The Inheritance of Loss (23 page)

"It took two weeks of rough trekking to get to Thimpu. On the way, through the jungle, we would stay in those shiplike fortresses called
dzongs,
built without a single nail. We’d send a man ahead with news of our arrival, and they’d send along a gift to welcome us at some midpoint. A hundred years ago it would have been Tibetan tea, saffron rice, silk robes from China lined with the fleece of unborn lambs, that kind of thing; by then, for us, it would be a picnic hamper of ham sandwiches and Gymkhana beer. The
dzongs
were completely self-contained, with their

own armies, peasants, aristocrats, and prisoners in the dungeons—murderers and men caught fishing with dynamite all thrown in together. When they needed a new cook or gardener, they put down a rope and pulled a man out. We’d arrive to find, in lantern-lit halls, cheese cauliflower and pigs in blankets. This one man, in for violent murder, had such a hand for pastry—Whatever it takes, he had it.

The best gooseberry tart I’ve ever tasted."

"And the baths," Father Booty joined in, "remember the baths? Once, when I was on a dairy outreach program, I stayed with the mother of the king, sister of Jigme Dorji, the Bhutanese agent and ruler of the province of Ha, who lived next to you, Sai, at Tashiding—he became so powerful that the king’s assassins killed him even though he was brother of the queen. The baths in their
dzong
were made of hollowed-out tree trunks, a carved slot underneath for heated rocks to keep the water steaming, and as you soaked, the servants came in and out to replace the hot stones and give you a scrub. And if we were camping, they would dig a pit by the river, fill it with water, lower hot stones into it; thus you splashed about with all the Himalayan snows around and forests of rhododendrons.

"Years later, when I returned to Bhutan, the queen insisted I visit the bathroom. ‘But I don’t need to go.’

"‘No, but you must.’

"‘But I don’t NEED to go.’

"‘Oh, but you MUST.’

"So I went, and the bathrooms had been redone, all modern piping, pink tiles, pink showers, and pink flush loos.

"When I came out again, the queen was waiting, pink as the bathroom with pride, ‘See how nice it is? Did you SEE?’

"Why don’t we all go again," said Noni. "Let’s plan a trip. Why not?"

________

Sai got into bed that night in her new socks, the same three-layered design that sherpas used in mountaineering expeditions, that Tenzing had worn to climb Everest.

Sai and Gyan had recently made an excursion to see these socks of Tenzing, spread-eagled in the Darjeeling museum adjoining his memorial, and they had taken a good look at them. They had also studied his hat, ice pick, rucksack, samples of dehydrated foods that he might have taken along, Horlicks, torches, and samples of moths and bats of the high Himalayas.

"He was the real hero, Tenzing," Gyan had said. "Hilary couldn’t have made it without sherpas carrying his bags." Everyone around had agreed. Tenzing was certainly first, or else he was made to wait with the bags so Hilary could take the first step on behalf of that colonial enterprise of sticking your flag on what was not yours.

Sai had wondered, Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them? Sherpas went up and down, ten times, fifteen times in some cases, without glory, without claim of ownership, and there were those who said it was sacred and shouldn’t be sullied at all.

Twenty-six

It was after the new year
when Gyan happened to be buying rice in the market that he heard people shouting as his rice was being weighed. When he emerged from the shop, he was gathered up by a procession coming panting up Mintri Road led by young men holding their kukris aloft and shouting, "
Jai
Gorkha." In the mess of faces he saw college friends whom he’d ignored since he started his romance with Sai. Padam, Jungi, Dawa, Dilip.

"Chhang, Bhang, Owl, Donkey," he called his friends by their nicknames—

________

They were shouting, "Victory to the Gorkha Liberation Army," and didn’t hear him. On the strength of those pushing behind, and with the momentum of those who went before, they melded into a single being. Without any effort at all, Gyan found himself sliding along the street of Marwari merchants sitting cross-legged on white mattress platforms. They flowed by the antique shops with the
thangkhas
that grew more antique with each blast of exhaust from passing traffic; past the Newari silversmiths; a Parsi homeopathic doctor; the deaf tailors who were all

looking shocked, feeling the vibrations of what was being said but unable to make sense of it. A mad lady with tin cans hanging from her ears and dressed in tailor scraps, who had been roasting a dead bird on some coals by the side of the road, waved to the procession like a queen.

