loud, screeching song. She pulled her shawl further over her face and said, “Wait a few minutes. My father and brother want a ride also.” The driver scowled. “We didn’t say we would take three passengers,” he said, revving his engine, and drove off.
The pine branch had gone out when it fell from her hand and she had lost the matches somewhere on the way down. Nothing was visible in the aftermath of the headlights. She closed her eyes to get used to the dark again and in a while discovered that the light of the half-moon and stars was enough for her to see where she was going.
She began walking towards Uprari. “Put one foot before another, and you will get there,” she told herself. “Wild animals eat dogs, not humans.” The smooth, level tarmac was a relief after her scramble through the forest. She hummed under her breath, songs from the radio at the jam factory. She changed shoulders when the bag she was carrying started to feel heavy. Her stomach began to rumble with hunger, but she put away thoughts of food, not knowing how long the rotis and jaggery would have to last. To her left, the narrow road rose into a sheer granite cliff overgrown with dry grasses and bent trees. To the right, it fell away into a valley, on the other side of which were faraway villages whose names she did not know. There was not a glimmer of light on the road. At times, cars and motorbikes charged past her, tearing the road in half with their headlights, noise, and fumes, too fast to notice anyone walking. No buses appeared.
At eight, she reached Pilkholi and sat down at the tea stall exhausted, no longer bothered that someone she knew would see her. “How much is a tea?” she asked, and was told, “Three rupees for you, four for anyone else.” She asked for a glass of water, ate a lump of her jaggery with it, and then began to walk again.
Half an hour further on towards Uprari, large headlight beams once again swept towards her. Once again she stopped and wildly waved her arms, hoping that the glare of the headlights this time hid a bus and not a truck.
It was a bus, and the conductor leaped out in fury. “What do you think you are doing? Standing in the middle of the road like a cow! Who do you think will go to jail if you get killed?”
“Where is it going?” she asked, in a voice trembling with tears.
“Wherever it is going, it’s not taking you. Mad girl! And there’s no space.”
“I can sit on the floor,” she said. “I can stand.” Her shoulders drooped from the weight of her small bag.
“Not in my bus,” the conductor said. He put a foot on the lowest step of the bus and held the handrail to haul himself in. He slammed the body of the bus twice with the flat of his palm to tell the driver to drive on. Then as the bus revved its engines, he banged the wall of the bus again.
“What the hell are you doing? Do we go or stop?” screamed the driver.
The conductor’s tone was bad-tempered and grudging, but he said, “Get in. And be quick. And pay for the ticket – no free rides on this bus.”
Charu got in. The bus was going to Nainital, two hours away. They gave her a seat right at the back, and the man next to her, at the window, retched out of it all through the journey as the bus swung round the twisting and reeling and swinging and swirling hill roads.
15
That first week in October, I thought I could hear the earth creaking on its tilted axis, moving a little further in the opposite direction each day, towards the cold months. Very slowly, but it did move, and the wet, grey, solid sky which had come down to live around houses and treetops through the months of rain thinned to uncover an airy concentration of blueness. Standing outside the house in the mornings, I luxuriated in the sunlight and heard nothing but the chirring of cicadas. At my feet, the meadow ended and slid away into limitless forests. Far below, the forest’s green was lit by bright points of autumnal red. Dinosaurs must have come up that slope once, crushing trees in their path, to sun themselves on the gigantic moss-greened granite boulders that were strewn over this