“Who am I to criticise?” he said, finishing his gin in one long swallow. “I taught him nothing when he was a boy. I could have.”
“But he said you taught him birdcalls and animal sounds and answered all his wildlife questions,” I said. “So you’re wrong on both counts. He is interested in nature, and you did teach him things.”
“No, it’s different. His interest in nature – it’s not what it seems. He is a complicated man, our friend Veer.”
Diwan Sahib stopped up his caustic words with another slug of gin and changed the subject. “Corbett was one of a kind because he never lost sight of the humans – and I mean the poor, the hill peasants whose cattle and kin were in danger from wild animals. In my days in Surajgarh, in the Nawab’s court, I saw many feudal lords and white colonials who knew a great deal about animals. They could read the jungle almost as well as Corbett. But they couldn’t have – wouldn’t dream of it – sat and gossiped with peasant women as Corbett did, answering all their nosy questions. None of them stayed up nights with a gun, guarding their crops from rats and birds. Why do you think they called him Carpet Sahib and adored him all over these hills? He would have understood Puran in a second.” He laughed bitterly. “He’d have understood that poor idiot’s grunts and groans and whimpers and made sense of them. He’d have talked to Puran in his own language.”
The afternoon deepened and grew more mellow. A large family of pale-furred langurs alighted on the deodars. Their tails painted elliptical loops in the air as they swooped from tree to tree, the branches swung low with their weight as they landed. The monkeys disagreed with each other, now in soft chatters, now in screeches. Some of the mothers held tiny, ancient-faced babies to their breasts. Dogs barked at them in a frenzy and strained at the chains that tethered them to doorposts. The langurs knew the dogs were tied up and paid them no attention, but when they noticed us they turned their black, human-looking faces towards us, trying to decide if we were a danger.
Until humans came and made anthills out of these mountains, Diwan Sahib was saying, looking up at the langurs, the land had belonged to these monkeys, and to barking deer, nilgai, tiger, barasingha, leopards, jackals, the great horned owl, and even to cheetahs and lions. The archaeology of the wilderness consisted of these lost animals, not of ruined walls, terracotta amulets, and potsherds. Only now and then did we catch a glimpse of the distant past of our forests, when the shadow of a barasingha’s horns flitted through the denser woods, or when a leopard coughed at night. It was extremely rare, though not unknown, for wild animals to trust human beings, Diwan Sahib said. Why should they, when we have destroyed their world? Puran’s affinity to animals was a lost treasure. Puran was the sanest of us all, because animals knew whom to trust. They were imbeciles themselves who called Puran half-witted.
13
Veer returned at the end of the month from Dehra Dun and Delhi. He had been away for a fortnight, getting things organised for the next trekking season, which he was going to run from Ranikhet. He came back laden with gifts. There were exotic southern edibles for me: yogurt marinated chillies, murukkus. He had even brought me a bottle of pickle, made from whole baby mangoes – the kind I had been used to in Hyderabad and had only dreamed of ever since. Had I told him about my past? I flipped through our old conversations, which I could recall virtually down to the last detail. The bottle remained unopened on my table for several days as I tried to get used to it. I picked it up every now and then, my heartbeat quickening each time I examined the label, which said, “Begumpet Pickles: Traditionally Made from a Secret Recipe Handed Down for Generations”. I was reminded of the day my father had put one of his palms over my eyes as he led me to a thick-trunked mango tree in our garden to show me my new tree house. I must have been seven years old. A little red ladder led up to the house, and its inner walls were painted with butterflies. It had a toy telephone with a bell that rang. One morning my