The Folded Earth

By: Anuradha Roy

(India)

Summary of the story:

The girl came at the same hour, summer or winter. Every morning, I heard her approach. Plastic slippers, the clink of steel on stone and then her footsteps, receding. That morning she was earlier. The whistling thrushes had barely cleared their throats, and the rifle range across the valley had not yet sounded its bugles. And, unlike every other day, I did not hear her leave after she had set down my daily canister of milk.

She did not knock or call out. She was waiting. All went quiet in the blueness before sunlight. Then the soothing early morning mutterings of the neighborhood began: axes struck wood, dogs tried out their voices, a rooster crowed, wood-smoke crept in through my open window. My eyelids dipped again and I burrowed deeper into my blanket. I woke only when I heard the General walking his dog, reproaching it for its habitual disobedience, as if after all these years it still baffled him. “What is the reason, Bozo?” he said, in his loud voice. “Bozo, what is the reason?” He went past every morning at about six thirty, which meant that I was going to be late unless I ran all the way.

I scrabbled around, trying to organize myself—make coffee, ?and the clothes I would wear to work, gather the account books I needed to take with me—and the milk for my coffee billowed and foamed out of the pan and over the stove before I could reach it. The mess would have to wait. I picked up things, gulping my coffee in between. It was only when I was lacing my shoes, crouched one-legged by the front door, that I saw her

Out of the corner of an eye: Charu, waiting for me still, is drawing circles at the foot of the steps with a bare toe.

Charu, a village girl just over seventeen, lived next door. She had every hill person’s high cheekbones and skin, glazed pink with sunburn. She would forget to comb her hair till late in the day, letting it hang down her shoulders in two disheveled braids. Like most hill people, she was not tall, and from the back she could be mistaken for a child, thin and small-boned. She wore hand-me-down salwar kameezes too big for her, and in place of a diamond she had a tiny silver stud in her nose. All the same, she exuded the reserve and beauty of a princess of Nepal—even if it took her only a second to slide back into the awkward teenager I knew. Now, when she saw I was about to come out, she stood up in a hurry, stubbing her toe against a brick. She tried to smile through the pain as she mouthed an inaudible “namaste” to me.

I realized then why she had waited so long for me. I ran back upstairs and picked up a letter that had come yesterday. It was addressed to me, but when I opened it, I had found it was for Charu. I stuffed it into my pocket and stepped out of the front door.

My garden was just an unkempt patch of hillside, but it rippled with wild? Owners on this blue and gold morning. Teacup-sized lilies charged out of rocks and drifting scraps of paper turned into white butteries when they came closer. Everything smelled damp, cool, and fresh from the light rain that had fallen at dawn, the? Rest after many hot days. I felt myself slowing down, the hurry draining away. I was late anyway. What difference did a few more minutes make? I picked a plum and ate it, I admired the butteries, and I chatted of this and that with Charu.

Background of the author:

Late in this quietly mesmerizing novel, set in a Himalayan hill town in the north of India, Anuradha Roy describes the crystalline beauty of the peaks in winter, viewed long after the haze of the summer months and the fog of the monsoon, held in secret for those who choose to brave the cold: “After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.” In the mountains, one of Roy’s characters observes, “love must be tested by adversity.”

It’s the inherent conflict in human attraction — the inescapable fact that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them — that forms the spine of the novel. In marrying a Christian, the narrator, Maya, has become estranged from her wealthy family in Hyderabad. But after six happy years together, her husband has died in a mountaineering accident. Rather than return to her parents, she seeks refuge in Ranikhet, a town that looks toward the mountains that so entranced her husband. Overcome with grief, she stows away his backpack, recovered from the scene of the accident, and refuses to inspect its contents. She can’t bear to know the details surrounding his death.

In Ranikhet, Maya settles into a routine: teaching at a Christian school; spending time with her landlord, Diwan Sahib; and observing the sometimes comic rhythms of the village and its army garrison. Roy manages to capture both the absurd and the sinister in even minor characters, like a corrupt local official who embarks on a beautification plan that includes posting exhortatory signs around town. (One, meant to welcome trekkers, is vandalized to read “Streaking route.”) His crusade, inspired by the Sing­aporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who embraced caning as a punishment, also includes the persecution of a simple-­minded but harmless herder.

Of course, a sedate world exists only to be shaken, and soon enough the town is disturbed from all sides. An election brings issues of religion to the fore, threatening to stir sectarian violence. Curious military maneuvers prompt rumors of Chinese spies and fears of a border conflict with Pakistan. Diwan Sahib’s nephew, Veer, a mountaineering guide, moves into the elderly man’s villa, and Maya finds herself drawn to him, despite the bad habits he encourages in his uncle and, more alarmingly, his tendency to disappear without warning.

While there are scenes of tension and intrigue — a political goon attacks a young girl, Veer’s work in the mountains starts to appear suspicious — the novel’s mood remains elegiac rather than fraught, expressed through small tragedies like the burning of a valuable manuscript or the death of a beloved deer. Roy is particularly adept at mining the emotional intricacies of the relationship between Maya and Diwan Sahib, which also serves to symbolize India’s uneasy passage from tradition to modernity.

The novel’s one weakness is its culminating revelation (and its consequences), which feels strangely insignificant, as if Roy couldn’t bring herself to commit to the more outrageous implications she has set in motion. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” a character note of a day when the Himalayas are shrouded in clouds, “would he believe you? . . . But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” Perhaps Roy prefers to keep the heights of her story, like those mountaintops, shrouded in mystery.

Appreciation of the story:

The Filipino’s like Islam’s and INC this is the common religion in the Philippines and following the rules that if you’re a Muslim girl then you married a boy that is not disbelieving their tradition. Each and every one should follow the rules if they don’t follow they are free to change their religion. In INC or Iglesia Ni Cristo they should follow the rule that each and every one should marry they called “Kaanib.” For instances Pedro is an INC then Mary is a Jewish they are engage .The parents of Pedro disapproved of their engagement. The advantages of having a the same religion to the couple they well understand what are the traditions and cultures of their parents .It shows that the each and every one should engage their own cultures and it is really hard to engage the other it will cause a big effect in their minds.

As a kid I’d experience so many things usually in religion my parents didn’t teach us what are norms, beliefs and most the salvation. The family is our first teacher in terms of believing to the Almighty God. My grandma said you should marry a Catholic the same religion because if you don’t I will not approved your engagement and I will never ever accept you as my grandson. I will see you as nothing.