compass.
For the moment everyone was too busy talking to remember they were in the middle of a slideshow and that there were many more slides to see. Veer was behind me, at the back of the room. If I turned an imperceptible fraction, I could glimpse him outlined against the faint light that came in from the veranda through a murky old glass pane, could sense his eyes upon me in the darkness. I curled deeper into my shawl, my arms holding my shoulders close. He had bought the murukkus because he had heard me saying how much I missed them – I had said it only once, in passing. But he had remembered – and the pickle, which by some miracle was from my father’s factory. I wished the room were empty and his show for me alone.
Veer fiddled with the projector, and a new picture flickered on the wall, turning it grey and white and very cold. My eyes, half shut with daydreaming, snapped open. The slide showed a woman looking up into a camera pointed at her from above. She was bent under the weight of her rucksack and her face was etched with pain. Snow had settled like white trim on the purple of her anorak’s hood. The snow-covered slope she was climbing fell behind her into grey-green water half covered with splintered sheets of ice. Flakes of snow were sprinkled all over the photograph. Icy slopes rose out of the water on the far bank.
Veer was saying, “It was freezing and windy that day. This woman almost slipped and fell into the water just after I took this photograph. She was already feeling ill and the altitude made her worse. It’s over 16,000 feet. People can start bleeding from the nose. Their skin might peel off. They get terrible headaches and frostbite. My ear and missing finger – that’s from frostbite. Frostbite means your blood has frozen – literally.”
Every head in the room swivelled towards Veer as if they had not noticed his deformed ear and missing finger all these days. He changed the slide to turn them back to the wall.
I did not stop Veer to ask him the name of the place. I did not need to. I knew it was Roopkund. That was the water beside which Michael had frozen to his death. I scoured the pictures that snapped onto the wall one by one. A different angle each time: close-ups, long shots. Water and ice, ice and water. Lead-coloured sky. Sheer sides of brown rock and white snow rising from sheets of ice. I examined every inch with frantic concentration in the seconds before one picture made way for another. I had never seen Michael’s dead body. His death felt more a disappearance, still unreal, leaving behind a smoke-like vestige of hope. He was there on those slopes. He had to be. I waited for Michael’s blue and red-hooded jacket to appear. Then he would step away from the wall and into the room.
Long ago, when I was a little girl, I used to believe that radios contained people. No more than a few inches tall, but in every way human, those people were forever imprisoned within the big brown and black radio that stood on my father’s desk. It had a large dial, and round, serrated knobs for switches. When it was turned on, the panel inscribed with frequencies glowed with a yellow light that made the radio look like a little house. If someone took it apart, the singers on Binaca Geet Mala would step out onto the table and talk to me.
I felt icy winds curl around my fingertips, my toes, my face, even my heart. I was trembling. I thought I would cry out in pain and fear. I buried my face in my shawl and stopped my ears under it. My throat had wound itself into a tight knot.
“What is that, is it a waterfall?” someone in the room, who still had a voice, asked. Someone else said, “See how the falling water has frozen!” I inched out of my shawl again. The scene had changed to a herd of white sheep on a meadow enamelled with flowers. Veer muttered “Wrong sequence,” and then there was another stretch of water on the wall, a glassy expanse that reflected the sides of the gorge within which it flowed away into the horizon. At the banks were the frilly white edges of waves frozen in mid-surge. Charu went