The Inheritance of Loss (31 page)

He hadn’t called for help. He’d turned and fled, run up to his rented room and sat there.

________

Without thinking, the judge made the calibrated gestures, the familiar turns back to Cho Oyu, instead of over the edge of the mountainside.

Close to home, he almost ran into an army jeep parked by the side of the road, lights off. The cook and a couple of soldiers were hiding boxes of liquor in the bushes. The judge swore but continued on. He knew about this side business of the cook’s and ignored it. It was his habit to be a master and the cook’s to be a servant, but something had changed in their relationship within a system that kept servant and master both under an illusion of security.

Mutt was waiting for him at the gate, and the judge’s expression softened—

he blew his horn to signal his arrival. In a second she went from being the unhappiest dog in the world to the happiest and Jemu-bhai’s heart grew young with pleasure.

The cook opened the gate, Mutt jumped into the seat next to him, and they rode together from the gate to the garage—this was her treat and even when he stopped driving anywhere, he gave her rides about the property to entertain her.

As soon as she’d get in, she would acquire a regal air, angling her expression and smiling graciously right and left.

On the table, when the judge got in, he found the telegram waiting. "To Justice Patel from St. Augustine’s: regarding your granddaughter, Sai Mistry."

The judge had considered the convent’s request in the brief interlude of weakness he experienced after Bose’s visit, when he was forced to confront the fact that he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. He couldn’t knock down the lies or else the past would crumble, and therefore the present. . . . But he now acquiesced to something in the past that had survived, returned, that might, without his paying too much attention, redeem him—

________

Sai could look after Mutt, he reasoned. The cook was growing decrepit. It would be good to have an unpaid somebody in the house to help with things as the years went by. Sai arrived, and he was worried that she would incite a dormant hatred in his nature, that he would wish to rid himself of her or treat her as he had her mother, her grandmother. But Sai, it had turned out, was more his kin than he had thought imaginable. There was something familiar about her; she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India. The journey he had started so long ago had continued in his descendants. Perhaps he had made a mistake in cutting off his daughter . . . he’d condemned her before he knew her. Despite himself, he felt, in the backwaters of his unconscious, an imbalance in his deeds balancing itself out.

This granddaughter whom he didn’t hate was perhaps the only miracle fate had thrown his way.

Thirty-three

Six months after Sai,
Lola and Noni, Uncle Potty and Father Booty made a library trip to the Gymkhana Club, it was taken over by the Gorkha National Liberation Front, who camped out in the ballroom and the skating rink, ridiculing even further whatever pretensions the club might still harbor despite having already been brought low by the staff.

Men with guns rested in the ladies’ powder room, enjoyed the spacious plumbing that was still stamped BARHEAD SCOTLAND, PATENTEES in mulberry letters and dawdled before the long mirror, because like most of the towns’

residents, they rarely had the opportunity to see themselves from top to bottom.

The dining room was filled with men in khaki, posing for pictures, feet on the stuffed head of a leopard, whiskey in hand, fire in the fireplace still with rosette tiles. They drank up the entire bar, and on chilly nights they took down the skins from the walls and slept in the musty folds.

Later evidence proved they also stockpiled guns, drew maps, plotted the bombing of bridges, hatched plans that grew in daring as managers fled from the tea plantations that stretched in waves over the Singalila Mountains all around the Gymkhana, from Happy Valley, Makaibari, Chonglu, Pershok.

Then, when it was all over, and the men had signed a peace treaty and moved out—here at this very spot in the Gymkhana Club, on these dining tables placed side by side in a row—they had staged a public surrender of arms.

On October 2, 1988, Gandhi Jayanti Day, seven thousand men surrendered more than five thousand pipe guns, country-made revolvers, pistols, double- and single-barrel guns, Sten guns. They gave up thousands of rounds of ammunition, thirty-five hundred bombs, gelatine sticks, detonators and land mines, kilograms of explosives, mortar shells, cannons. Ghising’s men alone had more than twenty-four thousand pieces. In the pile was the judge’s BSA pump gun, the Springfield rifle, the double-barreled Holland & Holland with which he had roamed, after teatime, in the countryside surrounding Bonda.

________

But when Lola, Noni, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, and Sai were turned away from the Gymkhana dining room, they didn’t expect things to go so badly with the club. They mistook the gloom for present trouble, just as the manager had suggested, and not for a premonition of the dining hall’s future.

Where should they lunch, then?

"That new place, Let’s B Veg?" asked Father Booty.

"No
ghas phoos,
no twigs and leaves!" said Uncle Potty firmly. He never ate anything green if he could help it.

"Lung Fung?" It was a shabby Chinese establishment with slain-looking paper dragons dangling from the ceiling.

"Not very nice to sit in."

"Windamere?"

"Too expensive, only for foreigners. Anyway, it’s their tea that’s good, lunch is the missionary boardinghouse type of thing. . .
thunda khitchri. . .
blubbery collar of mutton . . . salt and pepper, if you’re very lucky. . . .

In the end it was Glenary’s, as usual.

"Lots of options, at least—everybody can get what they want."

So they trooped across. At a table in the corner sat Father Peter Lingdamoo, Father Pius Marcus, and Father Bonniface D’Souza eating apple strudel. "Good afternoon, Monsignor," they said to Father Booty, bringing a whiff of Europe to them. So elegant:
Monsignor. . .

As always, the room was mostly crowded with schoolchildren squirming with joy on their lunch out, boarding schools being one of Darjeeling’s great economic ventures along with tea. There were older children celebrating birthdays on their own without supervision, younger ones accompanied by parents visiting from Calcutta or even Bhutan and Sikkim, or Bangladesh, Nepal, or from the surrounding tea gardens. Several patriarchs in a generous mood were also questioning their children about their studies, but the mothers were protesting, "Let them be for once,
baba,
"
piling up plates and stroking hair, looking at their children in the way their children were looking at the food, trying to stuff in all they could.

