you noticed how missionaries are being threatened and beaten up? I told you how those election workers threatened me and Miss Wilson. The poor woman was terrified.”
“The poor woman! You’re constantly complaining, ‘Agnes-this, Agnes-that, Agnes needs her vocal cords changed, no wonder Jesus didn’t want Agnes Wilson for His bride’.” Diwan Sahib spoke in high-voiced imitation of my own. “So why is your heart bleeding for her now?”
“That’s different. This is serious, I’m sure this is another way of giving the Church a message.” I was stumbling over my words in my anger and tried to slow down. “I’ve noticed things going wrong there over the last few months. Most of the old gravestones have chunks missing. Some of the writing on them is wiped off. That beautiful angel on little Charlie Darling’s grave is headless.”
“Why have graves, is what I say. The man’s dead and you hold onto his bones. It’s all molecules.” Diwan Sahib looked sullen and obstinate. “Throw the ashes into a fast-flowing river. Or scatter them in the air. Much more poetic.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” I said in as sharp a voice as I dared. “That graveyard is sacred to some people.”
Diwan Sahib refused to take me seriously. He poured himself another drink, topped it carefully with an equal amount of water, and flung himself back into his chair. “Chandan and Puran and Joshi and Tiwari,” he said. “I suppose they’re all hiding country bombs in their haystacks and shops and cowsheds to go and attack your precious school and church and jam factory, one of these days. And your chaiwallah at the temple, who spots a leopard for every cup of tea he sells? He may be manufacturing gunpowder boiled in leopard blood as we speak. Look for another job, Maya, while there is time. And go back to your maiden name.”
15
By the end of April the peaks were hidden behind a dust haze that rose from the plains, and on the rare early mornings when they became visible we could see bald grey stone on ridges where snow should have been. Down in the plains, we heard, the hot winds had begun to blow. Here it was cool in the evening, but the grass was yellow, the earth dusty far too early in the summer, and sun was so intense that it tore through layers of clothing like fire. Water ran dry in the pipes, garden plants wilted. If the sky showed signs of clouding up, Ama cautioned Charu not to bring in the washed clothes from the line or the red chillies that were drying in the sun. Her notion of rain was that it was a sentient creature that enjoyed wetting things put out to dry. It would lose interest and saunter off if the clothes and the chillies were moved to a sheltered place.
Charu and Puran began to go further and further afield with the cows, having exhausted all the grass closer to home. Despite the heat, Puran neither bathed nor changed out of his sweater and cap. When he passed, the air around him hung with a sour unbreathable smell that was a putrid compound of sweat, hay, milk, and cattle. These days I moved away if I saw him approach.
Charu and Puran would leave the house early and come back late in a flurry of cowbells and dog barks. Bijli was still an overgrown puppy more inclined to play than shepherd. He leaped before the goats, his front paws slapping the ground, tail furiously wagging. If the goats approached to butt him in response, he took it as encouragement and raced around them barking, sending them up slopes in bleating disarray. Charu’s grandmother said, “This is not a dog, it’s an ass. How will it ever look after the cattle? Even the leopard thinks it’s not worth eating.”
I had heard leopards calling the night before, a hoarse sound much like the sawing of wood. It was very close to the house – I smelled its scent, like that of burned hair and buried myself deeper in my pillow. I wished I had never read Corbett. The leopards in Corbett’s stories were all natives of our hills, and short of opening locks on doors were able to enter almost any house at will, with the kind of intelligence and stealth that nobody imagined animals possessed. Had I remembered to lock the doors downstairs? Were the windows properly bolted? After tossing and turning I got up and checked and then