The House of Dhauladhar

Chapter 1: Two Springs and a Leaning Walnut

*The question came from Wednesbury, in the English Midlands, from Ranjit Katwal, aged fifty-eight:*

*"My father died in March. All his life he said we came from 'the village with two springs, one cold and one not, and a walnut tree that leans toward the palace.' He never said the name. He said the name would come back to him. It did not. Can you tell us which village it was, and whether anyone there still knows us?"*

---

Dear Ranjit,

Bareri. The village is Bareri, and yes, someone there still knows you. I will come to that. First I owe you an introduction, because you have written to the house and you deserve to know who in the house is answering.

My name is Sunanda. I am the younger daughter of Raja Uday Chand of Talehra, the sister of the late Raja Jaswant Chand, and the aunt, great-aunt and general nuisance of everyone who has been born into this family since 1963. I am eighty-six. I was never meant to inherit anything except my mother's handwriting, which is small and leans to the right, and her habit of answering letters on the day they arrive. I have kept both.

You should picture where I am sitting. It is a room on the ground floor of the Kanehri Mahal, the old palace at Talehra, with walls thick enough that a wasp nest inside one of them hummed for three summers before anyone found it. In my grandfather's day this was the treasury. The iron door is still on its hinges, painted green, and we keep it open with a millstone. Through the window I can see the town falling away down the ridge in slate roofs, gray and silver and green with moss, each one stepped below the last like a flight of stairs built for someone very large. Below the roofs are the terraces, cut so neatly into the hill that from the palace they look like the edges of a closed book. And above everything, all day long, sits the Dhauladhar.

You will have heard your father speak of it, even if he did not give the village a name. The range is white on its southern face for eight months of the year, and from Talehra it fills the whole top of the sky, so close in winter light that children here believe they could walk there before lunch. They cannot. My brother tried at the age of nine and was brought back by a shepherd at dusk, with frost in his eyebrows and an expression of great dignity.

Our first Raja, whose dates nobody troubled to write down, is said to have named the family for the mountain rather than for himself. A hill house, he said, should take its name from the thing that will outlast it. So we have been, since before anyone kept count, the House of Dhauladhar, and the families of the state have been, in the old phrase, the people of the state. That phrase is the reason this room exists. My mother set up the family's office here in 1952, after the state was gone, because she said that a house which had once had people could not simply stop answering them. Today it is run by a young woman named Kusum, who is from Bareri herself, and who reads me the letters that arrive on her screen in a voice so clear that I have stopped pretending my eyes are good enough to read them myself.

Now. Bareri.

It is two hours' walk below the palace and forty minutes by the new road, if the road is open, which in the rains it is not. It sits on a shelf of land between two ravines, facing east, so it gets the morning sun before any other village in the old state. That is why my grandfather, Raja Hamir Chand, chose it in 1912 for the first apple trees in Talehra. He had bought forty saplings from a nursery at a hill station three days' ride away, from a Scotsman who sold them with a warning that they would die. Thirty-one of them died. Nine lived, all of them in Bareri, and every orchard in Talehra today is descended from the grafts of those nine. When you see the hillsides here in May, white with blossom from the river to the deodar line, you are looking at Bareri's nine trees, multiplied for a hundred and fourteen years.

The two springs your father remembered are real. The cold one comes out of the rock on the north side of the village under a carved stone spout shaped like a fish. In January the water is so cold that it hurts your teeth, and in July it is still so cold that it hurts your teeth. The other one, on the south side, is not warm exactly, but it never freezes, and the women of Bareri used it in winter to wash wool. Your father's family lived between the two. The old people called that lane Bichla, the middle one.

And the walnut tree leans. It has leaned since the earthquake of 1905, when the hillside under it slipped about the length of a man and then stopped, as if it had changed its mind. It points, if you stand under it and follow its trunk with your eye, straight at the palace. Everyone in Bareri says it is bowing. My grandfather, who did not like being bowed to, said it was only tired.

* * *

Here is the part you asked for.

In 1931, the year my father became Raja, my mother began a register. She was sixteen and newly married, from a family across the Ravi, and she found that nobody in the palace could tell her the names of the families in the villages, only the names of the headmen. So she went village by village with a clerk and a mule and wrote down every household: who lived there, how many children, which fields, which festival they kept. It took her four years. The register is bound in red cloth that has gone the color of dried chillies, and it lives on the shelf beside me.

Bareri, page forty-one. Household of Chet Ram Katwal, on the Bichla lane, two terraces of maize, one of rice, a share in the walnut. Sons: Bhagwan Dass, aged three.

Bhagwan Dass is your grandfather. He left Bareri in 1963 for Wednesbury, where, I believe, a cousin had already found work in a foundry. I remember him, faintly. I remember a young man in a borrowed coat at the bus stand below the palace gate, because my brother went down to shake hands with every man who left that year, and I went with him to carry the list. Your grandfather had a tin trunk with BARERI painted on the lid in white, as if he thought someone in England might need to know.

So. Who still knows you?

Kusum's grandmother does. Her name is Sheela, she is ninety-one, and she lives forty steps from the cold spring. When Kusum read her your letter on Sunday, Sheela said, "Katwal? The ones who kept the black goat that ate the schoolmaster's umbrella?" and then laughed until she had to sit down. She remembers your great-grandmother, who had a goitre and a beautiful singing voice. She remembers that the family's terraces were taken over by a nephew, and that the nephew's son still farms them, and still calls the top terrace by your family's name, Katwalan da khet, the Katwals' field, without knowing why.

Kusum has put Bareri on the family's map for you. I should explain the map, since you will see it when she sends you the link. It is the whole of the old state drawn as it actually is, ravines and all, and the families who left have been marking the village their people came from, one small pin at a time. When we started, three years ago, there were nine pins in the whole state, all of them in the town. Bareri now has eleven, from Wednesbury, Wolverhampton, Brampton in Canada and a place in California called Milpitas that I cannot pronounce correctly no matter how many times my grandniece Ishani, who lives near it, says it slowly. Your family's pin is the twelfth. It sits on the Bichla lane, between the two springs, exactly where your grandfather's house stood. I asked Kusum to move it twice until it was in the right place. She was patient with me.

She has also sent you two photographs. The first was taken by my brother in 1958, with a camera he had bought in Delhi and did not yet know how to use. It shows the walnut tree, leaning, with four children sitting along its lowest branch like birds on a wire. One of them may be your grandfather. I have no way to be sure, and I will not pretend. The second was taken by Kusum last Sunday, from the same spot, as near as she could find it. The tree is still leaning. The branch is gone. In its place sit two of Sheela's great-grandchildren, who were bribed with sweets to climb up, and who look exactly as unconvinced as the children in 1958. Both photographs have their dates written under them, and the name of the person who held the camera. My mother insisted on that. She said a photograph without a date is only a rumor.

* * *

You did not ask me anything more, but I will ask you something, because this is how the letters work in this house: a question goes out, and a question comes back.

Your father spent sixty years remembering Bareri without its name. That means he remembered other things instead, the springs, the walnut, the lean. What else did he remember? Did he speak of the smell of the apple boxes, which were made of pine and stacked so high at the road in October that the bus could not get past? Did he speak of the swing that the young men hung from the walnut in Sawan, when the rains came in? Did he call the cold spring by its name, Machhli Wala, the fish one? If you or your mother or your sisters can tell me even one thing, I will write it into the register on page forty-one, under his father's name, in my mother's ink, which I still buy from the same shop in Pathankot. If you would rather say it aloud than write it, Kusum can set up a call and record it, but only if your family agrees, and only for the people you name. That is the rule here. It was my mother's rule before it was ours.

Then the page will say what it should have said all along. That the Katwals of the Bichla lane went to Wednesbury, and did not forget, even when the name went missing.

With affection from the house your father could not name, and which never forgot his,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 2: The Little Line to Saroli

*From Brampton, Ontario, from Preeti Awasthi, who signed herself "a schoolteacher who asks too many questions":*

*"My grandmother is ninety and says her father drove the Raja's train. My children laugh, because who has heard of a Raja with a train? She gets angry and stops talking. Was there a train? Did her father drive it? I would like to stop the laughing in my house."*

---

Dear Preeti,

There was a train. Your grandmother is right, your children are wrong, and you may read them this paragraph aloud at dinner in whatever tone of voice you think best.

It was not exactly the Raja's train. It was a narrow-gauge branch of the hill line, two feet six inches between the rails, and it climbed eleven miles from the plains junction to a station called Saroli, which was as close to Talehra as an engineer could be persuaded to bring it. But it would not have come at all without my grandfather, and for twenty years nobody in the state called it anything except Raja-ji ki gaadi, the Raja's cart. So your grandmother is right on the important points.

Let me tell you how it came, because it is really the story of my grandfather, and I have been meaning to write him down properly for someone who is not a historian.

* * *

Raja Hamir Chand was born in 1878 and became Raja in 1902, when he was twenty-four and had a moustache he was very proud of and a state with no road wider than a mule. He was not a clever man in the way the British officers liked. He did not write poetry or collect butterflies. What he could do was walk. He walked every path in Talehra at least once in his first five years, with two servants, a pony he rarely rode, and a notebook in which he wrote down how long each thing took. How long from Bareri to the town with a load of maize. How long from Lohani to the plains with a goat to sell. How many days a sack of salt took to come up, and how much it cost at each end.

The notebook survives. It is in the collection now, cataloged, with a note in Kusum's typing that says who has held it and when it was last read. The pages are mostly numbers. But in the margins, here and there, he wrote other things. "Old woman at Dharoti says her son died of fever on the road with the apricots. Four days down. Fruit rotted." And under it, in heavier pencil, "This is the problem."

He spent the next twenty years on that problem. The apples were part of the answer, because apples keep longer than apricots. The roads were part of it, though roads in these hills slide away every monsoon like wet sugar. But the real answer was the railway, which was being built in pieces through the lower hills in the 1920s, and which had no reason at all to come anywhere near us.

He gave it a reason. He offered land. He offered timber from the state forests, which saved the engineers a great deal of money and cost us, my father said later, some of our best deodar. And he offered men. Your great-grandfather, Preeti, was one of those men.

* * *

His name was Dina Nath Awasthi, and he came from Saroli, which before the railway was a village of eighteen houses on a saddle of land between two spurs, with a pond that dried out every May and a banyan that someone had planted far higher up the hills than any banyan has a right to be. The line was finished in 1929. My grandfather rode up on the first train, standing on the footplate in a sola topi, waving at everyone, and he took Dina Nath with him because Dina Nath, then nineteen, had been working with the engineers for three years and knew the name of every bolt.

I have the photograph. It was taken by the engineers' photographer on the platform at Saroli on the eleventh of November 1929, and it is dated in white ink across the bottom. My grandfather is in the middle, looking pleased. To his left is a British engineer in a terrible hat. And to his right, a little behind, half hidden by the steam, is a very young man with a rag over one shoulder and his hand on the rail of the engine as if it might wander off. Kusum has sent you a copy, and I am fairly certain that is your great-grandfather, because the register lists him as the fireman on the first train, and that is where the fireman stood.

He did not drive the train that day. He fed it. But he drove it later, for twenty-six years, from 1934 until he retired in 1960, and I know that because I rode behind him.

* * *

You must understand what that train was to a child. I was born in 1940, so the line was already old when I knew it, but it never stopped being astonishing. The station at Saroli had a tin roof painted red, a platform of stone flags, a bench that had been carved by someone in Ghatasni with apple blossoms down the armrests, and a bell. When the train was coming up the valley, the bell was rung by a boy who was paid four annas a month for nothing else, and you could hear it in the town, two miles above, if the wind was right.

The train itself was three carriages and a goods van, behind a small green engine with brass on its chimney and a whistle that sounded like a goose being disappointed. It went so slowly up the last gradient that the boys of Saroli used to jump off, pick wild raspberries along the cutting, and jump back on, and the guard pretended not to see because he had done it himself. In October the goods van was packed to the roof with apple boxes, and the smell of the whole line, for the whole month, was pine and apples and coal smoke, and if I could put one smell into an envelope for you it would be that one.

