We’ll find out if we missed anything in the third draft.”
He did not answer. He was lost again in his own thoughts, staring into the sputtering flames.
* * *
That night, I sat up with his papers, and the sound of my typewriter clacked into the night. I typed page after page, overcome by a sense of loss, which, if it had not been overpowering, would have struck me as absurd. How had I missed knowing the man who wrote those words at the time he wrote them? And if his time was short, as he insisted more and more often these days, could I bring myself to look into the abyss of Diwan Sahib’s certain absence?
This is what I typed from Diwan Sahib’s manuscript that night: it was his statement of purpose, his optimistic, tongue-in-cheek plan for a biography – when he had not known the project would take him forty years and still remain incomplete.
Being petrified ever since birth of even the most minor forms of physical injury, it is conceptually difficult for me to grasp something as foolish as bravery. I can only gape in wonder at people who do not require wild horses to drag them onto a cricket pitch, at batsmen who face fast bowlers without being shackled by iron to the wicket. I am similarly bowled over by the idiocy of people who go walking of their own free will in forests where they might be eaten by bears or be clawed by tigers whose talons can sometimes be as sharp as those of certain women I have known. Next to schoolteachers, a tiger seems to me the most terrifying thing in the world, and its immediate extinction (or at least caged enclosure) is a wild inner desire that I have to keep suppressing, given that I am writing a book on Jim Corbett. One look at a tiger’s dental arrangements is sufficient to convince anyone that vegetarianism is not a notion likely to have been entertained even by its remote ancestors. In early youth I was regularly carted off into a forest by my employer, the Nawab of Surajgarh. I was informed by him that the object of these expeditions was to try and glimpse one of these beasts. After I had got over the feeling that either he was joking or lunatic, I transcended the condition of fright in which one merely sobs uncontrollably, and was restrained from the suicide I was attempting by jumping off the swaying pachyderm transporting us in the direction of Blakean fearful symmetry. The Nawab had a profound effect on my early predisposition towards being separated, via a stout iron cage, from all species of four-legged life larger than myself. In part, this accounts for my fascination with Jim Corbett, who seems to have been braver even than the Nawab of Pataudi when he captained our national cricket team. His life was years of shunting and hooting, then hunting and shooting – he was a railwayman before he became a celebrated shikari. By his own account Corbett voluntarily, even assiduously, did the very last thing I would ever do, namely “get in touch” (as he sweetly puts it) with man-eaters. As we know from his riveting tales, the man-eaters were not equally keen to get in touch with him. Once he was on their tails, so to speak, they found it hard to shake him off – which we can’t either, once we get hooked to his tales. Man-eaters of Kumaon looks to me like India’s third greatest storybook, after the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. How did Corbett acquire the art of writing so brilliantly? He read James Fenimore Cooper; Jack London and Mark Twain may also have influenced him. He seems to have read fiction set in frontier territory; novels of exploration and adventure. In my book on Corbett, I want to model myself on Corbett’s tales, telling a sequence of stories that provide a picture of Corbett along with glimpses of his context. I want to give a sense of original, archival fact-finding. There will be entertaining digressions that show how Corbett’s immersion in wildlife was a substitute for the wilderness he suffered in relation to women because of a possessive and devoted sister. The chief source of information on Corbett is a sheaf of notes – thirteen pages dictated by the same sister (whose name was Maggie) to her friend in Kenya, Ruby Beyts, where she and Jim spent their last years. Maggie functioned for