edge, boys were arguing over a carrom board, and another group was cheering a volleyball game in the waste-lot next to Meghdoot Hotel. Girls in their brightest, tightest clothes walked up and down in pairs, casting sidelong glances at the boys, who stood around slapping each other’s shoulders, running fingers through their hair, laughing and talking louder when the girls passed. A jeep drew up from the bazaar, roof loaded with sacks and bundles, spilling out people and goat kids and black diesel smoke. Mr Chauhan covered his nose with a white, ironed handkerchief.
The younger Negi came to Puran with an expression of exaggerated patience. “Back again?” he said, and handed him a glass of tea and four fat slices of bread. Puran scurried away with his tea and bread across to the low parapet that ran all the way down the western edge of Mall Road, and sat on it eating in a hurry as if the bread was in danger of being snatched away from him. A ring of woolly dogs formed around him, looking up with pleading eyes and drooling tongues. Puran dropped them scraps and the dogs snarled and yelped as they fought over the food.
Mr Chauhan turned to me in triumph and said, “See? See what I mean? Yesterday I told my secretary – we were in the car – please make a note, I said, too many stray dogs. I would like a list – all dogs’ descriptions and names in one column and owners’ names in the second column. Any dog that does not have a licence must go. We will draw up regulations for licensing dogs and this … beggar? There should be no beggars in an army cantonment. We must be an example for the rest of India. I’ll fix this man. That is what I said.”
He returned to the door of his white Gypsy, whose bright red beacon had been spinning like an angry top all through our conversation. The car roared to life and took him away down Mall Road. Puran sat on the parapet oblivious. The stray dogs lolled at his feet, contented after their snack. The darkening mountains behind him began to swallow the blood-red sun as it turned from a disk to a sliver, slowly disappearing from view.
* * *
That night, I sat at my window in a trance gazing at the fires in the forest. What would happen to the animals that lived in the undergrowth if a wind were to fan those slow fires into a blaze? They were always in danger. One year Puran had run into the flames in the middle of the night and come back with a singed fox cub; another year he had rescued a baby monkey from the burning forest and the next morning a whole family of monkeys had appeared on our doorstep, agitating for its release in angry screeches and chatters.
I was lost in worried thoughts about Puran and Mr Chauhan’s threats to “fix” him when I heard a faint knock on my door downstairs. It was past ten o’clock, the neighbours were asleep. My light was the only one on; I was supposed to be correcting the English class test. At first I thought the knock was a figment of my imagination and applied myself to the exercise book I was working on. And then I heard it again.
Nobody visited this late in Ranikhet. My stomach gave a lurch. This was the call in the night I had known would come one day. Something had happened to Diwan Sahib and Himmat Singh had come to call me. I raced down the stairs and unlatched the front door in a panic.
It was Veer. His nose was peeling with sunburn and his face was thinner than usual from the weeks he had been away walking and climbing. His normally close-cropped hair had grown. That, and an unfamiliar beard, made him look a stranger. For a second my mind sprang to my last night with Michael when I had brushed my fingers over his clean-shaven cheeks in anticipation of the beard he came back with from every trek, when I had pinched the roll of fat around his stomach knowing he would lose it in the weeks away.
Veer was standing so close to me I could smell his sweat. His jeans were dirty and his shoes muddy. I was stabbed by a sudden, fierce need to bury my face in his shirt although it hung on him grimy