Your great-grandfather was the driver I remember best, because he was the one who let me ride on the footplate when my mother was not looking. I was seven. He wore a white cap that was never white and he hummed constantly, very low, the same song over and over, which I later learned was a Saroli wedding song about a bride who is sorry to leave the pond. He let me pull the whistle cord once, at the big bend above the river, and I was so frightened by the noise that I sat down on the coal. He laughed and told me that the Raja's granddaughter was now officially black, and that my mother would have something to say about it. She did.

* * *

My grandfather did not see much of his railway. He died in 1931, at fifty-three, of a heart that had walked too far. My father was twenty. There is a story in the family, told by my grandmother Rani Prem Kumari, that on the last evening he asked to be carried to the window of the Kanehri Mahal facing the valley, so he could hear the evening train ring its bell at Saroli. Whether it rang that night, nobody remembers.

What I can tell you is that the line changed everything in the state in one generation. Apples went down in a day instead of rotting in four. Salt came up for half the price. The first boys from Talehra went to college in Lahore on that train, and some of them, thirty years later, went much farther on it, as far as Delhi and Bombay and the ships. When the men of the state started leaving for England in the late 1950s and the 1960s, they left from Saroli. Every one of them sat on that carved bench. If I closed my eyes I could name half of them for you in order.

The line was closed in 1975. The road had come by then, and the buses were faster, and the engine was very old. The rails were pulled up, the carriages were sold, and the little green engine went to a museum in the plains, where I visited it once, in 1994, and stood beside it for longer than the guard thought was reasonable. The station is still there. The red roof is now green with moss. The bench is in our collection, because the station master's son sold it to my brother for one rupee on the condition that it be kept somewhere dry.

* * *

Now the part for your children.

Kusum has been building, for some years, the family tree of the state's railway families. That sounds grander than it is. It began because a man in Leicester wanted to know if his grandfather and a man in Toronto's grandfather had been on the same engine crew, and it turned out they had. Then other families heard, and now there are forty-one names on it, firemen and drivers and gangmen and the boy who rang the bell, each with the years they worked and the village they came from. Dina Nath Awasthi of Saroli is near the top, with a line down to his daughter, your grandmother, Kanta, and a line down from her to you, and an empty line under you waiting for your children if they would like to stop laughing long enough to be added.

There is one more thing in our collection that I would like your grandmother to see. It is a brass whistle cord handle, worn smooth, with a little dent in it, which my brother bought with the bench. Kusum has written its history under its picture: who made it, which engine it hung on, the years it was used, and the name of every driver we know held it. Your great-grandfather's name is there, and the years 1934 to 1960.

I would like your grandmother to tell me about the song. The Saroli wedding song, about the bride and the pond. I have half the tune and none of the words. If she will sing it, and if she agrees, Kusum can record it on a call, and we will keep it for the Awasthi family and for anyone she says may hear it, and nobody else. Tell her the girl who sat on the coal is asking. Tell her she has been asking for seventy-nine years.

And tell your children that their great-great-grandfather once carried a Raja up a mountain on a fire he fed with his own hands. That is not a thing to laugh at. Though, if they like, they may laugh about the coal.

Yours, with soot on the memory,

Sunanda Bai-ji Talehra

Chapter 3: The Painter's Thumbprint

*From Sunnyvale, California, from Mohini Rathour, a software architect, with a photograph attached:*

*"We have a small painting that came with my great-grandmother when she married out of the state. It shows a wedding procession crossing a bridge, with a white horse and a man holding an umbrella over the groom. On the back is a thumbprint in red. My mother thinks it was painted at the palace. An appraiser says it is 'Pahari school, unattributed.' I hate the word unattributed. Can you attribute it?"*

---

Dear Mohini,

I hate it too. It is the word for a person whose name someone did not bother to ask.

I can attribute your painting, and I can do better than that. I can tell you whose thumb that is, what the umbrella means, and why the bridge in the picture has only one rail. But to do it properly I have to tell you about my mother, because none of the painters of Ghatasni would have been remembered without her, and she would be annoyed if I told their story and left out the part where she climbed a wall.

* * *

My mother was Rani Ambika, and she came to Talehra in 1931 as a bride of sixteen, from a family across the Ravi where the women, she always said, were allowed to be rude to the priests and frequently were. She arrived in a palki, a covered chair carried on poles, up the last four miles from Saroli station, in November rain, with eleven trunks and an English grammar, and she was so sick from the swaying that she was put to bed for two days before anyone looked at her properly. My grandmother, Rani Prem Kumari, who was a widow by then and had decided opinions about everything, came to see her on the third morning, looked at the English grammar, looked at the bride, and said, "Well. At least you can read."

They became, eventually, very close. But it took a wall.

The Kanehri Mahal is built around three courtyards, stepping down the ridge. The highest belongs to the family. The middle one had the kitchens and the stores. And the lowest, by the gate, had a long low room with paper windows where, for a hundred and fifty years, the painters of the house had worked. My mother was told on her first day that the painting room was not a place for her. Painters were men, and the work was old, and the Rani's place was the upper court.

So on her ninth day she climbed down the wall of the middle court, at dawn, in a borrowed shawl, and stood at the back of the painting room until the old master noticed her.

His name was Lekh Raj, and he was seventy, and he had painted my grandfather's wedding, my grandfather's coronation, and a portrait of a British resident that the British resident had hated, which Lekh Raj considered his best work. He was mixing a red from a lump of something on a stone, and he did not stop. He said, without looking up, "If the Rani wishes to watch, she may sit. If she wishes to talk, she may leave." She sat. She sat for an hour every morning for six years.

* * *

The painters were from Ghatasni, a village two ridges east, where every second house had a painter in it and every house had a garden of plants that were grown for color. The village sits at the head of a side valley where three streams come together, and in my childhood the courtyards of Ghatasni were full of things drying on mats: indigo, kesu flowers, a yellow from a root I have forgotten, crushed lac for the reds. You could smell the village before you saw it, sharp and green and a little like wet iron. The houses there have overhanging upper floors of carved deodar, so the lanes are dark and narrow and cool, and the children of the painters would draw on the stones of the lane with chalk, and their fathers would come out and correct the drawings.

They painted in the old hill style. If you have seen Pahari painting in a museum you will know what I mean, even if you do not know the word: small pictures, the size of a book, so finely made that a single hair of a squirrel's tail was the brush for the eyelashes. Figures in profile, with long eyes. Hills in the background like ripples of green cloth, with a little river running through them and trees laid out in rows like an orchard on a festival morning. Love stories, mostly. Seasons. A woman waiting at a window for someone who is late, with a storm coming up behind the hills and the lightning drawn as a thin gold thread.

What my mother learned in the painting room was not how to paint. She tried and was terrible and gave it up in a week. What she learned was that every painter in the workshop had a sign. Not a signature, because hill painters did not usually sign. A small habit of the hand, so private that only another painter would see it. Lekh Raj always gave the horses one white hoof. His son, Bholu, drew water with three strokes and never four. And the youngest of them, Lekh Raj's granddaughter's husband, a quiet man named Gopi, painted bridges with only one rail, because, he told my mother, in his village the bridge had only one rail, and he was not going to lie about it to please a patron.

My mother wrote all of this down. Every painter, every sign, every picture she could find in the palace with the name of the hand that made it. It is a long ledger in English, with drawings in the margins of the hoofs and the waters and the rails. When the house had to sell paintings in the 1970s, and it did, which I will tell you about another time, that ledger meant that every painting that left Talehra left with its painter's name. Many dealers threw the names away. Some did not.

* * *

So, your painting.

Kusum enlarged your photograph until the bridge filled her whole screen, and called me over, and neither of us spoke until the kettle boiled. The bridge has one rail. The horse is white with no special hoof, which rules out Lekh Raj. The water under the bridge is drawn in three strokes, curving, which might be Bholu, except that Bholu would never have painted the hills so flat and quick. It is Gopi, Mohini. It is almost certainly Gopi, who learned his water from Bholu and his bridges from his own village.

And the thumbprint on the back is not his. It is my mother's.

She did that only with wedding gifts. When a girl of the state married out of it, and the house sent a painting with her, my mother pressed her own thumb in red lac on the back. It was not a stamp of ownership. It was meant to say, if anyone in the girl's new house asked, that she had been sent with the Rani's blessing and was not to be treated as if she came from nowhere. My mother did it, I count, thirty-seven times between 1934 and 1961. She told me once she had been a bride from somewhere else herself and had needed something to show.

The umbrella over the groom is a chhatar, and it means he is being treated as a king for the day. Every groom in the state got one. It was the only time most men in Talehra were ever kings, my mother said, and they always looked alarmed about it.

* * *

Now let me find your great-grandmother for you.

Your letter says she married out of the state. My mother's ledger has a separate section for the thirty-seven paintings, and Kusum went through it with me yesterday evening, by the lamp, because my eyes do better with yellow light. Painting twenty-two, 1949: "Wedding procession across the Ghatasni bridge. Gopi. Sent with Basanti, daughter of Hans Raj of Ghatasni, on her marriage to the Rathour family of the plains. Very thin girl, very brave. Asked me whether the plains were as hot as people say. I told her yes."

Basanti is your great-grandmother, Mohini. She was a painter's daughter. Hans Raj was Gopi's cousin, which means that the man who painted your bridge almost certainly painted it for his own cousin's child. That one rail is the rail she crossed every day of her girlhood.

* * *

Kusum has put the whole entry into the family collection, with a photograph of the ledger page and your photograph beside it. When you open it, you will see your painting listed with its history: who painted it and when, who it was given to and why, the thumb, the umbrella, and then, below that, your family's line, from Basanti through your grandmother and your mother to you, in California, seventy-seven years later. You can add to it. If you know when it went from India to America, and in whose suitcase, please write that in. Those are the lines the dealers always lose.

She has also linked it to Gopi himself. He is one of the people of the house now, in the list of those the family thinks should be remembered by name, alongside Rajas and Ranis and a cook I will tell you about in another letter. Gopi lived until 1987. There is a photograph of him in 1970, sitting on the step of his house in Ghatasni in a gray shawl, holding up a painting of a bridge to the camera with an expression of mild suspicion. Under it Kusum has written his dates, his village, his sign, and a short line from my mother's ledger: "Does not lie about bridges."

I should tell you that the bridge itself is gone. A flood took it in 1995. The village built a new one of concrete, with two rails, and the children of Ghatasni will tell you that it is a much worse bridge. But every year on the day of the village's own small fair, someone ties a red thread across the stream at the old crossing, where the one-rail bridge used to be, and nobody can tell me exactly when that started.

* * *

My question back to you.

Basanti went to the plains, where it was as hot as people said. Your family went from there to California. Somewhere in those three moves, someone kept a small painting of a cold stream safe through heat and packing crates and an ocean. Who was it? Was it Basanti herself, all her life? Your grandmother? Did anyone in your family ever paint? I ask that last one because of the thumbprint, and because Gopi's family say that the hand comes back, sometimes, two or three generations later, in someone who has no idea where it came from.

Look at your own children's drawings, Mohini. Look at how they draw water.

And please do not let the appraiser have the last word.

With my mother's thumb and my own,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 4: Bishan's Ladle

*From Ilford, East London, from Rukmini Dhiman, a pharmacist, aged forty-four:*

*"My mother makes madra for every family wedding and says it is 'the palace madra, from Lohani.' My aunt in Leicester makes it differently and says hers is the palace madra. They have not spoken properly since 2009. Is there a real recipe? Please, before Diwali."*

---

Dear Rukmini,

There is a real recipe. I have it in front of me, in the handwriting of the man who made it for forty-two years. I am afraid I must tell you at once that it does not entirely agree with your mother or with your aunt, and that you will have to decide for yourself what to do with that information before Diwali. I would advise caution. I have seen what happens to families over the question of how long to cook the yogurt.

* * *

The man was Bishan Dhiman of Lohani, and he cooked in the Kanehri Mahal from 1921 until 1963, and was its head cook for most of those years. He was, I think, your great-great-uncle. Kusum has worked through the family tree and is nearly sure, and when she says nearly, she means a cousin in Leicester has to confirm one marriage date. That cousin may well be your aunt. I leave it with you.

