of khus. I had to explain to Charu that chiks were blinds made of a kind of grass, khus, which became fragrant when dampened. The other servants sprinkled the khus with water before guests arrived. They filled tall vases with scented white tuberoses and dusted the pictures. On summer evenings, Kundan’s employers and their friends sat in the veranda looking into the large old trees that shaded the lawn, with a big cooler whirring at them. The tables around them began filling with empty bottles and glasses as the evening passed. One of the frequent visitors was a woman who dressed in very short skirts and long earrings; she drank the most, and also smoked long cigarettes. “She looks like a Nepali,” Kundan had written to Charu, “but she may be Chinese. She wears strange clothes. You can see her legs from top to bottom. She drinks five or six bottles of beer in one evening.”
The short-skirted woman wanted one day to learn how to make mutton the way hill people cooked it. She had demanded a lesson and Jhadu had told him to be ready. Kundan, who had seen cookery shows on television, placed all the ingredients he would need – chopped, diced, ground, or powdered – ready in a line of little bowls. He had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly and cleared all the surfaces so that it looked as much like T.V. kitchens as he could make it. But when the guests arrived, he felt shy. “I did not want to teach anyone anything,” he wrote in his letter. “I stayed in my room. Then Jhadu sent for me.”
When he came into the kitchen, still reluctant, the woman laughed and said, “What, you don’t want to teach me your secrets?” She stood by him and watched and took notes as he cooked the meat. She kept dipping in a spoon, blowing on it and tasting the gravy. One of the other friends took pictures of them cooking. They gave Kundan copies of the photographs, one of which he sent to Charu. It was the first photograph he had ever sent her.
I looked at it before giving it to her. The kitchen in the picture was shiny and new, like something from a magazine. The friend, a pretty young woman with slanting eyes and high cheekbones, was in a slate-grey mini-skirt, very chic. Earrings dangled to her shoulder and a long silver necklace slid down the centre of the low-cut, ivory-coloured top she wore. She was smiling at the camera, a lovely smile. Kundan too was smiling from over the steam in his cooking pot, which had made his face shine. His mop of hair had grown and the brass amulet at his neck blazed in the camera’s flashlight.
When Charu looked at the picture she did not smile. And for the first time, she did not spring about light-footed, humming and chattering, as she usually did after receiving a letter. The next few days she went to the market with her canisters of milk banging sullenly against her legs, and on her way back with the sack of rotting vegetables on her head, she slashed at every bush she passed with her stick.
6
The long summer turned the hillsides to tinder, the rains would not come, and there had been no letter from Kundan since the one with his photograph. Charu was too anxious for anything beyond the mechanical performance of her chores. In earlier times she had always kept a caring eye out for Puran. She was adept at stealing grain from Ama’s stores for his deer and because she knew he fed much of his own food to the animals he made friends with, she made a few extra rotis smeared with salt and ghee to give him when Ama was not looking. Now, more often than not, she forgot and Puran began to go hungry.
He did not ask anyone at home for food. Food had a way of coming to him, he had discovered, if he went up to Negi’s tea stall on Mall Road. That was where Mr Chauhan caught sight of him every other day, and then his long-nursed rage against Puran took on an inexplicable intensity. “This beggar and all these dogs! Just wait, Mam, and you will see what I mean,” he said to me in a hiss one evening when I encountered him on Mall Road. At that moment, Puran was sitting on Negi’s crooked bench, looking innocuous enough. At the road’s