part of the forest. The snow-peaks that ringed the horizon blazed: I could hardly raise my eyelids to let in their incandescence.
The golden light after the monsoon, the meadows pink with cosmos and wild lilies, and the clarity of the cool, dry air went through everyone like a live current. All around, people were whitewashing and painting and patching up their homes to undo the damage from the rains in time for Diwali. Mattresses were sunned after months of damp, women got down to the business of cutting grass to store for the winter months. In the bazaar, new election posters were plastered over the rain-sodden ones and new bunting went up everywhere. Road-works began, and smoking barrels of tar added their acrid stench to the scent of honeysuckle. Mr Chauhan’s men were everywhere, with cans of paint and tins of Brasso. The Reunion was a month away.
At the factory, we were in the middle of labelling the hundreds of bottles of jam we had made out of the summer fruit. This too had to be done before Diwali, so that the stock would reach Delhi in time for festival sales. The newspapers had forgotten Orissa’s Christians and moved on to something else; DivineLite T.V. had once more applied itself to saving souls. Miss Wilson had calmed down. When she once more stormed into my class to rap her cane on a table and call for silence, I knew life was back to normal. In the staffroom she told me after a particularly bad morning, “How long have you been teaching? Five years. Look at Joyce Mam. She only started three months ago and the students are like mice before her. Have you learnt to control the children at all? Is there any progress? No. Zero!” She liked to say “zero” as a mocking “Zee-row! Zed-ee-ar-oh, Zee-row!” She made a circle of her forefinger and thumb and placed it over her bespectacled eye as if she were looking at me through a monocle.
As the skies cleared, Diwan Sahib began to mend. He started asking for rum. He even wanted his Rolls Royce cigarette case beside him again. “Since I look like a Silver Ghost myself,” he explained. In a not very audible voice, interrupted by hacking coughs, he ticked off doctors and nurses, as well as me, for being too bossy. He asked for the newspaper and made me sit by him reading the oddments I knew would amuse him: that the Western Railways washed its blankets only once a month; that a Ukrainian bank robber had chosen to steal a police car for his getaway; that in Australia a pet camel had tried to mate with the woman who owned him and killed her in the attempt. His room in the hospital had turned by imperceptible degrees into an extension of the Light House. His familiar mess of bottles, books, pills and papers collected around him.
Mr Qureshi came every day, the General now and then. Himmat Singh lived there, and slept in Diwan Sahib’s room. He had made himself a home in a corner with his own mattress and blankets. Each time Diwan Sahib made a sound, Himmat Singh clambered to his feet to see what was needed; for the rest of the day he chatted with the new friends he had made, or dozed in the sun by the window. He had smuggled in a bottle of rum from which he took slugs when no-one was about; once I had caught him in the act of moving Diwan Sahib’s oxygen mask aside to give him a sip. I tried going there every day to prevent such efforts; Ama went to visit him at least twice a week and sometimes we came back together from the hospital in a jeep-taxi. Already the evenings were longer, darkness fell without warning. We would hurry back from the jeep drop-off point on Mall Road to the Light House, fearful of leopards behind every shadowed bush.
On the evening of 11 October, after we came back from the hospital, I had only just shut my door when Ama came out and shouted: “Is Charu over there?”
She was not. She was not in the cow-shed either. We searched all over the estate for her, torches and sticks in hand. “Where’s the girl? Has she fallen somewhere and broken a bone? Has a leopard mauled her?” Ama wailed. “When bad things start happening, they never stop.” She went into her rooms in confused agitation. Puran, who