‘The first thing?’ said Lata, recalling a shred of conversation she’d had with Malati. I sometimes think I don’t know the first thing about you. It’s unusual to hear you talking about yourself. ‘I was just hoping that you’d go on talking. ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ she said. He put his arm around her shoulder and, instead of protesting, she let it remain. Do you know that my mother is so unmusical that when I was a child and she would sing lullabies to me, I would beg her to stop and let my ayah sing them instead?’ And when I think that I only took up singing under Malati’s influence last year I realize how lucky I’ve been. When things get to be too much for me, it’s the first thing I turn to. Sometimes I do it for fifteen minutes before I come back to myself. Simply strumming the tanpura, even if I don’t sing a single note, puts me into a trance. ‘But,’ said Lata, following her own thoughts, ‘music really does do that to me. He had been thinking of a change of spirit brought about by a change of physical activity. ‘Mmm, yes, I think so, in a way,’ Kabir mused. The question was addressed as much to herself as to Kabir. Except, perhaps, well, like now on the river.’ The flat, drab plains bring you back to yourself. All that existed was the clean, pure air, the high snows, this rush of swift movement. When I went tobogganing in Gulmarg once, I remember thinking that I didn’t really exist. All your movements are different-and, as a result, all your thoughts. ‘What I meant was that you’re in a completely different element. ‘What did you mean by “swimming”?’ asked Lata. Near it, and leading down to the sands, was a huge earthen ramp, and above it a great pipal tree, its leaves shimmering in the morning breeze. The mist had cleared, and now before them on the bank of the river stood the grand grey edifice of the Brahmpur Fort, with a broad reach of sand stretching out in front of it. ‘I’m not complaining,’ said the boatman, surprised.
And I’m paying you a rupee and four annas. ‘Well then,’ said Kabir, ‘we should be paying you a rupee-at the most-considering that half your journey is downstream. He said to the boatman: ‘How much do you charge local people to take them all the way up to the Barsaat Mahal from near the dhobi-ghat?’
‘Swimming?’ asked Lata, trailing a hand in the water.Ī thought suddenly struck Kabir. ‘I don’t know about this year,’ said Kabir. ‘Do you like it in the hills? Will you be going this year as usual?’ But of course, we went up to the hills the next year as usual.’ Once, when he came down from the hills, he said that like Zarathustra he had gained enough mathematical insight on the mountainside in six weeks to last a lifetime. He says that the fresh air “opens up his assumptions”, whatever that means. We usually go to a different hill station every year-Almora, Nainital, Ranikhet, Mussourie, Simla, even Darjeeling. Though she had been schooled at St Sophia’s in Mussourie, there was no question now of being able to afford to take a house in the hills whenever they chose. ‘Do you go to a hill station every summer?’ asked Lata.
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