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

cows, filling water, and washing clothes. Usually her uncle Puran shared the chore of grazing the cows, but the last few days he had been subdued and withdrawn, disappearing into the forest, smoking grass, hardly eating. Charu was used to Puran’s eccentricities and made excuses for him to her grandmother, but it tired her out doing his share of work too. Her eyelids dipped and the sweater-in-progress subsided on her lap.
    For once, however, the Mall Road rumor turned out to be true. Sometime in the night, when nobody had been looking, the hotel manager had moved into Aspen Lodge. And now a tentative voice above Charu told her she needed to take her cows away.
    “And never bring them back,” the voice went on, sounding a little more determined. Flowers were to be planted now, Sa’ab had ordered. The garden was to be protected from all cattle.
    She looked over her shoulder and stood up. She squinted at the boy speaking to her. The sun was in her eyes; she had to shade them with her palm. She saw that he was tall and had curly hair. His eyes had the color and shine of the horse chestnuts that fell from trees in the autumn. When she frowned, he smiled at her in apology. It was a lopsided smile. His clothes were what anyone wore, but his face looked to her as if it had come off the pages of those magazines that were hung with clothespins at the newsstand.
    She felt herself smiling back and stopped, with some difficulty. He pleaded, “It’s not me, I have to tell you what Sa’ab says. I am only the cook.”
    His voice, though young, was richly rounded and deep. She felt she could roll his words on her tongue like smooth river pebbles and taste them. Just like those pebbles, the voice had faint rough edges that her tongue paused against to feel their grain.
    She said, “You are not going to cook your Sa’ab the grass, are you? Or has he brought cows with him from the city?”
    Like most hill girls, Charu could be tart when crossed and did not take kindly to being told what to do. The boy stammered, “This morning I found a very nice patch down the hill with grass. It has a stream; the cows will have water as well as food. I’ll show it to you, and you can take them there.”
    She shrugged in scorn. “You don’t have to show me any grass patches on these hillsides,” she said. “I know them all. The way down to the stream is too steep for cows. But I have many other places. I don’t have to bring them here.”
    For two days she stayed away. But on the third or fourth day, something made her leave her house again after she had tethered her cows in their stall. When her grandmother asked her where she was off to, she said she had to take the goats grazing. She skipped light-footed through the forest to the area below Aspen Lodge and made her way down the steep path to the old Dhobi Ghat. At places where the pine needles on the ground were thick and shiny she let herself slide downward. Her braids thumped her shoulder blades as she jumped from rock to rock, past the two tiny white Muslim shrines draped with tinseled cloth, and the cave where a leopard was believed to have its lair. Then she was down beside the stream. Its chilled, clear water ran over mossy boulders. At the stream’s edge there were low stone alcoves that washermen had used half a century ago. She sat on one of those and watched her goats feeding. She was sure he would come.
    He did not, not that day, nor the next, but on the third day he was waiting there, and on the fourth, and every day after that. Charu’s grandmother asked her why she did not graze the goats closer to home, but she tossed her head and said she was tired of the old places and liked washing clothes in the stream. “I get two jobs done at the same time,” she said. “I should always have been going there.” Every time she went, she made sure to take a bundle of dirty clothes and return with the washed ones that she hung out ostentatiously in their courtyard.
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