Lohani is the village nearest the river, at the bottom of the state, where the valley opens and the terraces get wide enough to grow rice. It is a warm place by Talehra standards, so warm that they grow mangoes there, small and sour ones that nobody outside Lohani admits are mangoes, and lemons the size of a child's head that are cut into pickle in February. The houses are of stone below and timber above, with the cattle on the ground floor for warmth, and the lanes run down to a broad pebbled shore where the river makes a sound in May like a crowd that has heard bad news. The men of Lohani were traditionally the cooks for every large feast in the state, the dham, which is the hill feast served on leaf plates to everyone at a wedding or a fair, sitting in long rows on the ground. A Lohani cook could feed eight hundred people from six cauldrons dug into a pit of embers, and was treated during the cooking with the deference other places reserve for surgeons.

Bishan came up to the palace at nineteen, as an assistant, and stayed. I knew him all through my childhood as a very large, very calm man with a shaved head, a voice like a well, and a brass ladle as long as my arm that he would not allow anyone else to touch. He cooked in the middle courtyard, in a kitchen with a soot-black ceiling and a window that looked straight at the mountains, and he believed, sincerely, that food cooked facing the Dhauladhar tasted better than food cooked facing anywhere else. He had a proof for this, involving the movement of the air at dusk, which I never understood.

* * *

So. Madra.

For your son or daughter, if they read this letter one day and do not know: madra is a dish of chickpeas, or sometimes kidney beans, or in some houses vegetables, cooked slowly in yogurt with ghee and whole spices until it is thick and pale and rich enough that a small bowl is a meal. It is the center of a hill feast. Nobody makes it for a Tuesday. It belongs to weddings, and to the days when the whole village has come to sit in rows.

The palace version, Bishan's version, was written down in 1958, and I am the reason it was written down at all. I was eighteen, home from college, and my mother told me that Bishan was getting old and that someone had to ask him what he knew before it went. So I sat on a stool in the kitchen for most of one winter with an exercise book, while he cooked, and wrote down everything he said in the order he said it, which was not the order he did it in. He did not like being written down. He kept saying, "The ladle knows. Ask the ladle." I said the ladle could not write. He said that was the ladle's great virtue.

Here is what he said about madra, translated as closely as I can manage.

"Soak the chickpeas from the evening before, in water from the cold spring if you can get it. Cook them until they give under your thumb but do not break. In the heavy pot, in ghee, a good deal of ghee, more than you think, put the cloves, the cardamom both large and small, a stick of cinnamon, and bay leaf, and let them speak. When they have spoken, put in the yogurt, which you have beaten until it is smooth and has a little gram flour beaten into it so it does not split. Then you stir. You do not stop stirring. You stir in one direction only, and you do not talk to anyone, until the yogurt has boiled and stopped being afraid. Then put in the chickpeas, and the turmeric, and the coriander powder, and a little salt, and let it cook low until the ghee comes up to the edges and shines. At the end, a pinch of nutmeg grated over the top, very small. That is all."

Now. Your mother, I suspect, uses kidney beans. Your aunt, I suspect, adds raisins. I suspect this because both of those versions exist and both are honored in different parts of the hills, and both are good. But neither is Bishan's. Bishan used chickpeas, did not use raisins, and, here is the thing that will start the next quarrel, he did not use onion. Not ever. Not in madra. He said onion made it a curry, and a curry was a thing you ate in the plains.

And the nutmeg. I have never met anyone else in the hills who puts nutmeg on madra. I asked him once where it came from, and he said his own teacher, an older Lohani cook, had learned it in the kitchen of a British officer's wife in the 1890s, who put nutmeg on everything, including, Bishan said darkly, rice. So the palace madra, the most Pahari dish on the palace table, has a pinch of an Englishwoman in it. I find I like that more every year.

* * *

Kusum has put the recipe into the family's collection of recipes, in Bishan's words and in proper measures for anyone who cannot read the ladle. Under it she has put a recording. I need to tell you about the recording.

In 1962, the year before he retired, my brother borrowed a reel-to-reel tape recorder from a friend in Delhi, because he wanted to record our father's voice and was too shy to ask him, and he practiced on Bishan. It is four minutes long. You can hear the kitchen fire, and a crow outside, and a kitchen boy dropping something, and Bishan, very close to the microphone, too close, saying the madra instructions exactly as he said them to me four years before, except that this time, at the end, he adds: "And if the Raja-sahib's sister wrote it down wrong, it is her fault, not mine." Then you can hear me laughing, at twenty-two, which I had forgotten.

The tape went into a tin box and stayed there until three years ago, when my grandnephew took it to London and had it moved onto something that will last. Kusum asked Bishan's oldest living relative, a great-niece in Lohani, before we put it into the family collection, because he cannot be asked himself and someone ought to be. The great-niece said yes, for the family, for the people of the state, and for anyone who cooks madra, but not for anyone selling anything. So that is where it lives, with that rule written under it.

You may play it to your mother and to your aunt. I suggest separately.

* * *

I promised in an earlier letter to tell someone about the cook, and it seems you are the one, so here is the rest.

Bishan cooked for two Rajas, one Tikka-sahib and one Viceroy, and for the last of these he was required by the Viceroy's staff to make a meal "in the European style," which he did, perfectly, and then served the Viceroy's aide-de-camp a bowl of madra on the side without being asked. The aide-de-camp asked for the recipe. Bishan said it was not for writing down.

He cooked through the hungry year of 1943, the worst of the war years, when the price of grain went so high that families in the lower villages were eating the bark of the kachnar trees. My father opened the palace stores, and for four months Bishan ran a kitchen in the lowest courtyard that fed, at its height, nine hundred people a day. He used the dham cauldrons, the wedding ones, and he did not make madra, because there was no ghee and no yogurt to spare. He made a thin dal and rice and babru, the fried bread stuffed with black gram, because babru, he said, was the food that made people feel they had eaten even when they had not had enough. I was three. I remember the smell of the frying, and the line of people down the hill, and nothing else. My mother kept the store ledgers from that year. They are the saddest books in our collection, and the most careful.

And he cooked my brother's wedding feast in 1961, the last great dham the palace ever gave, for two thousand four hundred people on the polo ground below the town, with the snow pink on the range at dusk and the lamps strung through the deodars, and a band from the plains that played the same three songs all night. He was nearly sixty and he did not sit down for three days. On the third night, when the last row had eaten, he came up to the family table, put his ladle in front of my brother, and said, "There. That is the last one I am doing." And it was.

He retired to Lohani in 1963 and lived until 1974, and grew small sour mangoes, and was consulted by every cook in the valley, and gave each of them a slightly different recipe for madra, which, Rukmini, may be the true origin of your family's troubles.

* * *

The ladle is in our collection. It is brass, sixty-one centimeters long, with a wooden handle that has been replaced twice and a bowl that has worn thin on one side from forty years of stirring in a single direction. Under its photograph Kusum has written what it is, who made it, which kitchens it worked in, and the list of every feast we know it served. Bishan's name is at the top. The last line says "Talehra, 1961, the wedding of Tikka Jaswant Chand. 2,400 guests. Last dham of the palace."

Here is my question back to you, and I am asking it on behalf of the recipe.

When your mother cooks the madra for a wedding, what does she say while she cooks it? Bishan said nothing, because you do not talk to the yogurt. But many cooks do talk. Many cooks say something they were told by whoever taught them, a line, a little proverb, a joke about the ladle. If your mother says something, and your aunt says something, I would very much like to know whether it is the same thing. Because if it is the same thing, the two of them learned it in the same kitchen, from the same person, and that person may have been a large calm man with a shaved head who once told a Raja's sister she was writing it down wrong.

Tell them both the sister is asking. And tell them both, from me, that the nutmeg is not optional.

With love, and with ghee to the edges,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 5: The Roof at Dharoti

*From Leicester, from Om Prakash Banyal, retired bus driver, eighty-one, dictated to his granddaughter:*

*"My father was a carpenter. In 1952 he helped put the new roof on the old temple at Dharoti, at the fair ground. He said the Rani paid him in silver and in apples. He said the roof would last a hundred years. My granddaughter says the roof is falling down. Is it?"*

---

Dear Om Prakash-ji,

Your granddaughter has been looking at the same photographs I look at every month, and she is right to be worried. But it is not falling down. It is sagging on one corner. There is a difference, and the difference is about twenty years and a good deal of careful work, and I would like to tell you about both. I would also like to tell you about your father, because I watched him on that roof when I was twelve, and he was the only man up there who sang.

* * *

First, for the granddaughter, who may never have been: Dharoti.

Dharoti is the village on the great meadow. Every hill state has one place where the land stops being steep for long enough to hold a crowd, and in Talehra it is a long, tilted bowl of grass halfway up the eastern ridge, ringed with deodar, with a small stream running across it in a cut so deep that the children use it as a hiding place. The village itself is only twenty houses, on the upper rim. But for three days every September, at the end of the rains, the meadow fills with everyone in the state, and that is the Dharoti fair.

At the top of the meadow, under the oldest deodars, stands the temple. It is small, the size of a large room, built of stone up to a man's height and then of carved timber, and it is crowned with a roof in the old hill style: a steep pyramid of slate on a deodar frame, with a second smaller roof perched above the first like a hat on a hat, and around the eaves a fringe of carved wooden pendants that clatter together in a high wind. The carving on the doorframe is said to be four hundred years old. There are creepers in it, and parrots, and a small elephant with a puzzled expression that every child in the state has stood on tiptoe to touch. People came to the temple at the fair, and many still do, in their own way, and that is their business. What everyone in the state shares, whatever they believe or do not, is the building itself. It is the oldest standing timber structure in Talehra. It is the place in every photograph of the fair. It is where, for three hundred years, people agreed to meet.

In 1950 the roof failed. A winter of heavy snow, then a thaw, then more snow, and the old deodar beams on the north-west corner, which had been quietly rotting for a generation, gave way under the weight. Half the slates came down into the courtyard. My father went up to look the next week, and he came back to the palace in a silence I remember, because my father talked about everything.

* * *

The state was gone by then. It had been gone for two years. I will write to someone about how it went, because a boy in Mississauga has already asked me and I have not finished my answer. What matters here is that by 1950 the house had no treasury and no power to order anything done, only some land, some forests that were about to stop being ours, and a great deal of respect that nobody could spend.

My mother spent it anyway. She went to every village in the state and asked each one for something. Not money. Things. Bareri gave apple wood. Lohani gave a feast for the workers on the day the roof was finished. Ghatasni gave paint for the pendants. Kunsal, up in the forest, gave the deodar for the new beams, felled by the old method in the right month so the timber would not split. Mandhol gave slate, which was split by hand in their quarry and carried up to Dharoti on the backs of forty men over three weeks. And Pukhar, the highest village, gave the carpenters, because Pukhar has always had the carpenters.

Your father was one of them. His name was Mangat Ram Banyal, and he was the youngest of the eleven carpenters of Pukhar who worked on the roof through the summer of 1952. I was twelve and had been told to stay away from the fair ground because it was dangerous, so naturally I was there every day. I sat on the stream bank with my knees under my chin and watched them fit the new beams in place without a single nail, every joint cut by eye and tapped together with a wooden mallet, and I remember the sound of it, a sound like someone knocking politely on a very large door. And I remember your father, because he was up on the ridge beam for most of July, and he sang the whole time, a song about a girl from Pukhar who was too proud to marry anyone from a lower village. The older carpenters told him to be quiet. He did not.

My mother paid them in silver rupees, which she had left from her own wedding jewelry, and in apples from Bareri, which was the house's way of saying that the work was for the whole state. When the last slate was in place, the carpenters carved their names into the underside of the topmost beam where nobody would ever see them. There are eleven names. Your father's is the last one, and it is crooked, because he carved it hanging upside down.

* * *

Now, the sagging.

Five years ago, my grandnephew, who is an architect in London and has opinions about timber, came home and went up to Dharoti with a camera and a long face. He photographed the roof from the same eight places, marked with stones, at the same time of day. Then he asked Kusum to do it again in three months. And then again. And so, for five years now, someone from the house or from Dharoti village has gone up to the meadow at the start of every month and taken the same eight photographs from the same eight stones, with the date, and put them into the record we keep of the important old places of the state. The fort wall at the top of the town is in that record too, and the old step-well at Bareri, and the station at Saroli with its mossy roof. Each place has its own page. Each page has its pictures in order, so you can scroll through the years and watch the moss creep and the light change and the snow come and go.

