I had never met before and they were so engrossed in conversation that they hardly noticed me as I laid a bundle of newspapers on the grass and stood behind Diwan Sahib’s chair.
It was a daily ritual. On my way back from school I picked up the newspapers from Negi’s tea stall on Mall Road and walked home with them to Diwan Sahib’s. His Man Friday, Himmat Singh, would make tea for us and we would sit and read the papers together. Diwan Sahib got the Statesman for a column it had of odd news from around the world. Once he told me of a woman in Texas who had to be detached by surgeons from a toilet seat she had sat on for two years. Her boyfriend had humoured her and served her meals in the bathroom for all of that time. “I have been told women take forever in the bathroom!” Diwan Sahib said. “But I didn’t think they took this long.” He had the habit of chuckling for ages over such nuggets of information before making neat clippings of them with his nail scissors and gluing them into a bulging leather-bound diary.
Afterwards, if Diwan Sahib had made some progress with his biography of Jim Corbett, he gave me the additions to his manuscript, and I would type them up on his chunky Remington. I had by painful degrees grown used to his long-limbed scrawls and learned to make sense of his arrows, brackets, lines-between-lines, looped scribbles. I had learnt a great deal from the manuscript about the hills in which I now lived, for before Corbett turned writer and naturalist he had been the Kumaon’s most famous hunter, an affable-looking man in khaki shorts and sola topi whose particular skill was the slaughtering of man-eating tigers and leopards. Over his several drafts, I thought I had become almost as much a scholar on the subject as Diwan Sahib, and if I felt brave enough I ventured comments on the book that, on the whole, he ignored.
Diwan Sahib regularly rethought the structure of his book. The first draft, which I had typed three years earlier, began with Corbett’s ancestor Joseph, who was a monk, and Harriet, who was a novitiate at a nearby convent. They met, broke all their vows, and married. I thought this a good romantic prologue for their descendant’s life, which, by contrast, was all celibacy and hunting. I had typed fifty or so pages with great care. We had scarcely reached the young Corbett’s first hunting exploits as a child, however, when Diwan Sahib changed his mind and began to organise the book thematically. In the new plan, the chapters were entitled “Scholar Soldier”, “Tiger-Killing”, “From Gun to Camera”, and the narrative moved back and forth in time within each chapter. The nun’s and monk’s story was abandoned. We were now on our third attempt, a plain chronology beginning with Corbett’s birth in Nainital, which was only two hours away from us. Bundles of discarded typescripts lay about the house. The “a” and the “s” keys on the typewriter had worn away long ago. Nobody in Ranikhet knew any more how to repair a typewriter so the manuscript looked as if it were written in code.
That afternoon, as I stood behind his chair and listened, Diwan Sahib was sitting with the stranger under his weeping spruce, and talking about the Nawab of Surajgarh, whose finance minister, long years ago, he had been. The Nawab had kept beautiful Arab horses, Diwan Sahib was saying. They were his passion. He spent more time with them than on his royal duties. He loved wildlife and went off on horseback for long days to the jungles where he slept on machans with no more than two servants to attend to him. Although he disapproved of hunting, he was a very good shot. He believed in keeping his guns oiled, and his finger and eye steady. He had been schooled for a world in which every self-respecting warrior had to be capable of firing an accurate shot in all situations, even when startled from deepest slumber. Every night, an alarm clock was set for five o’clock the next morning, and hung on a wall, or placed on the head of a stuffed tiger some twenty paces away across the room. The instant it rang, the Nawab sprang up, and “with one eye still asleep”, as he liked to boast, he aimed his revolver at the clock and fired at