into the wrong hands. And why should they not have feared that eventuality? So much in those letters was dangerous for people in public life. Nehru had called his friendship with Edwina a battle between convention and chemistry in which chemistry had won – more or less. It could not be allowed to win entirely. Public life is relentless, it is unforgiving, it is held together by conventions and the fear of any threat to them. “I should know,” Diwan Sahib said.
His voice took on the tones of someone reciting a poem: “I lose myself in a dreamland, which is very unbecoming in a prime minister. But then I am only incidentally a prime minister.” A man willingly imprisoned by his political destiny, said Diwan Sahib, separated from the woman he loved by duty, distance, necessity, even instinct. If either of them abandoned their own orbits, Nehru had told Edwina, they would both be terribly unhappy. The impossibility of their love was also what sustained it.
Diwan Sahib’s brow remained furrowed in thought. He stared at the fire as if reading from it. I hardly dared say a word, never having seen him so lost to the world around him. He had not once sounded like this talking about Corbett. I could not understand it. The story was startling, of course, but surely so well known and often repeated that it had lost its power to move anyone, especially someone as unsentimental as Diwan Sahib. You are starting to sound like a romance writer too, I would have said, if he had not looked so unlike himself.
“There were letters in which Nehru said he felt Edwina’s presence like a fragrance in the air,” Diwan Sahib murmured on. “She said she felt a sense of peace and happiness with him as she did with no-one else. He sent her things to remind her of the country she had left: birch bark from Kashmir, leaves, stones. Edwina had even given him a ring before leaving India. When she died in her sleep, alone in Borneo, Nehru’s letters were by her bed. She travelled with them everywhere. It was what she read before she slept every night.”
“Why didn’t you write a book on this instead of on Corbett?” I said, when his next pause grew too long.
He blinked as if he had been asleep. His face was etched with pain, but he rearranged it into an imitation of his usual half-seriousness. “Because of Edwina’s dog, entirely because of her dog,” he said. Edwina had a dog called Mizzen. She did not know what to do with it when the time came to leave India. Given England’s quarantine rules, the dog would have had to be isolated for several months before being allowed to re-enter the country. Edwina consulted Nehru and they agreed it was better to put it down than make it suffer quarantine; the dog was too old to survive it, they thought. “That did it for me,” Diwan Sahib said. “All those gardens at his prime-ministerial doorstep and the man didn’t offer to adopt it and let it live out its remaining years in peace? How do you think an old dog like me feels about that? You won’t put me down, will you, if I become inconvenient?”
“Do you really have any of their letters?” I asked him. “Couldn’t I see them once?” I had had a hunch all along that he had made it up to amuse himself watching people like the woman from East Anglia pay him obeisance.
“Maybe I have them, maybe I don’t,” Diwan Sahib said. “Maybe, maybe not. You’ll find out.” He had shut his eyes again. “I should chop this house into firewood,” he said, his words slurring. “Too big for me, too big – ”
He was drowsy now. He slouched in his big armchair, and in the dim light he looked shrivelled, old and haggard, all bones and loose skin. Above him, the photograph of his dogs in silhouette was scarcely visible, but it made me think of Veer’s stories of Diwan Sahib’s youth: his parties, his horses, the music, his women. He was receding before my eyes, fading out of reach.
I felt the need to do something to stop him disappearing from my life. I pulled a few pages from one of the old bundles on Corbett that had emerged a month ago and said, “Tonight I’m going to type up a few of these and we’ll go over them tomorrow. O.K.? We’ll start again.