On the temple's page there is something else. Below the photographs is a short note each month, in plain words. "North-west corner, ridge line, dropped about a finger's width since last spring." "Two slates slipped on east face, replaced by Dharoti boys 14 June." "Pendants on south eave: three missing, two loose." "Moss heavy on north face after wet August." And there is a small flag on the page, which Kusum can set to one color if nothing has changed, and to another if something has, and when it changes, the people who care about the place get a message. There are now, I am told, ninety-four people who care about the Dharoti roof enough to be told. Forty-one of them live in England. Your granddaughter is the ninety-fourth. She added herself two weeks ago, which is how your letter came to be written.

What the photographs show is this. Your father's roof has lasted seventy-four years, which is very good for a hill roof, and most of it is sound. The beams on the north-west corner, the same corner that failed in 1950, are beginning to go again. It is the corner where the snow drifts off the meadow and sits longest in spring. Your father and his friends put the best wood they had there. They knew. But snow is patient, Om Prakash-ji, and it has had seventy-four winters.

So the roof is not falling down. But it will need new beams on that corner within ten or fifteen years, and it would be much better done in five.

* * *

Here is what has happened since the photographs began, and here is where I need your help.

Last year, Dharoti village and the house agreed that the roof would be repaired in the old way: by every village giving something. The forest department, which looks after the forests that used to be ours, has agreed to the deodar, felled in the right month. Mandhol has said yes to the slate. Ghatasni will repaint the pendants. Lohani will feed the workers. We have the money for the scaffolding and the wages, mostly from families of the state who have done well abroad, in amounts small and large that Kusum keeps in a careful list so that every family knows what every rupee went to.

What we do not have is the carpenters.

There are two men left in Pukhar who know how to cut the old joints without nails. One is seventy-seven. The other is his nephew, who is fifty and has a bad back. Between them they could do the work, but they could not teach it at the same time, and if the joints are not taught while the roof is being made, then the next time the roof fails there will be nobody at all.

So I am asking you, Om Prakash-ji, and through you your granddaughter, and through her anyone in Leicester or anywhere else whose father or grandfather was a Pukhar carpenter. Is there anyone in your family, in your street, in your temple society, in your bus depot, who still does this work? Who builds with timber? Who would come to Dharoti for one summer, in four years' time, to stand beside the old man and learn the joints and carry them home?

I do not expect an answer quickly. But I have learned that the people of the state are spread across the world more thickly than anyone would believe, and that somewhere in Leicester or Toronto or California there is very likely a cabinet-maker whose grandmother came from Pukhar and who has never once been told that his hands come from somewhere.

* * *

One more thing.

When the beams on that corner come down, the top beam will come down too, because the joints are linked. So, for the first time since 1952, someone will see the eleven names on its underside. Kusum has already written them into the temple's page, in the order the carpenters carved them, from a list my mother made that summer. But I would like your granddaughter to be there when the beam comes down. I would like her to put her own hand on your father's crooked name, and photograph it with the date, and then I would like her to put the beam back.

Not that beam, exactly. The new one. With the old names copied onto its underside, and then twelve new names beside them, carved upside down by the people who cut the new joints, so the next roof can be told who held it up.

And if anyone up there sings, so much the better.

With respect for your father, who would not be quiet,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 6: What My Father Signed

*From Mississauga, Ontario, from Nihal Chauhan, aged sixteen, for a history assignment:*

*"Our teacher asked us to interview someone about a big change in our family's history. My grandfather says the Raja of Talehra gave our state away in 1948 and that after that the forest was not ours anymore. He says it like it was a betrayal. My mother says don't ask him about it. So I am asking you. What happened? Was it a betrayal? Sources are required, sorry."*

---

Dear Nihal,

Do not apologize for sources. I have spent seventy years asking people for sources. It is the most useful habit a person can have, and the most annoying, and you should keep both parts of it.

You have asked me a hard question, and I am going to answer it in three parts: what my father signed, what it meant in Kunsal, and whether your grandfather is right. I will tell you now that I do not think the answer to your last question is yes or no. I think your grandfather is right about one thing and wrong about another, and I think he knows it, and I think that is why your mother says not to ask him. You will have to decide what to put in your assignment. I will only try to make sure you have the facts.

* * *

First, Kunsal, because your teacher should know where you are from.

Kunsal is the forest village. It sits higher than any other village in Talehra except Pukhar, at the place where the terraces give up and the deodar begins, and for three hundred years its families lived from the forest. The deodar there is old. I mean truly old: trees that were tall when my grandfather's grandfather was a child, trunks so wide that four children holding hands cannot reach around them, bark in long gray plates, and a smell, especially after rain, like a cedar chest that has been opened in a cold room. The light under them is green and dim at noon. The ground is a soft brown carpet of needles that swallows the sound of your feet, so that in the deep forest above Kunsal you can hear a pine cone drop two hundred yards away. In winter the snow comes down through the branches in slow clumps, and the whole forest makes a sound like someone very patiently clearing their throat.

The Chauhans of Kunsal were the forest keepers of the state. Not owners. The forests belonged to the Raja, which is to say, in the old way of thinking, to the state. But the Chauhans had rights in them that were written down in my great-grandfather's time and older than writing: the right to graze their goats and sheep in the clearings, to cut grass for winter fodder, to take fallen wood, to gather the morels that come up after the spring rain and sell them in the plains for a great deal of money. In return they guarded the forest. No tree was felled in Talehra without a Kunsal man marking it. When the timber for the railway was cut in the 1920s, it was Kunsal men who chose which trees, and your great-great-grandfather, Fateh Chand Chauhan, refused to let them take any tree from the grove above the village spring, and my grandfather backed him against the British engineers. That is written down. It is in my grandfather's notebook: "Fateh Chand says not the spring grove. Agreed."

* * *

Now. 1948.

You will have learned at school that India became independent in August 1947 and that, at the same time, the princely states, more than five hundred of them, large and small, each had to decide how to join the new country. Talehra was one of the small ones. We were one of about thirty hill states in this part of the mountains, some of them so small that the whole state could be walked across in a day. Ours could be walked across in two.

In the winter of 1947 and into 1948, the rulers of the hill states were asked to merge their states into a single new province, which came into being on the fifteenth of April 1948 and was named Himachal Pradesh, which means, more or less, the snow-mountain land. My father, Raja Uday Chand, was thirty-seven. He went to Shimla in March of 1948, with one secretary and one suitcase, and he signed the agreement with the other rulers. He came back up through Saroli on the little train four days later. I was seven, and I remember him walking up from the station rather than riding, which was unusual, and coming into the upper courtyard, and sitting down on the edge of the stone tank where the goldfish lived, still in his traveling coat, for a long time.

I have read what he signed. There is a copy in our collection, which Kusum has scanned and placed beside a short page about my father: his dates, his photograph at the time, the things he did and did not do as Raja, and the things he did afterwards, which in some ways mattered more. If your teacher wants a source, there is one, and Kusum can send you the page.

In plain words: by signing, my father handed the government of Talehra to the new province. Its courts, its police, its taxes, its schools, its roads. And its forests. In return, the family kept the palace and some private land, and received an annual allowance from the government, called the privy purse, which was meant to last forever and which, as it turned out, lasted twenty-three years. I will write about the end of it to someone else, because a family in California has asked.

* * *

Was it a betrayal?

Here is what my father said, when I asked him that question myself, at about your age, in 1956. I had heard the same word, betrayal, from a boy at school in the plains whose family had been in service to another hill house. My father did not answer for a while. Then he said: "Sunanda, there was no Talehra that could have stood alone. There were forty-one thousand people in this state. We had no army, no doctor who had studied medicine, one school that went past the eighth class, and a treasury that could not have paid for a single bridge over the river. Every family in this state deserved what every family in the country was going to get. Hospitals. Schools. Roads that did not slide away. A vote. I could not give them those things. The new government could. I signed so they would get them."

Then he said something I have thought about my whole life. "But I signed away some things that were not only mine to sign. And I did not ask the people whose things they were."

He meant the forests.

* * *

Here is what happened in Kunsal. When the state's forests became the new government's forests, the old rights of the Chauhans did not simply vanish, but they changed. They were written down again, by people who did not know the forest, in offices in Shimla and later elsewhere, and they became permissions rather than rights. Permissions can be reduced. Over the next twenty years some of the grazing clearings were closed to let the forest regrow, which, I will tell you honestly, the forest needed. The morel gathering came to need a permit. The forest guards became government employees, and some of them were Kunsal men and some of them were not. And in 1959 the spring grove, the one your great-great-grandfather had protected from the railway, was marked for felling by a forest officer who had never heard of Fateh Chand.

It was not felled. My father went to Shimla again, this time with your great-grandfather, Bishamber Chauhan, and a copy of my grandfather's notebook page, and they sat in an office for three days until someone senior agreed to see them. The grove still stands. But your great-grandfather came home and said to my father, in front of me, in the upper courtyard: "Raja-sahib, the last time a man came to cut our grove, you stopped him by saying no. This time you had to sit in a corridor and ask." And my father said, "Yes." That was all. He did not argue.

So when your grandfather says the Raja gave the forest away, Nihal, he is right. And when he says it was a betrayal, I think he is wrong, but I do not think he is foolish, and I do not think he is being unfair. I think he grew up hearing that story about the corridor. And I think it is possible for a thing to be the right thing to do and still to cost someone something they did not agree to give.

You may quote me.

* * *

Something else, because you are writing a history assignment and you should have something nobody else in your class will have.

Last month I asked Kusum to set up a call between your grandfather and me. I am sorry to have done this behind your back. It was your mother's idea, and she made me promise not to tell you until your letter arrived, which I suppose it now has. The call was at half past seven in the morning in Talehra, which was ten o'clock the night before in Mississauga, and your grandfather, I am told, put on a collared shirt for it, and so did I, metaphorically.

He did not want to speak to me at first. When he did, he spoke for an hour and forty minutes. He told me about grazing goats above the spring grove at the age of eight, and about the morels, which he could find, he says, with his eyes closed, by smell. He told me about his father coming home from Shimla after those three days. He told me that he left Talehra in 1972 because there was no forest work left for a Kunsal man that did not involve wearing a uniform and saying no to his own cousins. He said this very carefully.

We recorded the call, with his permission, and he chose who may hear it: his children, his grandchildren, and the people of Kunsal, and nobody else. You are on the list. Your mother has the link. I would like you to listen to the part, about fifty-one minutes in, where he describes the sound of the forest in snow, and then I would like you to tell your teacher that this is a primary source and that it is better than anything I could write.

* * *

The spring grove is still there, above Kunsal. Some of the trees in it are among the oldest in the state. A Chauhan boy, your grandfather's cousin's grandson, is now a forest guard and walks through it twice a week, and he has started taking a photograph of the oldest tree every month from the same rock, for the record the house keeps of important places. Last winter the photograph showed a split in the bark on the north side. A forest scientist from the university came to look and said it was nothing serious. We will keep watching.

Your grandfather asked me, near the end of the call, whether I thought the house owed Kunsal an apology. I said I did not know whether an apology was the right thing. I said I thought what the house owed Kunsal was the truth, written down, with the names of the people it happened to. That is what I have tried to give you in this letter.

He said, "Then write the grove." So I have.

Tell your teacher that the Raja's daughter says you get full marks for asking. Tell your grandfather I would like to hear about the morels again. And tell your mother she was right to make me promise, and wrong to think you would not find out.

With my father's honesty, which I have tried to keep,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 7: The Schoolmaster's Son from Mandhol

*From Smethwick, near Birmingham, from Lajwanti Sankhyan, aged fifty-five, a hospital administrator:*

*"Forgive me if this is improper. My father, Partap Singh Sankhyan, died last year. Among his papers was a letter in Hindi, never sent, addressed to 'Sunanda Bai-ji, Kanehri Mahal.' It is dated 1965. I have not read it. It is sealed. My mother says I must not open it. My brother says I must send it to you. I have enclosed a photograph of the envelope. What should I do?"*

---

Dear Lajwanti,

Send it to me. Do not open it first. I will tell you why, and then I will tell you what I think is in it, and then, if you like, when it comes, we will open it together on a call, you in Smethwick and I in the treasury room with the green door, and we will read it at the same time.

