The Last Postwoman

The Last Mile of Road

They finished the road to Sera on a Tuesday, in the week the buransh came out red on the south face, and I was the last person in the valley to be glad of it.

You will think that strange. A woman of sixty-three who has walked these slopes for forty years, knees gone to gravel, the strap of the mail bag worn a groove in her shoulder you could lay a finger in — surely such a woman should fall on her face and thank the Devi that a motor will now do the climbing for her. The whole valley thought so. They had been wanting the road since before my husband died, and he died a long time ago. The men of Sera went down to meet the machine where it broke through the last spur. They put marigolds on the yellow digging-arm and a red tika on the driver's forehead and they cracked a coconut on the new gravel, and the boys who are left, which is not many, danced to a drum that has not been beaten for a happier reason in my lifetime.

I watched from above, sitting on the flat stone where I have always stopped to ease the bag and chew a little gur and let my heart find its feet again before the last pull to Sera. The stone is warm by noon even in winter. It knows me. I have left more of myself on that stone than I have left in some houses I was born into.

A road is a wonderful thing. I am not a fool, and I am not one of those old women who hates a thing only because it is new and she is not. A road means that Bhaguli of Sera, who is older than I am and whose legs filled with water years ago, can go to the hospital at Charkhet in an hour instead of being carried four days down in a basket by men who curse her weight without meaning it. A road means salt and kerosene come up cheap, and medicine comes up at all. A road means that when the snow takes the power line in January, a man can drive down and buy a candle.

But a road has only ever come into our valley to take something out. First the timber. Then the herbs the strangers pay so much for and call by Latin names. And then, for fifty years, our children, one bus-load at a time, down to the plains and the cities, to the army, to the hotels, to the factories that make I-don't-know-what. The road that reached Sera this Tuesday is only the last length of a rope that has been pulling the young out of these mountains my whole life. Now it has reached the top knot. There is nothing above Sera but the bugyal and the snow and the pass, and the pass goes nowhere a wheel can follow.

So that is the first thing the road took: my route. From this Tuesday there is no more dak-walli of the Lohini. The post will come up by jeep to the new tin shed they have bolted a red letter box to, and a boy on a motorcycle will run it the last little way to the doors, and he will do in a morning what took me three days, and he will never once be asked inside for tea, because nobody offers tea to a boy on a motorcycle. A boy on a motorcycle is not carrying anything but paper. I was carrying the valley's whole heart up and down on my back, and the valley knew it, and that is why I could not cross a yard without somebody pressing roti into my hand.

The second thing the road took I will get to. It is a longer story and I am an old woman and the light is good and I have, for the first time in forty years, nowhere in particular to be by dark. Let me sit on my warm stone a little longer.

You want to know the country first. People always want the country first, and then they forget it and only remember the people, which is backward, because in the mountains the country is a person and the people are weather.

The Lohini is a river the colour of a knife. It comes off the glacier under the Lasar pass white as milk in the melt and goes grey-green when the snow is done, and where it has cut down through the valley it has left us a ladder of villages, each one a day's hard climb or a half-day's easy one above the last. At the bottom is Charkhet, where the road has always ended until this week, where the bus turns around in a cloud of its own smoke, where the bazaar is, where the sub-post office is with its smell that I will tell you about because it is the smell of my whole working life. Then the path leaves the road and goes up.

First Dungri, where I was born, where the houses lean into the slope like old men into a wind. Then a long climb through the oak — banj, we call it, the oak that the cattle eat and the leopard waits in — to Sauni, which has the school, or had the school, when there were children. Then the worst stretch, the one we call the Slip, where the mountain has never decided whether it is a mountain or a river of stones, and where I have lost the path under fresh scree more mornings than I can count. Above the Slip the trees give out and the wind starts and you come to Khaal, which means the saddle, the windy notch where the Devi's stone is, where you can see both the way you came and the way you have left to go, and neither of them is encouraging. And then, last, highest, smallest, Sera. Beyond Sera the grass goes up into the bugyal where the shepherds take the sheep in summer, and above the grass the rock, and above the rock the snow that is there in June and there in January and does not care which.

Five places. Forty years. Three thousand climbs, if you do the figuring, and I have done the figuring on bad nights. A woman could walk to the moon on less.

I carried a canvas bag the government dyed an ugly red that faded in two monsoons to the colour of old blood, and on the strap I hung Khushal's bell, and in the bag I carried letters. That is all. I never carried a gun like the old runners did, though there were nights on the Slip I would have liked one. I carried letters, and money orders, and the form you sign for a registered envelope, and twice a year the school examination results, and now and then a telegram, which is a different animal and which I will come to, and once a wedding invitation card so heavy with gold paint that I cursed the bridegroom's family the whole way up and have forgiven them since, because the marriage was a good one and the man is dead now and you cannot stay angry at gold paint forever.

Other people's words. Forty years of other people's words, going up the mountain on my back. My own I left at home, in a tin box that once held English biscuits, where words keep without spoiling, the way a thing keeps when you never take it out into the air.

That is the second thing the road took. But I said I would come to it, and I will, and an old woman is allowed to take the path she knows.