Scribd
Upload
630 views5 pages

The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy

The document describes a woman whose husband Michael has a strong passion for mountain climbing that takes him away from her each year. The last time he goes on a trek to Roopkund Lake at 16,000 feet, he does not return. After days of searching, his body is found near the lake with injuries indicating he died from exposure during a snowstorm.

Uploaded by

don16.jose
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
630 views5 pages

The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy

The document describes a woman whose husband Michael has a strong passion for mountain climbing that takes him away from her each year. The last time he goes on a trek to Roopkund Lake at 16,000 feet, he does not return. After days of searching, his body is found near the lake with injuries indicating he died from exposure during a snowstorm.

Uploaded by

don16.jose
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 5

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fnortheastreview.wordpress.

com%2F2012%2F11%2F01%2Fanuradha-
roy%2F&psig=AOvVaw0PC1uKe7zvC67M2JQrT_wx&ust=1665844025701000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjRxqFwoTCNiM4eP23_oCFQAAAAAdAAAAA BA
N

My rival in love was not a woman but a mountain


range. It was very soon after my wedding that I
discovered this. We had defied our families to be
together, and those first few months we were
exultant castaways who had fitted the universe into
two rented rooms and a narrow bed. Daytime was
only waiting for evening, when we would be
together. Nights were not for sleeping. It took many
good-byes before we could bear to walk off in different shorturl.at/uAPQ2
directions in the mornings. Not for long.

It began in little ways—silences, the poring over maps, the unearthing of boots and
jackets stuffed in a suitcase under our bed—and then the slow-burning restlessness
in Michael became overpowering. He was with me, but not with me. His feet walked
on flat land but flexed themselves for inclines. He lay at night with his eyes open,
dreaming. He studied weather reports for places I had never heard of.
Michael was not a climber; he was a press photographer. Through a school friend
whose father was an editor, he had found a job with a newspaper when we got
married. We could not afford more than an annual trek for him in the mountains and
that one trek was what he lived for all year.
Michael’s yearnings made me understand how
it is that some people have the mountains in them
while some have the sea. The ocean exerts an
inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are—
in a bright-lit, inland city
or the dead center of a desert— and when they feel
the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it
and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge,
straightaway calmed. Hill people, even if they are
born in flatlands, cannot be parted for long from the
mountains. Anywhere else is exile. Anywhere else, the
ground is too flat, the air too dense, the trees too broad-
shorturl.at/elCW1 leaved for beauty. The color of the light is all wrong, the
sounds nothing but noise.

I knew from our student days together that Michael trekked and climbed. What I
had not known was that his need for the mountains was as powerful as his need for
me. We were far away from the high peaks: we lived in Hyderabad. The journey to the
foothills of the Himalaya took two nights on trains and cars and it took many more
days to reach the peaks. No hills closer at hand would do. Not the Nilgiris, nor the
entire Western Ghats. It had to be the Himalaya—it would be impossible for me to
understand why until I experienced it, Michael told me, and one day I would.
Meanwhile, each year, the rucksack and sleeping bag came out and his body left in a
trail of his mind, which was already nine thousand feet above sea level and climbing.
One year, Michael decided to go on a
trek to Roopkund, a lake in the Himalaya at
about sixteen thousand feet. It is reached
by a long, hard climb toward the Trishul, a
snow peak that is more than twenty-two
thousand feet high. For much of the year,
its water remains frozen. A park ranger
stumbled upon the lake in 1942 and it has
been an enigma ever since: it contains the
bones and skulls, preserved by the cold, of
some six hundred people who died there in
the ninth century, some say the sixth. Many
of the skeletons wore gold anklets,
bracelets, necklaces, and bangles. Six
hundred travelers at that altitude, in that
stark wilderness—where were they going?
Impossible to tell: there was no known shorturl.at/auFOS
route from Roopkund to Tibet, or to
anywhere else. How did they die?
Archeologists think they may have been
caught in an avalanche or hit by large hailstones: there are tennis-ball-sized dents on
many of the skulls.

The bones were stripped of their jewelry and most of


them were left where they were. And there they have
remained, although momento-seekers have carried off
bits and pieces as trophies. Even now, each time the
lake melts during the monsoon, bones and skulls float
in the water and wash up at its edges. Michael had tried
to reach Roopkund once before and failed because of
bad weather and lack of experience. This time, he had
better equipment, he said; he was timing it differently,
he knew what to expect. Even so, I felt a cloud of dread
grow and darken as the day for his departure neared. I
found myself looking at him with an intensity I had
forgotten over six years of being married to him. The
smell of him, which I breathed in deep as if to store
inside me; the bump on his nose where it had been
broken when he was a boy; the early lines of gray in his hair;
the way he cleared his throat mid-sentence and pulled at his earlobes when thinking
hard.
shorturl.at/lvIY3
He knew I was worrying, and the night before he left, as
I lay on my stomach and his fingers wandered my tense back and aching neck, he
told me in a voice hardly more than a murmur about the route: the trek was not really
difficult, he said, it only sounded as if it was. His fingers went down my spine and up
my neck while an iron ball of fear grew heavier inside me. Many had done it before,
he said. The rains and snow would have retreated from that altitude by the time they
reached it; there would be wildflowers all over the high meadows on their route. His
hands worked their way from my legs to my shoulders, finding knotted muscles,
teasing them loose before he returned to my back. The boots, sleeping bag, tent,
would be checked, every zip tried, every rope tested. The bulbs and batteries in his
headlamp were new, he would get himself better sunglasses in Delhi. It was as if he
was running through a list in his head.

Each item he mentioned reminded me of things that could go wrong. I did not want
to know any more. I touched his always fast-growing stubble and I think I said, “By the
time you’re home you’ll have a beard again, like every other time.” My fingers held the
inch or two of fat he had recently grown at his waist. “And you’ll have lost this. You’ll
be thin and starved.”

“Completely starved,” he said. “Lean and hungry.” His teeth tugged at my earlobes.
He stretched over me to switch on the shaded lamp by our bed and traced with his
eyes every curve of my face and the dimple on my chin. “Why did he marry this girl?”
he said in a voice that imitated the stereotypical older relative. “Why did he marry this
stick-thin girl, as dark as boot polish? All you can see in her face are her big eyes.” He
ran his fingers through the tangled mass of my hair. “Almost at your waist, Maya.
Where will it have grown to by the time I’m back?” I could smell onions frying although
it was almost midnight. On our neighbor’s radio, a prosaic voice reported floods,
scams, train accidents, cricket scores. Michael’s hand wandered downward until it
reached my hips. He said, “Your hair will be here—or maybe longer? This far?

I switched the light off.


--------------------------------------
The news came to me by way of my landlord, who had a telephone. They had
found Michael’s body after three days of searching. It was close to the lake, I was told,
he had almost made it there when the landslides, rain, and snowstorms came and
separated Michael from the others with him. His body had a broken ankle, which was
no doubt why he had not been able to move to a less exposed place. And the face
was unrecognizable, burned black by the cold.

-end-

You might also like