far as I know, our young man has nothing to do with the Army or with helicopters. But I’m the old fool, the senile drunk, I’d be the last to know anything.” He looked as bad-tempered as he had that morning. After a minute’s silence he threw me one of his unexpected questions.
“How old were you during the Bangladesh war?”
I tried to remember when the Bangladesh war had been, without giving my ignorance away, but he knew me too well. “1971,” he said in a voice that could have cut glass.
“Do you know Michael and I had the same birthday?” I said. “Once we added up our ages and had a cake with 44 candles on our birthday. It was a chocolate-cream cake and it had two white sugar mice with pink eyes, I remember. I ate one of them and the tail got stuck in my throat because it was made of a dried noodle.” I giggled at the memory.
Diwan Sahib was looking at me as if I had lost my mind. Then he dismissed me with a you-foolish-woman shake of his head and I resigned myself to the story that had been postponed since that morning. During the Bangladesh war, one of the intriguing political figures was Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Diwan Sahib said, a man he remembered from pre-independence days. He was a largely self-educated villager who had turned fervent socialist. He threw himself into every revolt that came his way in British times, from the Khilafat movement to the non-cooperation movement. In the last days of the British Empire, it was rumoured that he had come to Surajgarh for a secret meeting with the Nawab to plot the state’s secession from India, but that was the time the Nawab had put Diwan Sahib in jail for plotting the opposite, so the Maulana and the Diwan had not met.
By 1970, Diwan Sahib went on, the Maulana was ninety, but still an incendiary demagogue, now fighting for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. Although he was violently against India, like most Bangladeshi political leaders he took refuge in this country when the war started. He was a frail old man of volatile temper, given to making provocative statements. He had to be kept out of the public eye, far away from the newspapers. Which place was secluded and secret enough? Naturally, Ranikhet, Diwan Sahib said, a town whose secrets were kept by the hills, by its remoteness, by the Army.
The Maulana hated the mountains. He kept urging the Indians to give him a few acres of land nearer Bangladesh, in Assam where his son was buried. But he was not allowed to leave Ranikhet until the war was over.
The helicopters drew closer again and louder. Diwan Sahib shouted over the noise, brandishing a book at me. “And do you know when I found out about this? Yesterday. From a book! Here was this walking archive, lodged maybe a mile away from me in one of those army houses, and I had no idea.” The sounds died down as the helicopters circled away and Diwan Sahib shook his head irritably at them. “Nothing makes you as irrelevant as retirement, Maya. There was a time when Nehru and Patel trusted me with secrets. All these bloody generals in Ranikhet used to beg for invitations to this house. And now?” He withdrew into scowling silence.
That evening, I sat in my veranda with a cup of tea, staring absently at the spot in the sky where the peaks would have been if the heat haze had not rubbed them out. I thought of the ninety-year old Maulana hidden away in Ranikhet’s silent hills, longing for his familiar rivers and swampy heat. My reasons for coming to Ranikhet were strangely similar to the Maulana’s, I thought, we had both been on the run.
My thoughts turned to Veer. From all he had said in passing over the last few months I had constructed a story in my head about his reasons for moving to Ranikhet. He had been an orphan looking for his home, and in his childhood he had found one, after a fashion, in the Light House. Diwan Sahib’s affection had been understated, but combined with the force of his personality it had been enough to make an impact on the lonely child. Veer was a man in search of a father figure and had found one in Diwan Sahib. Nothing else could account for his rough-edged tenderness towards the old man. He