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

mantelpieces, but also deep verandas and tin roofs. To the extent that it was possible in distant India, they re-created their remembered Scotland. Ever since, Ranikhet has been made up of memories and stories: of trees laden with peaches the size of tennis balls, of strawberry patches and watercress sandwiches, of the legendary eccentrics who lived here. There was the scholar-dancer who lived alone tended by a village man whom she had taught to recite Hamlet’s soliloquies. In her eighties she employed an impecunious artist to illustrate a book on dance and posed for him day after day in full Bharatnatyam costume, frail and bony, and relentlessly scathing about his ineptitude. He crept out one night, braving the darkness and his fear of wild animals, and escaped her and the town, leaving his sketches behind on his bed as a tidy heap of shredded paper. Then there was Angelina, the Goan visitor who fell in love with our retired General, who was old enough to be her father. He was smitten by her cropped, floppy hair, her careless beauty, and her brisk disregard for propriety. They married, and she wandered the town in flamboyant dresses, flowers tucked behind her ear, intercepting tourists and telling them the Forest Lodge had ghouls that drank blood on particular nights.
    Our town has a private history that is revealed only to those who live here, by others who have lived here longer. Ama had a daily story for me both about the dead and the living, talking in the same breath of Janaki on the next hill who made bhang and charas out of the marijuana plants that grew wild all over the hillsides, and of unmarried Missis Lily, who had fallen pregnant forty years ago by the judge of the local court. When I went to the Christian cemetery, where I had buried Michael’s ashes, I recognized the names on the other tombstones from stories I had been told over the years. In the older part of the graveyard was Charlie Darling beneath a gravestone with winged angels. He had been dead since 1912, of syphilis, I had been told, after too many visits to Lal Kurti, where pretty Kumaoni women earned extra money from soldiers stationed in Ranikhet’s army barracks. The fiery Angelina was a few feet away, beneath a marble slab with carved roses. She never came out of anesthesia after some minor surgery at the hospital. The General, now in his nineties, had been mourning her for decades. He came to her grave every week with Bozo, and if we met there, he gave me a ride home in his old Ambassador. Bozo would sit very straight in the front, staring solemnly ahead, while I had to make do with a corner in the back that I managed to free of clutter and dog things. From behind, the big German shepherd was a head taller than the General, who—in his prime no taller than the army’s mandatory five foot five inches—was shrinking every passing year. He held himself as high as his five remaining feet would allow and as he drove he alternated between humming songs from old Hollywood musicals and holding forth on the anarchy in the country. “It’s going to the dogs,” he would say, and immediately apologize to Bozo: “Not you, dear boy, not you. You would rule with an iron paw . . . ,” and in the same breath to me, “June Allyson, my girl, did you ever see June Allyson? No, of course not . . . too young—”
    These were the people I was telling Veer about one afternoon when he had fallen in step with me, as he often did these days when I was on my way back from the graveyard or when I took the shortcut through the woods and across the stream to the bazaar and St. Hilda’s. Once he held out a hand to me on the steep bit in the forest path to the bazaar where tumbling boulders made footholds precarious. I had been so taken aback that I had taken his hand, forgetting that I clambered down those stones all by myself every day.
    “But what about you?” I said. “You came here in your childhood, you probably know all this old gossip. Himmat says