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the house was full of people in those days, and parties. I can’t imagine Diwan Sahib throwing parties. He is such a solitary person.”
    “Oh, the old man was very different then. He was very handsome, straight and tall and strong looking. He had a romantic, heroic aura. People said that once he put his own life at risk to save one of those tribal lion trackers. That long scar he has all the way down his left cheek? That’s from the mauling he got.”
    “He told me it was barbed wire,” I said.
    “Ah, he did, did he?” Veer said. “That’s strange, he used to boast about it when he was younger. Maybe . . . anyway, he had a famously glad eye—you should have seen his entourage and the adoring women—army wives and daughters, and all those summer visitors who arrived from upper-class Lucknow and Delhi. Virtually every year there would be a new—invariably very beautiful—woman who would be introduced as a friend of the family, but everyone knew she was the flavor of that year. I only came for vacations. So did he, because he lived in Surajgarh at that time, and came here for the summer. He traveled in one of those first-class carriages, the old ones, all teakwood and gilt mirrors—and his dogs traveled with him.”
    I knew about the dogs because on one of the walls above the fireplace in Diwan Sahib’s drawing room was a black and white photograph of four fringe-tailed golden retrievers on an open field. Each dog was backlit, its coat glowing in white outline from the sunset. That line of light transformed them into ethereal beings with floppy ears and panting tongues. One of the dogs had a happy smile as it looked up at Diwan Sahib. His hand had intruded into a corner of the picture. A fine riding boot was visible too.
    “Parties, booze, love affairs, music on the lawn and singers he invited from Benares, meat slow-cooked on wood fires, machines for hand-churned ice cream that always tasted slightly of salt,” Veer was saying. “He had no time for grubby parentless boys parceled out between relatives for boarding-school vacations. I was left to fend for myself. The only thing that made him take an interest in me was if I asked questions about wildlife. So I thought of something new every day. Why does the woodpecker peck a tree trunk? How does the magpie fly with such a long tail? Where did all the tigers of these hills go? And then he’d give me five minutes—undivided attention—whatever he was doing. Sometimes he would do those imitations of his: birdsong, tiger calls, barking deer. After that I would be alone again until I caught the train back. All I did was eat, ready to be the school’s fatso again when the school break was over.”
    The bitterness in his voice startled me. His face suddenly appeared thinner to me, worn out with remembered pain. He turned away as if he did not want me to see it. I knitted my fingers one into the other and held them behind my back so that I would not give in to my impulse to reach out for his hand. When Veer turned to me again it was with a smile, and a question about something inconsequential. We discussed his difficulties in setting up an e-mail connection and the hide-and-seek his mobile phone’s signal played. We did not mention Diwan Sahib again that day.
    Veer had by now shifted base to Ranikhet. He was a climber, a professional whose work it was to take other people on climbs and treks. He was starting a new trekking company here and was busy setting up: laying in equipment, computers, looking out for an assistant to hire. When I saw the sophisticated, expensive things he came back with from trips to Delhi, I was wracked with compassion for Michael’s ill-equipped attempts, armed with little more than his passion for the mountains. Those thick-soled shoes, that plastic tent, his windproof jacket with its twice-repaired zip—they had seemed so invincible then, so flimsy, cheap, and makeshift now. It would have been a natural point of conversation for