gloomy about his vital signs and asked me how soon Diwan Sahib’s relatives could reach his bedside; then he came back, wheezing, gurgling, coughing up yellow phlegm. All the hours that he lay flat on his back the only thing to look at were the cracks and cobwebs in the flaking blue and yellow ceiling of the hospital room. When he was well enough to be propped up, he stared from behind the gag of his oxygen mask out of the window that overlooked a green, serene valley. Kites and eagles wheeled around in the sky it framed.
Diwan Sahib had thrust away memories of past grandeur and lived a solitary life as the local eccentric. In his final attempt to assert authority he had been insulted by a constable who would have bowed and scraped before him in the days when he was Diwan of Surajgarh. He had no children. He had burned his life’s work in a moment’s frenzy. Now gagged into silence by tubes and masks, he was in a zone more unreachable than Veer’s. When I sat by him and talked to him, his eyes sometimes changed expression, but often he shut them and turned away as if it was unbearable to be reminded of the world outside his cage. I thought of my mother in her last days with that knife under her pillow, when she had struggled with one last letter to me. The only thing she dreamed of now, she had said in the letter’s three dipping lines, was a glimpse of me, and after that, death.
I thought about Ama, who had been many times to see Diwan Sahib at the hospital. She walked the entire five miles because she wanted to save the six rupees the jeep ride would have cost. Once in the room, she perched as straight as a bamboo pole on the edge of a chair, as if sitting back comfortably would be an impropriety. She looked away when the nurse came in to turn Diwan Sahib over or attend to his oxygen mask. In that different setting, she was a stranger, a tall, bony village woman in her best going-out clothes, hair oiled and pulled back in a bun. Her expression was formal and distant. Unlike at home, she covered her head with a corner of her sari, and hardly spoke. Ama had scraped together an uncertain and tenuous living all these years, fiercely protecting her dignity and Charu’s virtue in the hope of eventual respectability through a son-in-law in a government job. There was no knowing what would happen when she found out about Kundan.
And I? How far I had come from my distant Deccan home! A bright-eyed, coffee-skinned, long-plaited girl with flowers in her hair, practising Bharatnatyam in a pink and yellow half-sari, and learning to grind dosa batter from Beni Amma on a great stone pestle – just for fun, naturally. A girl from a family as wealthy as mine would never have to sweat over a pestle grinding anything. What had I dreamed of then? I could no longer remember. And after meeting Michael, the fantasies – first of just a few hours alone with him, then a day, then every hour of every day. The usual thoughts of children and pets and home and work, all of which disintegrated when he died. What did I dream of now, if anything? I was afraid to find out.
14
There is only one way for people to leave Ranikhet: by road. Long-distance buses leave from two bus depots in the bazaar. The government bus depot has a cluster of shops around it: fruit shops, a barber shop, and small restaurants grimy from years of living close to badly sprung, rattling buses that spew out black, oily fumes. This is the more genteel bus stop, since the government bus staff do not feel the need to fight for custom: they get their salaries regardless of the number of passengers they pick up. At the other end of the market is the bus stop for private operators. This is loud, aggressive, sleazy. The staff there hustle people into their buses with all sorts of false promises: “Leaving in a minute! Haldwani, Rudrapur, Rampur, Moradabad, Delhi! Leaving in a minute!” Once you have bought your ticket and found a seat on the bus you might wait all the next hour while the driver yells out to passers-by, asking them to hop in. Through that hour people harangue you to buy bananas