ice, the green water – it was not Roopkund, it was a river in Kashmir, but how different could Roopkund be? I felt a shiver go down the back of my neck from some fear I could not define. I was reminded of the way Corbett said he sensed the presence of a man-eating tiger even if he had not seen one: “I felt I was in danger,” he wrote, “and that the danger that threatened me was on the rock in front of me. The fact that I had seen no movement did not in any way reassure me – the man-eater was on the rock, of that I was sure.” I had typed three of Diwan Sahib’s drafts in which those lines appeared and they were engraved on my mind. Corbett’s words had never felt so palpable. Now I understood what he meant, and the apprehension was all the more powerful for being illogical.
I looked up at the stretching limbs of the deodars. The trees were vastly high. Only eagles reached their very top and they told nobody what they saw from there. Each fringed branch was almost large enough to be a tree on its own. For a dizzy moment, it felt as if I were the one human left alive, glued by gravity alone to the edge of a spinning globe, only just keeping myself from being flung off.
14
That night, I had a vivid dream in which skulls rolled down white slopes and fell into pools of green water. I saw a woman hooded in an anorak, clawing her way up a snowslope. Someone was photographing her as she struggled, saying Smile, say cheese? The voice was Veer’s. Then the woman’s face turned into Michael’s and suddenly he was falling, toppling over the edge of the slope, and as he fell through the white space towards the water, I felt myself falling too, flailing, unmoored, weightless, helpless, until I woke up sweating under my blankets.
It was long past the time for the army bugles. The sun was blazing through the window. It was a holiday. I could hear children playing and the clerk’s boombox pumping out music with a bass beat that resounded across the hillside. Ama’s side of a conversation was taking place in shouts just below my window. Someone had wound barbed wire around my head and set fire to it. I staggered down to the kitchen to make myself coffee. How much rum had I drunk the night before? One at Diwan Sahib’s. And did I have one, or was it two, after Veer left?
I sat at the dining table with my coffee and a painkiller, and noticed a familiar piece of paper on it, weighed down with a jam jar: Diwan Sahib’s electricity bill. He had asked me to deal with it – that was a week ago, and now it was late, so there would be a fine. How much? I looked at the bill – an extra thirty rupees. It was not a lot, and I missed the due date almost every month. But today it made me feel as if someone had just tightened that wire round my head. I covered my aching eyes with my palms and felt them dampen with tears. I was always in trouble with Miss Wilson, my students failed their exams, my house was a mess of old and useless things because I could not bring myself to throw anything away, every month I paid late fines out of my tiny salary because I put things off. The two people most precious to me, my mother and Michael, were dead, and my father was growing old alone in that vast, echoing house in Hyderabad while I was alone in mine, thousands of miles away. Yet he and I, equally implacable, could not find a way back to each other. I put my head on the table and broke into sobs.
After a while I picked my head up, swallowed my mud-cold coffee and decided I would visit Michael’s grave. If I went to his grave and talked to him I would calm down and the knot in my throat, which had come to live there since the evening before, would dissolve. I would pay that overdue bill on the way.
I walked down to the electricity office by various shortcuts past the backs of people’s houses. Past Tiwari, the plumber, who raised his hands in a Namaste; past three lumbering olive-green army trucks, each one as