The Folded Earth [Excerpt]
by Anuradha Roy (India)
My rival in love was not a woman but a mountain range. It
was very soon after my wedding that I discovered this. We had defied our
families to be together, and those first few months we were exultant castaways
who had fitted the universe into two rented rooms and a narrow bed. Daytime was
only waiting for evening, when we would be together. Nights were not for
sleeping. It took many good-byes before we could bear to walk off in different
directions in the mornings. Not for long.
It began in little ways—silences, the poring over maps,
the unearthing of boots and jackets stuffed in a suitcase under our bed—and
then the slow-burning restlessness in Michael became overpowering. He was with
me, but not with me. His feet walked on flat land but flexed themselves for
inclines. He lay at night with his eyes open, dreaming. He studied weather
reports for places I had never heard of.
Michael was not a climber; he was a press photographer.
Through a school friend whose father was an editor, he had found a job with a
newspaper when we got married. We could not afford more than an annual trek for
him in the mountains and that one trek was what he lived for all year.
Michael’s yearnings made me understand how it is that
some people have the mountains in them while some have the sea. The ocean
exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are—in a bright-lit,
inland city or the dead center of a desert— and when they feel the tug there is
no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving
edge, straightaway calmed. Hill people, even if they are born in flatlands,
cannot be parted for long from the mountains. Anywhere else is exile. Anywhere
else, the ground is too fl at, the air too dense, the trees too broad-leaved
for beauty. The color of the light is all wrong, the sounds nothing but noise.
I knew from our student days together that Michael
trekked and climbed. What I had not known was that his need for the mountains
was as powerful as his need for me. We were far away from the high peaks: we
lived in Hyderabad. The journey to the foothills of the Himalaya took two
nights on trains and cars and it took many more days to reach the peaks. No
hills closer at hand would do. Not the Nilgiris, nor the entire Western Ghats.
It had to be the Himalaya—it would be impossible for e to understand why until
I experienced it, Michael told me, and one day I would. Meanwhile, each year,
the rucksack and sleeping bag came out and his body left in a trail of his
mind, which was already nine thousand feet above sea level and climbing.
One year, Michael decided to go on a trek to Roopkund, a
lake in the Himalaya at about sixteen thousand feet. It is reached by a long,
hard climb toward the Trishul, a snow peak that is more than twenty-two
thousand feet high. For much of the year, its water remains frozen. A park
ranger stumbled upon the lake in 1942 and it has been an enigma ever since: it
contains the bones and skulls, preserved by the cold, of some six hundred
people who died there in the ninth century, some say the sixth. Many of the
skeletons wore gold anklets, bracelets, necklaces, and bangles. Six hundred
travelers at that altitude, in that stark wilderness—where were they going?
Impossible to tell: there was no known route from Roopkund to Tibet, or to
anywhere else. How did they die? Archeologists think they may have been caught
in an avalanche or hit by large hailstones: there are tennis-ball-sized dents
on many of the skulls.
The bones were stripped of their jewelry and most of them
were left where they were. And there they have remained, although
momento-seekers have carried off bits and pieces as trophies. Even now, each
time the lake melts during the monsoon, bones and skulls float in the water and
wash up at its edges. Michael had tried to reach Roopkund once before and
failed because of bad weather and lack of experience. This time, he had better
equipment, he said; he was timing it differently, he knew what to expect. Even
so, I felt a cloud of dread grow and darken as the day for his departure
neared. I found myself looking at him with an intensity I had forgotten over
six years of being married to him. The smell of him, which I breathed in deep
as if to store inside me; the bump on his nose where it had been broken when he
was a boy; the early lines of gray in his hair; the way he cleared his throat
mid-sentence and pulled at his earlobes when thinking hard.
He knew I was worrying, and the night before he left, as
I lay on my stomach and his fingers wandered my tense back and aching neck, he
told me in a voice hardly more than a murmur about the route: the trek was not
really difficult, he said, it only sounded as if it was. His fingers went down
my spine and up my neck while an iron ball of fear grew heavier inside me. Many
had done it before, he said. The rains and snow would have retreated from that
altitude by the time they reached it; there would be wildflowers all over the
high meadows on their route. His hands worked their way from my legs to my
shoulders, finding knotted muscles, teasing them loose before he returned to my
back. The boots, sleeping bag, tent, would be checked, every zip tried, every
rope tested. The bulbs and batteries in his headlamp were new, he would get
himself better sunglasses in Delhi. It was as if he was running through a list
in his head.
Each item he mentioned reminded me of things that could
go wrong. I did not want to know any more. I touched his always fast-growing
stubble and I think I said, “By the time you’re home you’ll have a beard again,
like every other time.” My fingers held the inch or two of fat he had recently
grown at his waist. “And you’ll have lost this. You’ll be thin and starved.”
“Completely starved,” he said. “Lean and hungry.” His
teeth tugged at my earlobes. He stretched over me to switch on the shaded lamp
by our bed and traced with his eyes every curve of my face and the dimple on my
chin. “Why did he marry this girl?” he said in a voice that imitated the
stereotypical older relative. “Why did he marry this stick-thin girl, as dark
as boot polish? All you can see in her face are her big eyes.” He ran his
fingers through the tangled mass of my hair. “Almost at your waist, Maya. Where
will it have grown to by the time I’m back?” I could smell onions frying
although it was almost midnight. On our neighbor’s radio, a prosaic voice
reported floods, scams, train accidents, cricket scores. Michael’s hand
wandered downward until it reached my hips. He said, “Your hair will be here—or
maybe longer? This far?
I switched the light off .
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The
news came to me by way of my landlord, who had a telephone. They had found
Michael’s body after three days of searching. It was close to the lake, I was
told, he had almost made it there when the landslides, rain, and snowstorms
came and separated Michael from the others with him. His body had a broken
ankle, which was no doubt why he had not been able to move to a less exposed
place. And the face was unrecognizable, burned black by the cold.
very helpful. Thank you so much
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