sahib had found me imprisoned in the dog rose creeper that ran wild along a wall at the Light House. My clothes were caught in the briars, my fingers bleeding from efforts to take out thorns. The more I had tried to move away, the more stuck I had got. There was no help at hand. By the time he came upon me I was almost in tears of annoyance and self-pity. “Damsel in distress,” he had said, “and no knight at hand.”
Diwan Sahib had extracted me thorn by thorn while I babbled embarrassed explanations: I had merely been trying to smell a flower and pick a few for a vase and get a cutting to plant in my own patch of green and I did not know how or when … After a while he had said in the impatient tones I came to know so well, “Could you stop chattering for a minute please, so that I can get you out of here and not be crucified too?” But his eyes were kind and the care with which he took each thorn out made me think, for the first time since Michael’s death, that I might one day feel less alone.
Now Diwan Sahib was speaking again, his voice dreamy. “I’ve always thought about the dog rose that it was wild, unglamorous – the scent is light and a bit sharp, and there are more thorns per flower than on almost any other rose. It is the quintessential beginning rose, no breeding, almost no colour, stitched probably by birds a thousand years ago. And yet when you see it, as on that outer wall of this house when it is in full bloom, holding those half-broken stones together – they remind you what is imperishable, real beauty.”
He stopped as if taken aback by his own eloquence and said in his everyday tones: “Where was I? Yes, Corbett. Corbett understood the jungle by looking, and he could tell you its story from the sounds he heard. If he heard a chital far off, he would know whether it was calling its young or calling to warn other animals of a tiger. He walked the forests barefoot when he was a boy. He understood the fall of every leaf and the meaning of a cloud – would it bring a hailstorm or rain.”
He suddenly seemed to remember it was his nephew he was discussing, and not very favourably.