I am eighty-six, my dear, and I have had a long time to become someone who can read such a letter calmly. Your father was twenty-eight when he wrote it. I owe it to him to read it, and I owe it to you to tell you who he was to me, because otherwise you will wonder, and wondering is worse.

* * *

Mandhol is the slate village. It sits on the west side of the main ridge, on a steep face above a side stream, and its houses are built of the very rock they stand on, so that in certain lights the whole village vanishes into the hillside and you only find it by the smoke. Above the houses is the quarry, a great gray bite out of the mountain, terraced in ledges, where for centuries the men of Mandhol have split slate by hand. They use thin steel wedges and small hammers, and they listen to the rock, and when it is ready it comes away in sheets so flat and thin you can see light through the edge. Every roof in Talehra is Mandhol slate. Every roof in the state is, in that sense, Mandhol. When it rains, the whole village rings, a soft, rapid chiming of water on stone, and the children of Mandhol are said to be born unable to sleep in silence.

Your grandfather, Mohinder Singh Sankhyan, was not a quarryman. He was the schoolmaster of the Mandhol primary school, the first in the state outside the town, which my mother started in 1936 by the simple method of finding the only literate man in the village and paying him to teach. He was thin and severe and very funny without ever smiling, and he made the children of Mandhol learn their letters by scratching them on offcuts of slate with a nail, so that every family in the village still has, somewhere, a little gray tablet with a child's alphabet on it.

Your father was his son. He came up to the town in 1951, at fourteen, to attend the high school that the new government had built in the old armoury below the palace. That school was one of the things my father had signed for. Your father was the cleverest boy in it. I know because the headmaster used to come up to the palace once a month to report, and he talked of nobody else.

I was three years younger, and by the time I was old enough to notice anyone I was at college in Delhi, and home only in the winters and the long summer holidays. So I did not know your father well. What I knew was that in the summer of 1958, when I came home and set up a little lending library in a room of the middle court, with books from Delhi that I thought the high school boys should read, he was the only one who returned every book on time, and the only one who wrote notes on slips of paper and left them inside, arguing with the authors. I have a few of those slips still. They are in a box with the library ledger. One says, in English, in very correct handwriting, "Mr Dickens is wrong about schoolmasters. Some of them are excellent."

* * *

Now I have to tell you something about myself, and about the house, that is the real answer to your question.

I was never meant to inherit, Lajwanti. Not the chair, which went to my brother, Jaswant, who was born four years before me and was called Tikka-sahib from the day he could walk. Not the house, which was his. Not even, in the way people thought in those days, my own future. The younger daughter of a hill Raja in 1960 was expected to marry well into another house, preferably a larger one, preferably far enough away to be useful and near enough to be visited. My mother had been one of those daughters herself. She had climbed a wall to make something of it. She hoped I would marry and climb my own walls somewhere else.

In 1962 a proposal came from a good family in the plains. I will not name them. They were kind people. The young man was decent and educated and liked horses and wanted, his mother said, a wife who would not mind the heat.

I said no.

I said no because I did not want to leave the mountains, which was true. I said no because I had begun, by then, to help my mother with the register and the ledgers, and I had seen that she was getting tired, and that nobody else in the house thought the register mattered. That was also true. And I said no for a reason I did not say to anyone, which was that I had begun to look forward to slips of paper inside returned library books.

Your father and I never spoke of it. Not once. It would have been impossible. A schoolmaster's son from Mandhol and the Raja's sister: the world has changed so much, in your lifetime, that I do not know if I can make you understand how impossible. It was not that my parents would have been cruel. My mother, of all people, might have understood. It was that the whole state would have known by sunset, and every person in it would have had an opinion, and none of the opinions would have been about him or about me. They would have been about the house. I was not willing to make him into a story. And he, I think, was not willing to make me into one.

In 1965 he got a scholarship to study engineering in Birmingham. He came up to the palace the week before he left, to return the last of his library books and to say goodbye to my parents, as every man of the state did in those years. I was in the treasury room, where I am now, starting the list of the men who were leaving. He stood in the doorway for a minute. Then he said that Mr Hardy was too gloomy, and that he would write to tell me what England was really like. Then he went down the hill to Saroli and took the train.

He never wrote. I always assumed he had decided not to, and I thought that was wise of him, and I was sad about it for longer than I would admit to anyone except, now, to you.

So. I think I know what is in the envelope. I think he did write, after all. And I think he decided not to send it.

* * *

Here is what I can tell you about the rest of his life, from our side, and you can tell me if I have it right.

He did well in Birmingham. I know because his name appears, every so often, in the list my brother kept of the men of the state abroad. My brother was more organized than people gave him credit for. He wrote to every man on the list once a year, at Diwali, and kept their answers, and Kusum has put those answers, with permission from the families who could be found, into the family tree of the state, beside each man's name. Your father's entries begin in 1966. "Studying hard. The food is very bad." In 1969: "Married. Her name is Kamlesh. She is from Mandi. She laughs at my English." In 1971: "A daughter. Lajwanti. She has my father's eyebrows." In 1980: "Chief engineer at a firm in West Bromwich. We have bought a house. It has a garden. I am growing apples. They are terrible."

That last one made my brother laugh out loud. He brought it up to my room and read it to me. I remember I laughed too, and then went out for a long walk along the old wall above the town, from the clock gate to the water tower, where the stones are warm in the afternoon and you can see the whole of the Dhauladhar turn from white to gold to pink to gray in the time it takes to walk there and back.

He came back to Talehra once that I know of, in 1988, for his own father's funeral in Mandhol. I did not see him. I was in Delhi. When I came back, there was a slate tablet on my desk in the treasury room, left by someone who did not leave a name. On it, scratched with a nail, in the careful letters the Mandhol school taught every child, was the Hindi alphabet, and under it, in English: "Some schoolmasters are excellent."

The tablet is in the collection now, cataloged, with its history written under it as far as we know it. Until today, the line about who left it said "unknown." I will ask Kusum to change it.

* * *

I said I would tell you what to do, so I will.

Send me the letter. When it arrives, Kusum will set up a call. You may bring your mother and your brother if they wish, and I would like it if they did, because your mother was his wife for fifty-six years and has every right to be in the room. If she does not want to be, I understand that also. We will open it together. I will read it aloud, in Hindi, and you will translate it for your brother, whose Hindi I am told is a disgrace. Then we will decide together what happens to it: whether it goes into the family's keeping, or into the fire, or back into its envelope. I will not keep it without your family's say. It is his letter. It belongs to whoever he would have wanted to read it, and I think, given that he kept it sixty years and did not destroy it, he wanted someone to.

You asked whether you were being improper. You are not. You are being exactly what a good daughter of Mandhol should be: careful about the rock before you split it.

* * *

One last thing. Your letter said that your mother says you must not open it. I would like you to tell her something from me, as one woman of the state to another, though we have never met. I would like you to tell her that whatever is in that letter, it was written by a young man who had not yet met her. And that the one I have, the one in the family's list from 1969, says that she laughed at his English. A man does not write down that his wife laughs at him unless he is very happy about it.

Tell her the old woman in the palace said so.

With respect, and with a little nervousness,

Sunanda Bai-ji Talehra

*P.S. Since this letter is already more personal than I meant it to be, I may as well say that in 1964, two years after I refused the proposal from the plains, I went to a polo match in Delhi with my brother, and spent most of the afternoon being told about Marwari horses by a very serious fourteen-year-old boy from a desert state, the heir of the house of Kesarmer, who informed me that polo was dying in his family and that he was going to bring it back when he grew up. I told him that in my experience people who announce such things at fourteen generally do. He looked at me as if I had given him a medal. I am told he kept his word. I mention it only because it was the first time anyone in years had told me what they were going to do with their life without asking whether they were allowed, and I went home and thought about it for a long time, and the next week I took over my mother's register.*

Chapter 8: The Summer Palace at Neelikot

*From San Ramon, California, from Daulat and Ritika Dhatwalia, who wrote together, she typing, he correcting:*

*"We visited Talehra in April for the first time. A guide took us to Neelikot and said the house had 'sold the summer palace to pay its debts' in 1972 and that it is now a girls' hostel. My husband's grandmother worked in that palace as a girl. She always said the Rani cried when they left. Is it true they had to sell it? Were they poor? We are sorry if this is a rude question."*

---

Dear Daulat and Ritika,

It is not a rude question. It is a question every guide in the valley answers wrongly, and I am grateful for the chance to answer it properly, because I was there, and I did not cry, and my mother did, and I think your husband's grandmother saw it.

Yes, we sold Neelikot. No, we were not poor, not in the way you mean. And the guide is wrong about the debts. Let me tell you what the summer palace was, and then let me tell you about the year it went.

* * *

Neelikot means the blue fort, though it was never a fort and is not blue. It sits four thousand feet above the town, at the top of the long valley that runs north-east toward the range, on a shoulder of land so close to the snow that in June you can hear the meltwater talking in the rocks all night. My great-grandfather built it in 1889, in the style that was fashionable then among hill rulers who had been to Shimla: half English cottage and half hill house, with a steep tin roof painted green, deep verandas with carved railings, bay windows of real glass carried up on mules from the plains, and a tower at one corner that was meant to look like something in Scotland and in fact looks like a very tall chicken coop. Around it the gardens went down in terraces. My grandmother put in roses, my mother put in apple trees, and nobody ever took either out.

We went up every year on the first day of May and came down on the first day of October. The move was a great event. Twenty mules, sixty porters, the cook and the kitchen, the painters with their brushes rolled in cloth, my mother's ledgers in a tin trunk lashed to the steadiest mule, and my father on foot in front, because he said a man should arrive at his summer house on his own legs. The path went up through the orchards of Bareri, then into the deodar above Kunsal, then out onto open hillside where the dog roses grew in great tangled banks, pink and white, and the air smelt of them for a mile. The last stretch was a set of switchbacks so steep that the porters sang a counting song to keep their breath, and every child in the procession knew the words, and every child, on reaching the top, threw themselves down on the lawn and refused to move.

At Neelikot the world was very simple. In the mornings the range stood over the garden so near and so white that you could see the shadows of single clouds sliding across the snow. In the afternoons it rained, briefly and hard, and then the whole valley steamed and the smell of wet earth and roses came up through the floorboards. In the evenings we sat on the long veranda and my father read the newspapers, which arrived three days late by runner, aloud, and argued with them. There was no electricity until 1958. We read by lamps. I learned to do embroidery at Neelikot, very badly, and to identify fourteen kinds of bird by their calls, very well.

The house had a staff of twenty-two, most of them from Neelikot village, which lies below the palace in a cluster of slate roofs around a spring, and from Chilgi, the next village down. Your husband's grandmother, Phulmati Dhatwalia, was one of them. Kusum has found her in my mother's register: Chilgi, 1958, page ninety-three, "Phulmati, daughter of Ishwar Dhatwalia, aged fifteen, to the Neelikot linen room, very quick with a needle." She is in the photograph of the household that my brother took on the lower lawn in September 1966. Fourth from the left, second row, holding a folded sheet as if it might escape. I remember her. She mended a dress of mine that I had torn climbing the chicken coop tower, so well that my mother never found out.

* * *

Now, the year it went.

In 1971 the privy purses ended. I need to explain this carefully, because it is one of those pieces of history that people in your generation have often heard of only as a slogan, from one side or the other.

When my father signed the merger in 1948, the families of the rulers were promised an annual allowance by the new government, in return for handing over their states. Ours was not large. Talehra was small and the purse was set by the size of the state. But it paid for the house, the staff, the upkeep of the old buildings, my mother's little schools and the lending library, and the pensions of the people who had served the family for generations. In 1971, after a long debate in the country that I will not try to settle for you, the constitution was amended and the purses and the titles were abolished. There were people who thought this was a great injustice and people who thought it was long overdue, and they are still, in some houses, not speaking to each other. My father did not say which he thought, not even to me. He said only that the country had decided, and that the house would now have to live like everybody else, which was, he added, what most of the country had been doing all along.