As he floated through the market, Gyan had a feeling of history being wrought, its wheels churning under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a documentary of war, and Gyan could not help but look on the scene already from the angle of nostalgia, the position of a revolutionary.

But then he was pulled out of the feeling, by the ancient and usual scene, the worried shopkeepers watching from their monsoon-stained grottos. Then he shouted along with the crowd, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he’d never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history.

Then, looking at the hills, he fell out of the experience again. How can the ordinary be changed?

Were these men entirely committed to the importance of the procession or was there a disconnected quality to what they did? Were they taking their cues from old protest stories or from the hope of telling a new story? Did their hearts rise and fall to something true? Once they shouted, marched, was the feeling authentic? Did they see themselves from a perspective beyond this moment, these unleashed Bruce Lee fans in their American T-shirts made-in-China-coming-in-via-Kathmandu?

He thought of how often he wished he might line up at the American embassy or the British, and leave. "Listen Momo," he had said to a delighted Sai,

"let’s go to Australia." Fly away, bye-bye, ta-ta. Free from history. Free from family demands and the built-up debt of centuries. The patriotism was false, he suddenly felt as he marched; it was surely just frustration—the leaders harnessing the natural irritations and disdain of adolescence for cynical ends; for their own hope in attaining the same power as government officials held now, the same ability to award local businessmen deals in exchange for bribes, for the ability to give jobs to their relatives, places to their children in schools, cooking gas connections. . . .

But the men were shouting, and he saw from their faces that they didn’t have his cynicism. They meant what they were saying; they felt a lack of justice. They moved past the godowns dating from when Kalimpong was the center of the wool trade, past the Snow Lion travel agency, the STD telephone booth, Ferrazzini’s Pioneer in Fast Food, the

two Tibetan sisters at the Warm Heart Shawl Shop; past the comics lending library and the broken umbrellas hanging oddly like injured birds around the man who mended them. They came to a stop outside the police station, where the policemen who could usually be found gossiping outside had vanished indoors and locked the door.

Gyan remembered the stirring stories of when citizens had risen up in their millions and demanded that the British leave. There was the nobility of it, the daring of it, the glorious fire of it—"India for Indians. No taxation without representation. No help for the wars. Not a man, not a rupee. British Raj Murdabad!" If a nation had such a climax in its history, its heart, would it not hunger for it again?

________

A man clambered up on the bench:

"In 1947, brothers and sisters, the British left granting India her freedom, granting the Muslims Pakistan, granting special provisions for the scheduled castes and tribes, leaving everything taken care of, brothers and sisters——

"Except us. EXCEPT US. The Nepalis of India. At that time, in April of 1947, the Communist Party of India demanded a Gorkhasthan, but the request was ignored. . . . We are laborers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads, soldiers. And are we allowed to become doctors and government workers, owners of the tea plantations?
No!
We are kept at the level of servants. We fought on behalf of the British for two hundred years. We fought in World War One. We went to East Africa, to Egypt, to the Persian Gulf. We were moved from here to there as it suited them. We fought in World War Two. In Europe, Syria, Persia, Malaya, and Burma. Where would they be without the courage of our people?

We are still fighting for them. When the regiments were divided at independence, some to go to England, some to stay, those of us who remained here fought in the same way for India. We are soldiers, loyal, brave. India or England, they never had cause to doubt our loyalty. In the wars with Pakistan we fought our former comrades on the other side of the border. How our spirit cried. But we are Gorkhas. We are soldiers. Our character has never been in doubt. And have we been rewarded?? Have we been given compensation?? Are we given respect??

