The Leopard

Monsoon, the Himalayan foothills

The mountains are solitary.

That's why people go up in parties to their summer homes, when the hill clubs have their short seasons with dancing and bunting and gaiety.

I've never felt that the weather is bad when out of season.

The weather is always bad when you're alone.

________

I went up this past year after the last house parties had fled the hills. In the plains, it was still hot. But once you passed the first pine trees, the world was different. It started to rain as soon as I crossed B****. A sodden monkey barely escaped my tyres. I braked to look at the dripping troop on the far side of the road. They should have been screaming, but they seemed lost as well. I looked around for the alpha, but the rain had reduced them all. I got out, walked by the troop to the fall where I'd filled my bottle in years past. The monkeys skulked away. Only one, the beast I'd almost despatched, looked at me.

He had a cut across his lip. He shook himself, gazed at me, his fangs bared. Then he ran as well.

I turned to see what had caused his silent flight. Up the side of the hill ran the low scrub—verdant, now—that covered this range at this height. I realised that I was getting soaked. I walked to the edge. The first chir pine on the rising road shaped the rain away from me. Cutlip looked back at me. Over his shoulder was the distant gap between the hills where the plains steamed. I could hear the steady fall of the stream behind me and up the road a truck descending and the tired beating of the wipers on my car.

To sit under a tree by the side of the road while the world melted seemed the only thing to do. But I needed to be at the barrier by dusk. Then my journey would almost be at an end.

"Good season?"

"Always," smiled the barrier guard.

The road had disappeared, as always, under the weight of the army lorries and the vans carrying the day-trippers. My way lay under the dripping deodars, past the old colonial club and the houses with the improbably Irish and Scottish names. The rain was stopping as I entered the old town. I slowed to pass a man walking under an umbrella. I must know him, I thought; there were never any strangers in these hills. But his unknown eyes refused my unspoken offer.

Soon, I was at the house. The oak that shaded the driveway shook its branches, spattering my head as Mangtu ran out with an umbrella. He smiled, as he had at my arrival for forty years. I could tell the passage of time with the disappearance of his teeth. Now, his smile was a maw. I hugged him as I had since I was a boy.

"Good drive?"

I shrugged.

"Alone?"

I walked past, into my family's home.

The lights were on inside. Soon tea was at my elbow, by the window looking across to the big mountains. They were covered by clouds picked out in the last light of the dying day. I thought I saw the icy spear of N****, but then it was night and all I could see were the lights, more every year, in the valley below. In the far distance was the snaking road along which moves the commerce of these hills and farther mountains and the lights along it were as fireflies.

The water was warm, he said. A whisky would be waiting when I emerged.

After, I asked for a chair by the garden wall. I sat with my feet on the parapet, looking across to where the old school should have been. The distant road and its travellers had disappeared into the enveloping cloud.

Mangtu brought me a refill.

"Not going to the club?"

I didn't bother replying.

"Dinner for one?"

I nodded.

"He's old enough to walk these hills with us, you know."

Yes...