The house was not poor. We had the palace in the town, some orchards, some land, and the paintings and the silver. But the purse had paid for the people, and the people were what my mother cared about. Twenty-two at Neelikot. Thirty-one in the town palace. Pensions for another forty. You cannot pay seventy-three people from orchards, not in hill orchards, not in 1972.

So my father and my brother sat in the treasury room, in this room, for most of the winter of 1971, with my mother's ledgers and a great many cups of tea, and they made a list. On one side were the things the house could keep. On the other were the things it could sell. They argued about almost everything. My brother wanted to sell the paintings and keep Neelikot. My father wanted to keep the paintings and sell Neelikot. My mother said nothing for six weeks, and then she said one sentence, which decided it.

She said, "The paintings are the people's. The summer house is ours."

She meant that the painters of Ghatasni had made the paintings for the state, and that the state's children should be able to see them. Neelikot was a house for the family to be cool in. It was a pleasure. And when you must choose, she said, you sell your pleasures first.

In the end they sold some of the paintings anyway, to pay the pensions, and that is another story and I have told some of it to a family in Sunnyvale. But they sold Neelikot first. In 1972, to the new state government, at a price my brother considered an insult and my father considered fair, on one condition, which my mother wrote into the sale herself: that it should become a school for girls from the villages of the high valley, who at that time had to walk four hours to the nearest class beyond the fifth.

That is the hostel the guide showed you. It is not a hostel for travelers. It is the hostel of the Government Girls' Senior Secondary School, Neelikot, and two hundred and twelve girls from the high villages live in it during term. They sleep in the rooms where my family slept. The linen room where your husband's grandmother sewed is a chemistry laboratory. The veranda where my father read the newspaper is where the girls do their homework at dusk, with the range going pink above them, and I have it on good authority that they argue with their textbooks exactly as he did.

* * *

Now. Did the Rani cry?

Yes. Your grandmother is right. My mother cried on the morning of the first of October 1972, when we came down from Neelikot for the last time. She stood on the lower lawn, among the apple trees she had planted forty years earlier, with the whole household lined up to say goodbye, and she went down the row and took each person's hands. When she got to the linen room girls, she stopped and could not go on. I was thirty-two and standing beside her, and I did not cry, because someone had to hold the list and say the names. Your husband's grandmother was second in that row. She was twenty-nine by then and married, and she had come up from Chilgi especially. I remember that she held my mother's hands and said, in our dialect, "Rani-ji, don't worry. The girls will look after it." And my mother said, "I know. That is why I am crying."

I have thought about that answer for fifty-four years. I think what she meant was that it was the right thing, and that the right thing can still break your heart.

* * *

Here is what I would like to show you, and Kusum has already sent it.

We keep a page for Neelikot in the record of the important places of the state. The school has been very good to us. The headmistress, who is from Chilgi herself and whose great-aunt was a palace cook, lets us photograph the house every season. So there is a run of pictures now, the same four views, from 1889, which is my great-grandfather's photograph of the house just built, with the gardens still bare earth, through my brother's photographs of the 1960s, through a gap of years when nobody thought to take any, to the girls' own photographs of the last six years, which they take themselves, as a school project, and add with the date. You can scroll through them and watch the roses come and go, and the tin roof change from green to red to green again, and the chicken coop tower lose its weathervane in the storm of 2019 and get a new one made by the metalwork class, which is shaped like a book.

Last year, one of the girls found out that the old linen room had been staffed by women from her own village, and asked the house whether she could see the register. Kusum sent her the pages. She is now building the list of everyone who ever worked at Neelikot, with their villages and their years, and adding them, with the families' agreement, to the family tree of the state. Your husband's grandmother is on it.

I would like you to do one thing for that girl, if you will. Her name is Jaya, and she is fifteen, and she wants to know what it was like to work in that house. Not from me. I was a guest there in my own home. From the people who worked. Your husband's grandmother is gone, I know. But she must have told you stories. Was the linen room cold? Did she like the work? Did she think my mother was strict? I promise you Jaya will want the honest answer, and so will I.

If you would rather tell it than write it, Kusum can arrange a call with the school. Time zones being what they are, it will be your evening and their morning, and the girls will be at the long table on the veranda, in their blue uniforms, with the range behind them. I have done one of these calls. It was the best hour I have spent in a year. The girls ask far better questions than historians do, and they are not at all impressed by anybody.

* * *

You asked if we were poor. I will answer that one too, before I stop.

We were never poor in the way that the high villages were poor before the school. We lost a house we loved, and some paintings, and the comfort of knowing that next year would look like this one. Seventy-three people kept their pensions. Two hundred and twelve girls sleep in my old bedroom. When I weigh those things on the old brass scales in the treasury, they do not balance in our favor. They were never supposed to.

With love to Chilgi, and to San Ramon,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 9: Words Kept in a Tin

*From Gravesend, Kent, from Tulsi Thakur Rawat, aged thirty-four, a speech therapist, who wrote in English with Pahari words underlined:*

*"My grandmother used words at home that nobody else in Gravesend used, not even the other families from the hills. My mother says they were 'village words, from Pukhar, don't bother.' I am a speech therapist. I bother. I have nineteen words written down, some without meanings. Can the house help me finish the list? I want my daughter to have them."*

---

Dear Tulsi,

The house can help, but I must tell you honestly that the house is only the second-best place to ask. The best place is Pukhar itself, where three women over eighty still speak the old way at home, and where one of them has been waiting, I think, for someone like you to ask for most of her life. I will introduce you. First let me tell you what Pukhar is, and why its words do not sound like anybody else's.

* * *

Pukhar is the highest village in the old state, and the hardest to get to. It sits above the deodar line, on a south-facing slope of open grass and boulders at the head of the eastern valley, about eleven thousand feet up, so close beneath the Dhauladhar that in winter the sun goes behind the range at half past two and the whole village goes blue. The houses are built low and long, of stone and thick timber, with flat earth roofs where the families dry apricots and walnuts and lay out their bedding on fine days. In the old days the village was snowbound from December to March. Nobody went up and nobody came down, and the people of Pukhar sat out the winter round their fires, carving wood and telling stories and, my mother always believed, inventing words.

Because of the snow, Pukhar was always a little apart. The village was famous for its carpenters, whom I have written about to a family in Leicester. It was famous for its shepherds, who took the flocks over the passes in summer to the high pastures on the other side of the range and came back in September with news from a world that the rest of the state never saw. And it was famous, among the few people who paid attention, for its speech. The people of Talehra all speak a hill language, closely related to the languages of the neighboring valleys and to Hindi but not the same as any of them. In Pukhar that language had gone its own way. There were words for kinds of snow that the town did not know. There were words for parts of a loom, a sheep's year, a roof beam, a particular kind of silence. And there were words, my mother said, that seemed to have come over the passes with the shepherds from somewhere else entirely and stayed.

* * *

My mother started a word list in 1940, the year I was born. She said she started it because she was going to have to teach me to speak, and she wanted to know what she was teaching. I suspect she started it because she was a person who could not hear a word without writing it down. It was a tin box, a tea tin from Assam with a picture of a lady on the lid, and in it she put slips of paper, one word to a slip, with the word in Devanagari, a guess at how it should be said, the village it came from, and a meaning, if she could get one. By the time she died in 1993 the tin held about four thousand slips. Some of the meanings are wrong. Some of the slips have three meanings, crossed out in turn. A great many say only "Pukhar. Old Chhajju says. Meaning?"

The tin is beside me now. It has lost its lady.

Your nineteen words have been checked against it. Kusum and I sat up two evenings, with the slips spread on the treasury floor in rows like a game of patience, and she read your words out one by one, and I hunted. I found fourteen. Five I could not find, and I will tell you about those at the end.

Here are some of the fourteen. I give them as my mother wrote them, with her guess at the sound, and then as I would say them, which is not always the same.

*Khiunda*. My mother wrote "khee-oon-da," and the meaning: "the first thin snow that does not stay." I would say it shorter, with the "oon" swallowed. Your grandmother probably used it of the first cold morning in Gravesend in November.

*Bhaunli*. "bhown-lee." "A small dizziness from standing up too fast, or from happiness." I love this one. My mother put two exclamation marks after it.

*Chhapru*. "chhup-roo." "The space under the eaves where the children hide." Every house in Pukhar has one. Your grandmother would have had one.

*Thaur*. "thowr," rhyming with "our." "A resting place on a steep path, usually a flat stone, where you put down your load." There were thaurs on every path in the state, and on the long path to Pukhar they had names. One is still called Rani da thaur, because my grandmother is supposed to have sat on it in 1905 and refused to go further.

*Ghumbri*. "ghoom-bree." "The sound of the river in spring, heard from far above." Not the river itself. The sound of it, from far off.

*Bhitru*. "bhit-roo." "Someone from inside the house," but my mother added, "also used for someone who has married in and has now been forgiven for it."

*Saungal*. "sown-gul." "The chain that holds the cooking pot over the fire." Also, in Pukhar, used of a grandmother.

That last one, Tulsi, I think is why your grandmother used it. I think she was the saungal of your family, the chain that held the pot over the fire, and I think she knew it.

* * *

Kusum has put all fourteen into the family's word list, which is a newer and more orderly version of the tin, kept on her screen. It is not a dictionary. It is the words of the families of the state, as they actually used them, each one with the village it belongs to, the meaning, any notes, and the name of the family who gave it. And each word has the sound of it, spoken by someone from that village, so a child in Gravesend can press a small button and hear it in the voice of a grandmother in Pukhar. There are now a little more than six hundred words recorded there. The tin has four thousand. You can see the work in front of us.

I want to tell you how the sounds were recorded, because it matters.

Three summers ago my grandniece Ishani, who was then at university in California and home for the holidays, went up to Pukhar with Kusum for a week. They stayed in the house of a woman named Lahru Devi, who is eighty-four and has the clearest speech in the village and, I am told, the strongest opinions about tea. Every evening after the meal, by the fire, they asked her to say words from the tin. She said them. Then she explained why my mother's meanings were wrong. Then, at length, she gave the right ones. Kusum recorded her, but only after asking, every night, the same three questions: may we record this, who may hear it, and may we use your name. Lahru Devi said yes to all three, and then said, "Who else would they hear it from? My own grandchildren are in Chandigarh and do not call."

They call now. I will come to that.

* * *

The five words I could not find.

One of them, *phirku*, I think is not from Pukhar at all. I think it is from the plains, or from Gravesend, or from somewhere your grandmother picked it up in sixty years of living abroad, because languages travel with people and pick things up the way a coat picks up burrs. That does not make it less hers.

But the other four are in no tin and no list. They are *ronsa*, *dhalaru*, *kuthi* (which in the town means a granary but which your grandmother, you say, used of a person), and *chhulmi*. You have written next to *chhulmi*: "used when someone left the room." I have been saying it aloud to myself for two days. I think I know what it is. I think it is the word for the warmth that stays on a seat after someone has stood up from it. I think I heard it once, from a Pukhar shepherd's wife, in the 1950s, and never wrote it down, and I have been angry with myself ever since. But I am not sure. And I will not put a meaning on a word on the strength of an old woman's half-memory, not even my own.

So here is my suggestion. Kusum will set up a call for you with Lahru Devi. It will be at seven in the morning in Gravesend and half past eleven in Pukhar, which is the hour when she has finished her work and the sun is fully on the roof and she is at her most talkative. Her granddaughter in Chandigarh will join from her office to help with the connection and to translate, if you need it. You will say your five words. And Lahru Devi will tell you what they mean, or that they mean nothing, or, if she is in a mood, that they mean something she will not say in front of a young woman. Whatever she says, if she agrees, will go into the list, with her voice and her name and yours.

And then, if you would, I would like you to do the same thing for her. Say a word from Gravesend. One that your daughter uses at home that nobody in Pukhar would know. Lahru Devi has asked for this. She says it is only fair. She says she has been giving words away for three summers and wants one back.

* * *

You said you want your daughter to have them. I want to say something about that, as someone who has spent a long life with a tin of words.

