was every bully’s target at boarding school. Once they paraded me in the corridors in a skirt because I was too frightened to join the boxing competition. I was the school wimp.”
The uncle made him wring the neck of a chicken the first day, then skin it, clean it, cut it, and watch it being cooked. He had to eat it at lunch. The next week’s lesson was a white goat kid. Veer had to bring the cleaver down on its neck. He was twelve years old. For the rest of his boyhood he no longer stayed away when pheasants and hares that had been shot on hunting expeditions were being plucked and skinned and cleaned. “And your Diwan Sahib?” Veer said. “He shot more birds than anyone. All this conservation bullshit he spouts is new.”
It was two weeks since Veer had returned. He was about to leave Ranikhet again, and this was our farewell lunch, hence the special mutton curry. Veer finished my share as well. “I’ll be starving the next few weeks, remember? Must eat up now,” he said, as I watched him suck the marrow clean from another bone before it joined the rest on his plate.
“I’ve never known you to starve,” I said. “And haven’t you read about the goat that Frank Smythe named Bartholomew? That goat walked with them all the way up the Valley of Flowers, he was their friend, and then one day he turned into food. They began to eat him, part by part.”
Veer laughed and ran his fingers through my hair as he got up, saying, “Time to leave, I can see. I’ll find a Bartholomew on the way, and save one of his teeth for you.” He was taking a German trekking group to the Valley of Flowers, which was at its most resplendent in the monsoon. Nobody could replace him at such short notice, so he told me when I protested that Diwan Sahib, still strapped to oxygen in the hospital, was too ill to be left. “I would pass it on to someone else if I could, really. I don’t want to leave the old man right now, either, but I can’t let the group down; they’ve planned this for a year. It wouldn’t be professional. Besides, you’re here, aren’t you?”
13
It was the last week of September before the next letter from Kundan Singh came, this time in an envelope. This was only the second time he had used an envelope, which cost much more than an inland letter. This time too, he used it to enclose a photograph. In the photograph Kundan wore an ironed white shirt and was frowning so hard at the camera that he looked cross-eyed. His hair had been oiled and flattened. Charu looked for a minute at the picture and then sandwiched it between her palms. She was too shy to look at it properly, not while I was there. She would take it to one of her hideouts and study every inch of it the minute she got a chance.
She sat down on her usual chair and waited for me to read her the letter but I had other things to do, which I finished while she waited, tapping a toe on the floor. I had already told her that I would not read the letters to her for much longer, thinking this was the only way she would work hard at her lessons again – she was tending to be lazy.
I was so little at home now that unpaid electricity and water bills had collected. My chairs staggered under the weight of clothes and the morning’s milk would certainly go rancid if I did not put it to boil at once. I went about my chores and then, as I sat at my table writing cheques for the bills, I became aware of a faint sound, almost no more than breathing: Charu’s voice. She was whispering in a low undertone. I could hear the hisses of the sibilants, the drawn out vowels where she halted halfway through a word trying to complete it. I sat very still, pretending to be immersed in my bills, wondering if it could be true: Charu was reading by herself ! At last, on the page and in her head, the alphabet had resolved itself into words she could make sense of. I stole a glance at her and saw her squinting at the letter, her lips moving as she mouthed the words. Her fingers