His name was Shivappa. He had worked, in those years, at a small tea and betel shop near the old viewpoint, the kind of shop that opened when it opened and closed when the owner felt like closing it. He was somewhere in his forties then, broad-shouldered, slow to speak, and the only adult in Rohan's childhood who had never once seemed to be in a hurry.
It was Shivappa who had first taken him down the steep steps toward the base of the falls, holding his hand so tightly that Rohan's fingers had gone pale, telling him nothing about the danger and everything about the names of the four separate falls — Raja, Rani, Rocket, Roarer — as though introducing him to four members of a family he had not yet met.
It was Shivappa who had taught him to fold a boat from a dry leaf and set it into the shallow water near the estate, and to watch it turn and vanish around the bend, and to feel, each time, a small ache that he did not yet have the words for.
They had gone often to Sagara, on the back of Shivappa's old bicycle, Rohan sitting sideways on the crossbar, his school bag between them, to buy pens and notebooks from the one good shop on the main road, and to eat a plate of bonda from a stall that Shivappa swore, every single time, made the best bonda in the district.
They had sat through entire monsoons on the wide veranda of Shivappa's small house, watching the rain come down in sheets so thick that the hill across the valley disappeared entirely, Shivappa telling him stories about the dam upstream, about the village that now lay somewhere beneath the still, dark water of the reservoir, about a childhood that had itself been rearranged once by a rising tide.
Rohan had never once, in six years, heard Shivappa raise his voice.
He had not been an uncle. He had not been family in any way that could be written on paper. But he had been, for six years, the person Rohan trusted most in the world — and children, Rohan would understand only much later, do not measure love in blood. They measure it in time given freely.
When the transfer orders came, Rohan had cried for two days. Shivappa had not cried. He had only walked him to the bus stand on the morning they left, placed one hand briefly on his head, and said nothing at all — because, Rohan understood even then, there are things a grown man does not trust his voice to say.
He had written to him twice in the first year. The letters had gone unanswered — not out of unkindness, he told himself, but because Shivappa was not, and had never claimed to be, a man of letters. And then, the way it happens to children who are moved from city to city, the writing had stopped. Not because the memory had faded. Only because the days had filled with other things.
Ten years had filled with other things.
And yet, of everyone from his childhood, it was Shivappa's face Rohan saw most clearly when he closed his eyes. It was Shivappa's slow, unhurried voice he heard when the rain came down hard in whichever city he now lived in.
He had come back to find that voice.