A word in a list is a pressed flower. It is beautiful and it tells you something was alive once. But a word that is said, at the table, about a real thing, is a seed. Your grandmother did not teach you *bhaunli* by defining it. She said it, standing up too fast from the sofa in Gravesend, holding her head and laughing. And you remembered, because it was attached to her.

So please do not only give your daughter the list. Use the words. Say *khiunda* on the first thin cold morning. Say *thaur* when you stop to rest on the walk up from the station. Call the space under her bed a *chhapru*. Let her think, for a few years, that everybody talks like this, until one day at school she discovers they do not, and comes home indignant, and asks you why.

Then send her to me. Or to whoever is answering the letters by then.

With love, and with a word for you,

*Chhulmi*,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 10: The Wedding Year, 1961

*From Wolverhampton, from Bimla Kaundal, aged fifty-nine:*

*"My mother, Kirpa Devi, turns eighty-five in December. She has one photograph from home: herself at nineteen in a red dhatu, dancing in a long line at a wedding below the palace, with lamps in the trees. She says it was the Tikka-sahib's wedding. She says she danced next to the Raja's sister. Is that you? We want to make her birthday special, and we don't know anything about that night except what she tells us, which changes."*

---

Dear Bimla,

That is me. Third from the right, in a borrowed dhatu that was too big, with my hand on your mother's shoulder because she was the only girl in the line who knew the steps and I was trying not to fall over. I remember her. She had a laugh that went up at the end like a question, and she kept saying, "Bai-ji, left foot, *left*," and I kept using the right one.

What she tells you changes because that night was too large to tell the same way twice. Let me give you my version, and you can put it beside hers.

* * *

My brother, Tikka Jaswant Chand, was married on the twenty-fourth of February 1961, at twenty-five, to Devika, the second daughter of a hill house three valleys west. It was the last time the house did anything on the old scale, and everybody knew it, though nobody said it. The state had been gone thirteen years. The privy purse still came. My father was fifty and had gray at his temples and had decided, I think, that if his son was to be the last Tikka-sahib to be married as one, then the whole of the old state would be fed, every village, no exceptions, and nobody would be asked whether they could afford a gift.

The wedding party went to fetch the bride on foot and horseback over the pass, three days there and three days back, with drums. I was not allowed to go. I was twenty and furious about it. I stayed behind to help my mother, which meant that for a week I walked between the palace and the polo ground with lists, while the polo ground was turned from a field into a town.

You will want to picture the polo ground, because your mother's photograph was taken there. It is the only flat piece of land in the town, a long green shelf below the palace on the south side, with the old wall above it and the drop to the river below, and on three sides it is ringed with deodars, very tall, planted by my great-grandfather when he decided the house needed a polo ground and discovered there was nowhere to put one. He had a quarter of the hillside levelled by hand. It took four years. On match days in my childhood the whole town sat along the wall with their legs dangling, and the ponies thundered up and down below them, and you could see the snow over the far end of the ground the whole time, so that every goal seemed to have been scored at the foot of the mountains.

For the wedding, the ground became Bishan's kitchen and the state's dining room. The cauldrons were dug into fire pits along the river side. The rows for the dham were laid out on the grass in lines of leaf plates two hundred yards long. And my brother, who was an engineer at heart and had been trying for years to get electricity up from Saroli, had strung a line of lamps through the deodars, oil lamps in glass chimneys hung on wires, hundreds of them. On the last night, when the bride had come and the feast was done, the lamps were lit all at once, and the whole ring of trees came alive, and the snow on the range above went pink with the sunset at exactly the same time, and there was a noise from two thousand four hundred people that I have never heard before or since, not a cheer exactly. A sort of breath.

That is your mother's photograph. The dancing line under the lamps. The *nati*, the long line dance of the hills, slow, slow, then fast, everybody holding hands or shoulders, stepping and dipping in a chain that goes round and round the dancing ground like water round a stone, for hours, while the drums and the long brass horns play. Every village sent its girls in their best. Your mother came from Jhunari, the village on the ridge across from the palace, which was famous for its dancers. The girls of Jhunari led the line. I was only in it because my mother pushed me in.

* * *

I should tell you about my brother, because this was his night, and because you will want to know what kind of man your mother danced at the wedding of.

Jaswant was four years older than me, and from the day he was born he was the Tikka, the heir, the one for whom the chair was being kept. I do not think he ever liked it. He liked machines. As a boy he took apart my father's gramophone and put it back together so that it played slightly faster than before. He went to a school in the plains for princes' sons where they were taught to ride and shoot and make speeches, and he wrote home every week asking for books on engines. He wanted to be an engineer. My father, very gently, said no. A Tikka-sahib did not become an engineer in 1955. So my brother became what the house needed instead, and spent the rest of his life finding small ways to be an engineer anyway.

He brought electricity to the town in 1958, by sitting in offices until people gave in. He built the first proper water pipes from the cold spring above the palace to the bazaar, so that the women of the town stopped carrying water up the steps. He drove the first motor car up the new road in 1963, a very old Morris, which broke down at the fourth hairpin and had to be pushed the rest of the way by schoolboys. In 1971, when the purse ended, he was the one who went through the house's accounts line by line and found that it could be done, the pensions could be paid, if certain things were sold. He did not enjoy that either.

He was not a talker. My father argued with newspapers; my brother fixed the radio so my father could argue with it more clearly. He walked down to the bus stand below the gate every time a man of the state left for England, and shook his hand, and asked him to write, and gave him a slip of paper with the palace address on it. He did this for fifteen years. He kept the replies in shoeboxes, one box per village, and they are the backbone of everything Kusum has built. There are four hundred and twelve of them.

And on his wedding night, after the lamps were lit, he did something that I do not think your mother saw, because she was dancing. He went down the long rows of leaf plates, where the last of the feast was being eaten by the families from the furthest villages, who had walked the longest and eaten last, and he sat down at the end of a row, beside an old man from Pukhar, and ate a plate of madra, in his wedding clothes, with his hands. Then he got up and walked to the next row, and did it again. My mother saw him and sent me to stop him, because he would ruin the brocade. I went down, and he looked up at me with his mouth full and said, "Sunanda, they walked for two days." I left him alone. He ate at eleven rows before Devika came and took him away.

* * *

Now, the birthday.

Kusum has made your mother a page. She asked me first if I minded my own photograph being on it, which I do not, since I look like a girl who is about to fall over, which I was. The page has your mother's photograph from 1961 at the top, very large, with the date and the place under it and the names of every girl in the line that we could identify. There were nineteen. We have found fourteen. Two of them are still alive in Jhunari, and one is in Brampton, and one is in Wolverhampton, three streets from you, Bimla, and has been for forty years, and neither of them knew.

Below the photograph is a place for messages, and Kusum has sent the link to Jhunari, to the Jhunari families abroad, to the families of the other girls in the line, and to me. So far there are thirty-eight messages. There is a video from the two old women in Jhunari, sitting on a stone bench in the sun outside the village school, singing the first verse of the song the line danced to that night, and then arguing about the second verse. There is a voice message from the woman in Brampton, who says your mother owes her four annas from 1961 and she would like it back with interest. There is a photograph of the Jhunari dancers at last year's fair, eighteen girls in red, on the same polo ground, under electric lights this time, in the same line. And there is a message from my brother's son, Raghav, who is the head of the house now and who was not born until two years after that night. He has written, very simply, "My father told me about the girls from Jhunari. Happy birthday, Kirpa Devi-ji. Thank you for dancing at his wedding."

The page will stay up, Bimla. After the birthday it will go into your family's part of the family tree, where your mother's line is, so that your grandchildren can find it and see what their great-grandmother looked like at nineteen under the lamps, with a Raja's daughter holding onto her shoulder.

* * *

My message is on the page too, but I will put it here as well, in case she would rather read it on paper.

Kirpa Devi, you told me left foot, and I used the right one, and you did not let go. I have thought of that more than once in sixty-five years, at moments when I was using the wrong foot about something important. Thank you for not letting go. Happy eighty-fifth birthday from the clumsiest dancer in the line.

And Bimla, my question back, which this time is for your mother, not you: what was the song? Not the tune; I can hum the tune. The words. The two women in Jhunari cannot agree on the second verse, and I suspect your mother can settle it, and I suspect she will enjoy settling it very much.

With love from the polo ground,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 11: A Cloth for Covering Gifts

*From Toronto, from Arnav Bhardwaj, aged twenty-nine, a museum technician, with three photographs:*

*"My grandmother left me a square cloth, about two feet across, embroidered on both sides with a scene of the Raja playing chaupar with his wife under a tree, with deer and a peacock. My museum's textile people say it is a Pahari rumal and very fine, but they cannot place it. My grandmother was from Bhalun. I would like to know who made it, and I would like to know how to look after it without ruining it. Also, are both sides really supposed to be the same?"*

---

Dear Arnav,

Yes, both sides are supposed to be the same. That is the whole point, and the whole difficulty, and the reason the women of Bhalun were famous in four valleys and paid by none of them. I will tell you about the stitch, and about the woman I believe made your cloth, and I will tell you something you did not ask, which is how I came to learn, this month, from a young woman in Kyoto, exactly how to answer your second question.

* * *

Bhalun first, because you have not been, and your grandmother would want you to see it properly.

It is the village of the long ridge, the one that runs south from the town like the spine of a sleeping animal, and it is strung out along the crest in a single line of houses, so that every house has a view down both sides at once: east to the orchards and the river, west to the terraces falling away toward the plains, which on a clear winter day lie spread out below like a brown and gold sea, with the haze of distant towns floating on it. Bhalun is windy. The houses are built with their backs to the north and their faces to the sun, with wide wooden balconies on the upper floor where, for as long as anyone remembers, the women of Bhalun sat to sew, because the light on the ridge is the best in the state. In the afternoons you could walk the length of the village under a row of balconies, and look up, and see the women working above you, a line of bent heads and moving hands and bright cloth, and hear them talking from balcony to balcony all the way along the ridge, so that a piece of news started at one end of Bhalun arrived at the other in about four minutes.

What they made was rumals. A rumal, in the hills, is a square of fine cotton, usually unbleached or white, embroidered all over with a scene, and it was used for one thing above all: to cover a gift. When a family sent sweets or fruit or cloth to another family, at a wedding, at a birth, at a festival, the tray went with a rumal over it. Nobody would send an uncovered tray. It would have been like handing someone a letter without an envelope. And because the rumal was seen first, before the gift, it said everything the family wanted to say about itself before a single sweet was tasted.

The Bhalun rumals were the finest in the old state. The women drew the scene first, faintly, often copied from a painting by the men of Ghatasni, which is why your rumal looks so much like a miniature. Then they filled it entirely, every leaf and hoof and fold of cloth, with a stitch in untwisted silk thread, worked so that it lies flat and identical on front and back. There is no wrong side. There are no knots. There are no loose ends. The thread passes back and forth through the cloth so tightly that the picture is on both faces at once, like a thought that is the same whichever way you turn it. The silk came up from the plains, on the little train, in skeins of a dozen colors. The most prized was a deep, glowing pink that the women called *gulabi*, and which only one family in Bhalun could dye to their satisfaction.

* * *

Now, who made yours.

The scene of a Raja and Rani playing chaupar, the game of the cross-shaped board, under a tree with deer and a peacock, was made many times in Bhalun, because it was the most popular scene for wedding gifts. A husband and wife at their ease, at play together, under shade, with nature tame around them. It is a scene that means "may you have time for each other." But there are three things in your photographs that I recognized as soon as Kusum put them on her screen and I put on both pairs of my spectacles.

The first is that the peacock is looking backwards over its shoulder, at the Rani. The second is that one of the deer has a single white hoof, which is borrowed from old Lekh Raj of Ghatasni and which nobody in Bhalun was supposed to copy. And the third is that, in the lower corner of the border, among the twisting vine, there is a tiny bird, no bigger than a grain of rice, sitting in a tiny nest.

