up to sprinkle water on our sheets to cool the room. If the electricity went, I would sit up, fanning us both with a newspaper. He slept through it all, exhausted by his long day at work rushing through the burning summer air on his motorbike, wherever his newspaper sent him to take pictures. I would look at his helpless, sleeping face and though he could not hear me, I whispered endearments so tender that they would have curled away and died if exposed to the light of day.
“I couldn’t say them to you then, but I wish you knew,” I said now, and tried to hear his voice replying. But all I heard was foxes calling to each other and pine needles sprinkling down on the tin roof, making a sound like rain.
4
In colonial times, the summer months in Ranikhet meant horse races and moonlit picnics, and even now we have a “season” when the town is crowded with people who come up from the plains to escape the heat. They are everywhere for a few weeks: tourists, summer residents, day trippers. Scholars would turn up to see Diwan Sahib. Trekkers heading for the high Himalaya paused in Ranikhet en route; all kinds of people wandered in and out of the Light House as if it were a public monument. If they found Diwan Sahib in the garden they stopped to pump him for information about the hills or to photograph him as a relic of the Raj, a bona fide old Indian nobleman. Sometimes supplies would arrive for one of Veer’s trekking groups, or middlemen tasked with requisitioning porters in the Ranikhet bazaar would come and stay for hours, poring over details. There was a young assistant Veer had employed, who was stationed at the house from time to time. He hovered all day, appearing to do nothing more substantial at all.
Ever since Veer had taken up residence at the Light House, Diwan Sahib’s writing had barely progressed. If I asked him for new chapters to type, he waved his hand at whoever happened to be visiting and said, “I can’t write when there are so many people. I’ll wait till the season ends and then we’ll finish chapter seven. I’ll get the book done this year, that’s a promise. I don’t have much more time. That Welsh poet, what was his name? We learned his poem in school – ‘Job Davies, eighty-five/Winters old and still alive/After the slow poison/And treachery of the seasons.’ – did you have to learn it too?”
“No,” I said.
“You should. Good poem. I’m like Mr Davies – worse – I’m eighty-seven! Every morning I wake up and tell myself, ‘What, still alive?’ I truly don’t have long.”
“You don’t want to write any more,” I said. “There’s too much else to do.” I pointed to the bottle on the table next to him. Now that Veer kept him supplied with superior alcohol, Diwan Sahib’s durbar began soon after breakfast and went on long into the afternoon. He would keep postponing lunch, pouring himself yet another drink, waving Himmat Singh away each time he said, “Shall I serve lunch, Sa’ab?” Mr Qureshi too was under the spruce tree nursing his steel glass on most days. He seemed to have abandoned his workshop to his son.
“Maybe if you wrote for an hour or so in the morning before starting on the gin?”
“What nonsense,” Diwan Sahib said, and poured himself another large measure. “Don’t be such a schoolteacher. My taste buds feel as if they’ve come back to life after twenty years dormant.” He turned to Mr Qureshi and said, “You were going to tell me something. This girl interrupted you.”
“Yes, yes, Diwan Sahib, as I was saying, mysterious are the ways of man.” Mr Qureshi smiled, round-faced, and red-nosed, already a little tipsy. “Do you know, Maya, a car came in for servicing yesterday – a Honda City, belongs to that new doctor at the nursing home, what’s his name? Sharma or Verma. Anyway, the boys started work on the car. They’re strapping young fellows, foul-mouthed and stoned half the time. When they opened the boot to get the spare tyre, right there, one of them almost fell over with fright. There was a head in the boot. Long hair and all.”
“A human head?” I said. “You mean a dead body?”
“Aha, Maya!” Mr Qureshi chuckled. “Scared you, didn’t I? No, when they looked again they realised it was a plastic head, a stand for a wig.