The Folded Earth: A Novel by Anuradha Roy Read Free Book Online

had said in his acerbic way that seeing how I haunted his rooms, I might as well abandon the cottage I rented from him, and move into his house. We had smiled at that, and I had left, knowing that he now wanted to be alone. He was not the kind of person who could share his life with anyone else. He had been single all his life and it was plain he disliked constant company. But the arrival of his nephew had changed everything in one afternoon. He had not fed me my daily diet of odd news from around the world. He had not even thought to ask for his precious Statesman . I could not remember the last time he had forgotten about the paper. It was what he waited all morning for; it was his link with the world he had renounced.
    I fell into a troubled doze in my chair and woke aching and cold more than an hour later, when the power returned and the harsh white lightbulb overhead snapped to life.

seven
    Life changed for Charu that December. It began in one of the old estates of our town. Like the Light House, other estates of the kind in Ranikhet had quaint British-sounding names like Oakley and Knock Fierna, which was all that had survived of the British who built them in colonial times. The one where Charu often went to look for pasture was called Aspen Lodge. It rambled over many acres of hillside and had deodar and oak forests, a stream, and several ruined peasant huts. The big bungalow was made of stone. It had French windows; a deep, pillared veranda going all the way along its front; five chimneys; and a flat expanse of land around it that must once have been a lawn. Fruit trees twisted with age stood at the edges of the flat part, and below them were terraced slopes that in the monsoon were restless with pink swathes of cosmos.
    It was a puzzle to outsiders why of all houses this one should lie buried in tall grass and bushes, almost in ruins, when it cried out for tended lawns, people, parties. The locals knew why it was derelict: a woman called Molly Mispeller had hanged herself from a roof beam in the dining room in colonial times and ever since it had been haunted. Anyone who lived in the house thereafter came to grief: all sorts of bad things happened to them and their families. It had been hurriedly abandoned by the last two families who scoffed at the ghost and had sunk good money into the estate.
    That winter, a rumor had meandered its way around Mall Road, idly at first, then with energy, that there was one more aspiring unbeliever: the house had been bought by a hotel chain that planned to start operations elsewhere in our town. The hotel’s manager was to live in Aspen Lodge. “He will be driven out in a week,” it was declared. Mrs. Mispeller would see to that. She was said to walk about the house at night, sitting occasionally to play a ghostly piano.
    Charu knew nothing of Mall Road rumors, nor did she believe in ghosts, so she often brought her cows to graze at Aspen Lodge. In the rainy months, she had come every day and cut tall grass from those slopes with her sickle, looking like a bush with legs as she carried enormous bundles of it home on her head. On this sun-browned winter morning, she loosed her cows on the grass that had survived the cold and sat on a boulder to fiddle with a flaming-orange sweater she had been knitting for weeks.
    The cows grazed on the slopes; her goats scampered about, brass bells tinkling at their necks. Charu’s dog Bijli scurried up and down the slopes, the russet of his coat merging with the pine needles on the forest floor. The cows lumbered away, shaking their horns at him. He trotted back to Charu, parked himself next to her, and wedging his bottom against her for warmth, nibbled his paws one by one.
    Charu hummed a tune that she interrupted at times with a yell to stop straying cows, then returned to her wool and knitting needles. The December sun and the soft weight of Bijli on her feet made her drowsy with the comfort of being warm after her cold day’s work milking