and oranges for the journey and drunks lurch up and down demanding small change.
There are also phalanxes of jeeps and shared taxis to carry people to nearby hill towns. Charu had never travelled out of Ranikhet before, except once or twice to go to villages further into the mountains for weddings and festivals. She had never gone alone; the only town she knew was Ranikhet. How big was Delhi? she had asked Kundan Singh when he was about to leave. Was it like four or five Ranikhets put together?
At that time she had only been curious. Now it was a matter of survival. Kundan Singh’s last letter had made her understand that her daydreaming had to stop. It was time for action. If Kundan was doubtful about coming to Ranikhet before he left for Singapore, she had to go to him.
Charu had no inkling of what to expect or how to find Kundan Singh if she did reach Delhi. All she had were inland letters on the back of which he had written his address. She posted him a letter, the first she had ever written in her life, telling him only the date, 12 October, that he should come to the bus stop in Delhi to get her. She had decided to leave on an evening when her grandmother was away, a regular occurence now that Ama went so often to see Diwan Sahib at the hospital. Charu picked the Friday a week away. She would have to wait till Puran was asleep, and then she would take a night bus out of town.
Every night, as Ama snored next to her and Bijli whimpered in his sleep, she lay awake, eyes open in the dark, thinking of ways to slip away unnoticed. The bus stop was a problem. Because she delivered milk in the bazaar every day, and one of her customers was Nanda Devi Sweets near the government bus depot, they knew her there. At the private depot end, there was Bimla, the Nepalese vegetable seller, from whose shop Charu collected spoiled stock every day for her cows. To dodge these inquisitive acquaintances, she had to avoid the bazaar and both bus stops.
The minute Ama left for the hospital on the 11 October, Charu began to look around their rooms for what she needed. She put some things from her grandmother’s box into a cloth pouch that she then tied round her neck and slipped inside her kurta. Into the cloth bag that she used on her trips to the market she put the few stale rotis kept aside for the cows. She added some batashas and lumps of jaggery, a change of clothes and a comb. She slipped in the rubber-banded bunch of Kundan’s letters. As an afterthought, she put in the smaller of her two sickles. She wore her everyday clothes and her plastic slippers.
As she was getting ready to leave she noticed Bijli, bright-eyed with curiosity, wagging his tail in anticipation of a late-hour romp through the forest. He got up and gave himself a full-body shake that made his ears flap, and stood at the door, ready. Charu said, “Not now, later.” She gathered a clump of his fur in her hands. She felt as if she would not be able to let go. Quickly, she locked him in. She crept up the path that led away from their house to the cow-shed to breathe in their smell and to touch their wet noses one last time. In a far corner she could see the huddled, sleeping form of her uncle, Puran. Tears sprang to her eyes. Who would look after him now? How would Ama milk Ratna? Ratna only let Charu touch her, nobody else. Before Ratna looked towards her, she slipped out of the shed and ran up the slope away from the Light House and its grounds.
She kept to the forested hillsides, meeting the roads only occasionally to cross them and hop onto the next slope. In order to avoid Mall Road, where she might be seen, though it provided the shortest, safest route to the highway, she had to walk away from it in the opposite direction, past the Jhoola Devi temple, from where she could cut through the forest, down the western ridge, to the highway. She had decided it might be best if she caught a bus outside town: she would walk down the highway to Uprari, the hamlet seven kilometres away, where buses stopped to pick up