passengers.
Dusk was falling. Window-squares glowed in the houses above and below her, and tubelights stuttered to life on street corners. Across the airy space of the big valley, one, two, then twenty lights began to twinkle on a distant hill misted over by the fading of daylight. The roads were deserted: the evenings had grown chilly and most people were indoors by this time. Charu drew her shawl around her head and half covered her face to avoid recognition. Only a few danger spots remained: in the marigold yellow house she was passing lived one of the girls who also worked at the jam factory; further down, where a woman was shouting for a dog, Charu knew the daughter. They had sometimes found their cows mingling as they grazed.
Soon she had left the houses behind. She began to hurry, breaking into a run. She ran past the Jhoola Devi temple, then turned superstitiously back. The tea shack next to it was shut, no-one was around. She tore a thin strip off her dupatta and tied it to the railings in a knot. She could see the dimly-illuminated image of the goddess through the little doorway of the temple. She touched her head to the cold steps that led inside and said, “Jhoola Devi, I have no bell I can tie, but please look after me.”
She struck a match and lit a pine branch to act as a torch to guide her descent through the forest beyond the temple. It was a craggy, steep hillside beyond all habitation. Charu had never been there before and felt as if she was stepping into a land so primeval it was as if no human feet had stepped on those stony slopes. Hillock-sized boulders leaned over her. Cacti and stunted pines struggled out through their cracks. She recalled people saying they had seen animals – leopards, of course, but also jackal cubs – basking on the rocks. Somewhere on that slope, she knew, was Diwan Sahib’s old blue car, home to foxes now.
Charu found the narrow trail through the forest and began sliding, slipping downhill, feet unsteady on gravel and pine needles, trees and bushes catching at her shawl and hair. She heard rustling sounds. A pair of foxes stopped and looked at her without fear, then went on their way. Her shawl fell off her head. She heard her own breathing, harsh and loud. She hoped her slippers would hold.
Her burning pine branch smelt of cosy evenings at home and for an instant she considered abandoning her wild enterprise and heading back. She had not ventured very far and would not yet have been missed. But then she spotted bobbing flames further down the path: villagers taking a short cut through the forest after a day’s work in Ranikhet. She raced after them, trying to keep the fire of her pine branch away from hair and clothes. She would walk down the hill at a discreet distance behind them. She pulled her shawl over her face again.
It must have been half an hour later, though it felt much longer, a lifetime, when she spotted tarmac snaking some thirty feet below her. The narrow highway corkscrews around the hillsides on its way down until it flattens out, straightens, and broadens where it eventually finds the plains. Like all roads in the hills, it does not have width enough to be divided into lanes. Charu could see the strong beams of a large vehicle’s headlights cutting through the centre of the road’s blackness. The beams came from the Ranikhet end of the road and pointed in the direction of the plains. She ran down the hill, past the two villagers. Where was the bus going? She had no idea, but the highway looked so dark and so lonely, she did not think she could walk all the way to Uprari after all. She ran helter-skelter, stopping herself at the wheels of the bus, waving it down with her flaming pine branch.
Its brakes screeched. But it was not a bus. It was a truck.
She fell back in disappointment, the pine branch dropping from her hand. The truck driver smiled, revealing a mouthful of brown teeth, and said, “Get in, wherever it is, I will take you.” His helper laughed. “Ah! We get people to places they never thought of !” Their faces were half-visible, bluish-red in the light of the dials on the dashboard of the truck. They looked like plains people. Their radio played a