"
No!
They spit on us."

Gyan recalled his last job interview well over a year ago, when he had traveled all the way to Calcutta by overnight bus to an office buried in the heart of a concrete block lit with the shudder of a fluorescent tube that had never resolved into steady light.

Everyone looked hopeless, the men in the room and the interviewer who had finally turned the shuddering light off—"Voltage low"—and conducted the interview in darkness. "Very good, we will let you know if you are successful."

Gyan, feeling his way out through the maze and stepping into the unforgiving summer light, knew he would never be hired.

"Here we are eighty percent of the population, ninety tea gardens in the district, but is even one Nepali-owned?" asked the man.

"No."

"Can our children learn our language in school?"

"No."

"Can we compete for jobs when they have already been promised to others?"

"No."

"In our own country, the country we fight for, we are treated like slaves.

Every day the lorries leave bearing away our forests, sold by foreigners to fill the pockets of foreigners. Every day our stones are carried from the riverbed of the Teesta to build their houses and cities. We are laborers working barefoot in all weather, thin as sticks, as they sit fat in managers’ houses with their fat wives, with their fat bank accounts and their fat children going abroad. Even their chairs are fat. We must fight, brothers and sisters, to manage our own affairs. We must unite under the banner of the GNLF, Gorkha National Liberation Front. We will build hospitals and schools. We will provide jobs for our sons. We will give dignity to our daughters carrying heavy loads, breaking stone on the roads. We will defend our own homeland. This is where we were born, where our parents were born, where our grandparents were born. We will run our own affairs in our own language. If necessary, we will wash our bloody kukris in the mother waters of the Teesta.
Jai
Gorkha." The speech giver waved his kukri and then pierced his thumb, raised the gory sight for all to see.

"
Jai
Gorkha!
Jai
Gorkha!
Jai
Gorkha!" the crowd screamed, their own blood thrumming, pulsing, surging forth at the sight of the speech giver’s hand. Thirty supporters stepped forward and also drew blood from their thumbs with their kukris to write a poster demanding Gorkha-land, in blood.

"Brave Gorkha soldiers protecting India—hear the call," said the leaflets flooding the hillsides. "Please quit the army at once. For when you will be retired then you may be treated as a foreigner."

The GNLF would offer jobs to its own, and a 40,000 strong Gorkha army, universities, and hospitals.

________

Later, Chhang, Bhang, Owl, Donkey, and many others sat in the cramped shack of Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen on Ringkingpong Road. A small handwritten sign painted on the side said "Broiler Chicken." A carom game board was balanced on an oil barrel outside and two creaky tattered soldiers, on bowlegs, originally of the Eighth Gurkha Rifles, played as the clouds shifted and billowed through their knees. The mountains sliced sharply and tumbled down at either side to bamboo thickets gray with distilled vapor.

The air grew colder and the evening progressed. Gyan, who had been gathered up accidentally in the procession, who had shouted half facetiously, half in earnest, who had half played, half lived a part, found the fervor had affected him. His sarcasm and his embarrassment were gone. Fired by alcohol, he finally submitted to the compelling pull of history and found his pulse leaping to something that felt entirely authentic.

He told the story of his great grandfather, his great uncles, "And do you think they got the same pension as the English of equal rank? They fought to death, but did they earn the same salary?"

All the other anger in the canteen greeted his, clapped his anger on the back.

It suddenly became clear why he had no money and no real job had come his way, why he couldn’t fly to college in America, why he was ashamed to let anyone see his home. He thought of how he had kept Sai away the day she had suggested visiting his family. Most of all, he realized why his father’s meekness infuriated him, and why he found himself unable to speak of him, he who had so modest an idea of happiness that even the daily irritant of fifty-two screaming boys in his plantation schoolroom, even the distance of his own family, the loneliness of his work, didn’t upset him. Gyan wanted to shake him, but what satisfaction could be received from shaking a sock? To accost such a person—it just came back to frustrate you twice over. . . .