despite the tears. “And how will I get someone else to read out your letters? What will you write about? What you cooked for lunch, what the manager said to you?”
He buried his fingers and then his face in her hair. “I’ll write in riddles,” he said. “It is only you who will know what I am saying.” He twisted the studs in her ear and said, “Give me one of these, and when we meet again, it’ll be back with the other. It’ll be our lucky charm.”
It was about a fortnight later, early in May, that Charu came to me with a letter from her friend “Sunita” and asked me to teach her to read and write.
PART TWO
1
It was early one morning that summer, Diwan Sahib still rumpled with sleep, holding his mug of tea, and I on my way to school, cutting through his lawn. A distant humming sound that came closer every second had stopped me in my tracks and brought him out from his bedroom in his night-clothes.
The sound resolved itself into an olive green helicopter and I said, “It’s just a helicopter.” As I started on my way again, Diwan Sahib said, “It may not be just a helicopter. Not in an army town. Have you any idea what goes on here? This is a town that lives by secrets. State secrets. Army secrets. Grubby little personal secrets.”
He looked more ill-tempered and bleary-eyed than was usual for his early mornings, and looked set to embark on a long story I would not be able to interrupt. I quickened my pace and shouted over my shoulder at him, “It is just a helicopter, and I’ll see you after school.”
That day however, the helicopter noise was insistent, and there were two of them: circling the forests, first coming down very low, then swooping away in another direction, chopping up the sky with their blades. Was it a General visiting, or did a forest fire needed monitoring? Each time the sound approached, people paused in whatever they were doing to look up and puzzle over it.
The restless sound echoed through the skies all day. By mid-afternoon we noticed dark plumes of smoke in the distance, and some people claimed they had heard an explosion. At Bisht Bakery, both customers and bakers were agreed that the Army was trying to find a Chinese spy who had slipped in through the northern border. By the time I reached Negi’s tea stall, the consensus had changed: an escaped terrorist was on the run and had set fire to something important.
On my way back from Negi’s, at about three o’clock, I saw Veer’s jeep turning a bend. I paused, waiting for him to stop and pick me up to drive me to the Light House, with a long detour for samosas. This was our ritual when he was in town. But today he drove past without even a wave. The road was empty. It was narrow. I had to stand aside to let him pass. He was close enough for me to see that he was wearing his dark glasses and a white shirt, that his backpack was on the seat next to him. I stayed where I was, sure he would realise his mistake and slam on his brakes further down the road.
The sound of his jeep died away. Once the cloud of diesel fumes cleared I resumed walking. I made myself focus my attention on the orange creeper that climbed a nearby pine, the yellow-throated marten that was making its way up a tree trunk, the kalij pheasants scuttling in the undergrowth, the mysterious fragrance that always hung over that particular curve on the road – all the while pushing away the thought that Veer had seen me and had not stopped.
When I reached Diwan Sahib and gave him his newspaper, I waited as long as I could, sipping my over-sweet tea, before asking with elaborate casualness, “Where’s Veer disappeared to?”
“He left all of a sudden,” Diwan Sahib said. “That boy’s a mystery to me. He was sitting here, staring at his computer, when his phone rang and within five minutes he was out of the house and in his car. Without a word to me. All he said to Himmat was that he would be away for a few days.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with – ” I looked up at the sky.
“What? Do you mean with this business of the helicopters?” Diwan Sahib said. “As