The woman who did all three was named Sukhdei, and she worked on the balcony of the fourth house from the south end of Bhalun from about 1930 until her eyes failed in 1966. My mother knew her well. She is in my mother's register, and in the ledger of the paintings, and in the tin of words, because she gave my mother half the needlework words in it. She was, by every account, the best needlewoman the state ever had. She was also a thief, by her own cheerful admission, because she stole details from everybody: the white hoof from Lekh Raj, a curl of water from his son, a way of drawing the Rani's veil from a painting she once saw in the palace and copied from memory. My mother asked her why she put a little bird in a nest in the corner of every rumal. Sukhdei said it was so that people would know the cloth had come from somebody's home.

Your grandmother's line, Arnav, Kusum has found in the family tree, and here I can be certain. Your grandmother was Nirmala Bhardwaj, born in Bhalun in 1941, daughter of Sukhdei's own daughter. This rumal was very probably made by your great-great-grandmother for your great-grandmother's wedding, and given to your grandmother when she married and left for Canada. It may be the last of Sukhdei's rumals still in the family that made it. All the others we know of, there are nine, are in museums or in the houses of families who received them as gifts.

Kusum has made a page for it in the collection. Your three photographs are there, front and back, with its history set down in order: who made it, when, for whose wedding, who carried it to Toronto, and when, and now you. Beside it are the pages for the other nine Sukhdei rumals that we have found, with their own histories, wherever they are. One is in a museum in London. One is in a family's sitting room in Leicester, in a frame, covering, as the family put it, "a damp patch." And one, the finest of all, is in our own collection in the palace, in a drawer in the room where my mother kept the paintings, and I have to tell you about it, because of your second question.

* * *

Our rumal is the one Sukhdei made in 1961 for my brother's wedding. It shows a wedding procession winding up a mountain path toward a palace at the top, with snow above, and lamps in the trees, and a line of dancers. It took her and two of her daughters eleven months. It covered the tray of sweets that my mother sent to the bride's family on the morning of the wedding. And then, for sixty years, it lay in a drawer, and over the last twenty of those years it began, very slowly, to come apart. The silk threads in the pink, which was always the most fragile dye, went brittle and began to split. Moths found one corner. And none of us knew what to do. Kusum had been photographing it every six months, carefully, the same way she photographs the temple roof at Dharoti, and the photographs showed the damage spreading, a little at a time, like frost on a window.

Now. This October, my grandniece Ishani, who lives in California and works for a family foundation there, went to a philanthropy summit in Lisbon. She went for her own work and not for the house. But she took photographs of our rumal on her phone, because she takes the house everywhere with her, and on the first evening, at the reception on a terrace hanging over the river, she found herself standing next to a quiet young woman from Kyoto named Rina Kazemori, who restores old textiles and armor for a living and whose own family is an old house in the snow country of Japan, with a storehouse full of things nobody had cataloged for a long time.

Ishani showed her the photographs. Rina, she tells me, put down her cup of tea and did not pick it up again for the rest of the evening.

They talked until the staff began stacking the chairs. Rina asked to see the back of the cloth, then the edges, then the corner the moths had found. She asked what the silk was, and where the dye came from, and who in the house had touched it last and when. Ishani rang me from the street afterwards, at what was for me nearly five in the morning, so that Rina could ask me some questions directly, and I sat up in bed in the dark with the phone and answered them as well as an old woman can who has been woken by her grandniece and a stranger from Japan. Rina's English was very careful and very soft. She asked whether anyone in Bhalun still knew the stitch. I said I thought two women did. She said, then, the most important thing is not the cloth. It is the two women. The cloth can wait in a dark drawer. They cannot.

I have been thinking about that for a week.

* * *

Rina has since sent Kusum a set of instructions for our rumal. Then, when I told her about your letter, she wrote some for yours as well, and said I might pass them on, with her name. I give them to you in her own words, as she wrote them, because they are better than anything I could put.

"Keep it flat, never folded. Fold lines become breaks. Keep it in the dark, between sheets of clean undyed cotton or acid-free tissue, in a drawer or a box, not a frame, unless the frame is made by someone who does this for a living. Keep the room cool and the air dry but not too dry. Do not wash it. Do not iron it. Do not let anyone touch it without clean dry hands, and better with cotton gloves. If you want to look at it, take it out, look at it with the people who love it, and put it back. Photograph it once a year, both sides, the same way, so that you will know if it is changing. If it changes, ask for help early, not late. And find the two women in Bhalun. Ask them to show someone the stitch."

I have nothing to add, Arnav, except that you work in a museum and probably knew all of this already, and that sometimes it is good to hear it from someone else, in someone else's voice, about one's own grandmother's cloth.

* * *

I said I would tell you about the two women.

They are Sukhdei's great-granddaughters, which makes them your cousins at some remove that Kusum is still working out. Their names are Mallika and Vandana. They are sixty-eight and seventy-one. They live in the fourth house from the south end of Bhalun, the same house, and on a fine afternoon they still sit on the same balcony, and they still do the double-sided stitch, though much more slowly, and they say their eyes are going too. They have not taught anyone because nobody has asked. The girls of Bhalun now go to college in Chandigarh and Delhi and do not come home to sit on balconies.

Rina, from Kyoto, has asked whether she might come to Bhalun next spring to learn the stitch from them, for her own work. Ishani has asked whether she might come too. And I am asking you.

You work with textiles. You have Sukhdei's hands somewhere in you, four generations down. You have a rumal that was made by her, which you could bring, so that her great-granddaughters could see the back of it and know whose bird that is in the corner. In April the rhododendrons are out along the ridge, great trees of them, scarlet, and the snow is still on the range, and the balconies of Bhalun are in the sun from noon until five.

I can promise you a room in the palace, a seat on the balcony, two strict teachers who will not let you hold the needle wrongly, a young woman from Kyoto who will not let you breathe on the silk, and my grandniece, who will be photographing everything.

I can promise you nothing about your eyes. But you are twenty-nine. You have time. That is the whole reason I am asking you and not someone my age.

With a small bird in the corner,

Sunanda Talehra

Chapter 12: Who Answers After

*This question did not come by post. It came from across the desk, from Kusum Bhatia of Bareri, aged thirty-one, who keeps the house's office, on a wet evening in late October, after she had read out the last of the week's letters:*

*"Bai-ji, who will answer them after you?"*

---

Dear Kusum,

You asked it lightly and then went pink and pretended to look for your pen, so I knew you had been carrying it for a while. You deserve a written answer, the same as anyone in Wednesbury or Toronto. You are, after all, one of the people of the state, and the granddaughter of the woman by the cold spring who remembers which goat ate the schoolmaster's umbrella. So here it is, on the same paper and in the same ink.

* * *

First, let me say what I have been doing all these years, since nobody has ever asked me to describe it, and I am not sure I could have, until the letters began to pile up on your screen.

I have been writing down the house from the side. That is the only place I ever stood. My grandfather Hamir Chand walked every path and wrote down how long things took. My father Uday Chand signed the state away and then sat on the edge of the goldfish tank in his traveling coat. My brother Jaswant shook hands at the bus stand and ate madra at eleven rows in his wedding brocade. His son Raghav sits in this house now and does the accounts and goes to too many meetings and answers his own phone, which his grandfather would have found astonishing. And Raghav's children, Ishani in California and her brother the architect in London, carry the house about with them on their phones and show it to strangers in Lisbon. Five generations. I have been in the room for four of them, and I was never once the one in the chair.

That is not a complaint. It is my qualification. The person in the chair cannot see the chair. They are too busy sitting in it. Somebody has to stand by the door with the list.

* * *

Here is what I have learned standing there, set down plainly so that you can take it or leave it.

The people of the state did not stop being the people of the state when they got on the train at Saroli. My brother knew that. He kept four hundred and twelve letters in shoeboxes to prove it. They became the people of the state in Wednesbury and Brampton and Milpitas, which is harder, because there is no meadow at Dharoti to meet in, no polo ground with lamps, nobody across the balcony to pass the news along. So they meet in small things. A word for the warmth left on a seat. A pinch of nutmeg on the madra. A crooked name carved upside down on a beam. When a family abroad writes to ask about one of those small things, they are not really asking about the thing. They are asking whether they are still from here. The answer must always be yes, and it must always come with a name, a date, and a question back.

The house owes the people the truth, including the parts that do not flatter the house. I learned that from Nihal's grandfather and the spring grove at Kunsal. The house sold paintings. The house signed away forests that were not only its own. The house cried at Neelikot and then sold it anyway, which was right. A record that only keeps the good parts is a shrine to ourselves, and I would rather the house had none.

Nothing goes into the keeping without the person's say, or their family's. Not a voice, not a photograph, not a letter sealed for sixty years. My mother's rule. It slows everything down. It is the only reason anybody trusts us with anything.

And a photograph without a date is only a rumor. You know that one. You have heard me say it four hundred times.

* * *

Now, your question.

The easy answer is: Raghav. He is the head of the house, and in the old way the letters to the people of the state went out in the Raja's name, even when my mother wrote them. But Raghav will tell you himself that he cannot do it. He is good at the accounts and the meetings and the long, unglamorous work of keeping the roofs on, and he will stand by you in all of that. He does not have the patience to read a letter from Leicester three times before answering it. He knows this. He has said so, kindly, at least twice.

The second answer is: Ishani. She has the patience and the phone and the habit of carrying the house to the other side of the world. She is the one who stood next to a textile restorer from Kyoto on a terrace in Lisbon this month and came away with instructions for two rumals and a promise of a visit to Bhalun in April. She will be a great deal of use to the house for the rest of her life. But she lives eight thousand miles away and is twenty-seven, and her work, which is helping old families find money for the things they are trying to save, will take her farther before it brings her home. She will not be the one at this desk.

So here is the true answer, Kusum, which I think you know and were too polite to say.

You will.

Not because I say so. I do not have the chair to give, and neither, any longer, does anyone. But because for six years you have been the one who reads me the letters, finds the page in the register, moves the pin twice until it is in the right place, asks the three questions before every recording, photographs the temple roof from the same eight stones, and knows that the walnut in Bareri is not bowing but tired. You are from Bareri. Your great-grandfather's name is on page forty-one, three households down from the Katwals. You are the people of the state, answering the people of the state. That is better than anything my family could have arranged.

Raghav agrees. I asked him at dinner on Tuesday. He said, "Bua, I assumed it was already decided." I said things are not decided in this house until somebody writes them down.

So I am writing it down.

* * *

There are some practical things, and then I will stop.

The red register, my mother's, is yours to keep in this room. Do not let anybody take it to Delhi to be scanned. You have already photographed every page; that is enough. The original stays where the people of the state can come and look at it.

The tin of words is yours too. Six hundred are in the list. Three thousand four hundred are not. Lahru Devi in Pukhar will not live forever, and neither will the women on the balcony in Bhalun. Go up while the paths are open.

The roof at Dharoti needs carpenters in four years. Om Prakash Banyal's granddaughter in Leicester has written to say she has found a cabinet-maker in Loughborough whose grandmother was from Pukhar and who has never been told. Follow it.

Lajwanti Sankhyan's letter arrived on Thursday. It is in the drawer of my desk, still sealed, waiting for the call. I would like you to be in the room when we open it. I would like you to hold the list.

Bimla Kaundal's mother sang the second verse. The two women in Jhunari say she is wrong. Leave it unresolved. Some things in a record should be.

And the letters will keep coming. Every week there are more. Last month there were eleven. This month already fourteen, one from Brisbane, which is new. Answer them the way you would want your grandmother to be answered: the same day if you can, with a name and a date and a place, and a question back. Always a question back. The question is what turns a letter into a correspondence, and a correspondence into a family.

* * *

I am eighty-six. The rain has stopped while I wrote this, and the clouds are lifting off the range in long gray strips, the way they do at the end of October, so that the Dhauladhar comes out of them a piece at a time, ridge, then shoulder, then the high white wall, freshly snowed on since this morning and lit gold from the west. The town below the window is wet slate and woodsmoke. Somebody in the bazaar is frying babru. The bell on the clock gate is striking six, a little late, as it has been since 1958, when my brother fixed it.

I will go on answering for as long as my hand holds. But I wanted you to have this in writing now, while I can still say it clearly, because I have spent my life watching what happens to the things that were only ever said aloud.

You asked who will answer them after me.

You will, my dear. You already do. I have only been signing them.

With my mother's ink and my whole trust,

Sunanda Talehra