They knew the menu by heart from years of special meals at denary’s.

Indian, Continental, or Chinese; sizzlers, chicken and sweet corn soup, ice cream with hot chocolate sauce. Taking swift advantage of parents’ melting eyes—

almost time to say good-bye—another ice cream with hot chocolate sauce?

"Please, Ma, please, Ammi, please, Mummy," mother’s eyes turned toward father, "Priti, no, it is quite enough, don’t spoil him now," then giving in, knowing Ma, Ammi, or Mummy would be weeping all the lonely road back to the plantation or airport or train station. Had her mother been like this? And her father? Sai felt suddenly bereft and jealous of these children. There was one Tibetan woman so intensely pretty in her sky-colored
baku
and apron with those disjointed bands of jolly color that made one feel cozy and loved right away.

"Oh, such sweet sweet cheeks," the family were all saying, laughing as they pretended to eat the baby, somehow kindly and gently, and the baby was laughing hardest of all. Why couldn’t she be part of that family? Rent a room in someone else’s life?

The ladies polished their cutlery on the paper napkins, wiped their plates and glasses, returned one that looked cloudy.

"How about a wee drink, ladies?" said Uncle Potty.

"Oh Potty, starting so early."

"Suit yourselves. Gin tonic," he ordered and dipped his bread stick directly into the butter dish. Came up with a cheerful golden berg. "I do like a bit of bread with my butter," he proclaimed.

"They do a good fish and chips with tartar sauce," said Father Booty with a flutter of hope, thinking of river fish in crisp gold uniforms of bread crumbs.

"Is the fish fresh?" Lola demanded of the waiter. "From the Teesta?"

"Why not?" said the waiter.

"Why not???!! I don’t know! You know
WHY
if
NOT!!!"

"Better not risk it. How about chicken in cheese sauce?"

"What cheese?" asked Father Booty.

Everyone froze . . . chilled silence.

They knew the insult was coming—

Utterly butterly delicious. . . . All India Cheese Champ—

"AMUL!!"

"WATERPROOFING!!" cried Father Booty.

As always they pondered their options and picked Chinese.

"It’s not like real Chinese food, of course," Lola reminded everyone that Joydeep, her now dead husband, had once visited China and reported that Chinese food in China was quite another matter. A much worse matter, in fact.

He described the hundred-day-old egg (and sometimes he said it was a two-hundred-day) buried and dug up as a delicacy, and everyone groaned with horrified delight. He had been a great success at cocktail parties upon his return.

"Don’t much care for their looks, either," he said, "
chapta
features. Much better, Indian women, Indian antiquities, Indian music, Indian Chinese—"

And in all India, nothing better than Calcutta Chinese! Remember Ta Fa Shun? Where ladies out shopping met for hot-and-acrid soup and accompanied it with hot-and-acrid gossip—

"So what should we have?" asked Uncle Potty who had finished all the bread sticks now.

"Chicken or pork?"

"Chee Chee. Don’t trust the pork, full of tapeworms. Who knows what pig it comes from?"

"Chili chicken, then?"

From outside came the noise of the parading boys going by again.

"God, what a racket. All this do-or-die stuff."

The chili chicken arrived and, after depositing it on their table, the waiter wiped his nose on the curtain. "Just take a look at that," said Lola. "No wonder we Indians never progress." They began to eat. "But food here is good."

Chomping.

________

As they were exiting the restaurant, the same procession that had disturbed them while they were eating and while they were at the library came back up the road after having traversed all of Darjeeling.

"Gorkhaland for Gorkhas." "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas."

They stood back to let them pass and who should almost stamp on Sai’s toes?—

Gyan!!!

In his tomato red sweater, yelling lustily in a way she couldn’t recognize.

What would he be doing in Darjeeling?! Why would he be at a GNLF rally rallying on behalf of independence for Nepali-Indians?

She opened her mouth to shout to him, but at that moment he caught sight of her, too, and the dismay on his face was followed by a slight ferocious gesture of his head and a cold narrow look in his eye that was a warning not to approach.

She shut her mouth like a fish, and astonishment flooded over her gills.

By that time he had passed on.

"Isn’t that your mathematics tutor?" asked Noni.

"I don’t think so," she said, scrabbling for dignity, scrabbling for sense.

"Looked just like him, I thought it was him myself, but it wasn’t. . . ."

________

On their steep way back down to the Teesta, they noticed Sai had turned green.

"Are you all right?" asked Father Booty.

"Travel sick."

"Look at the horizon, that always helps."

She fixed her eyes on the highest ridge of the Himalayas, on the un-moving stillness. But this didn’t make any difference. There was a whirl in Sai’s brain and she couldn’t register what her eyes saw. Finally, a mordant bile rose up her throat, frizzling her system, burning her mouth, corroding her teeth—she could feel them turn to chalk as they were attacked by a resurgence of the chili chicken.

"Stop the car, stop the car," said Lola. "Let her out."

Sai began to retch into the grass, vomiting up a sort of mulligatawny, giving them another unfortunate look at their lunch now so much the worse for wear.

Noni poured her a cup of icy water from the space-age silver capsule of the thermos flask, and Sai rested on a rock in the sunshine by the beautiful transparent Teesta. "Take some deep breaths, dear, that food was very greasy, they’ve really gone downhill—dirty kitchen—oh, just the sight of that waiter should have been enough to warn us."

At the other end of the bridge the checkpoint guards were inspecting some vehicles going through. Careful in this time of trouble, they had opened the bundles and cases of everyone in a bus and turned their belongings inside out. The passengers waited impassively inside; poor people, their faces squashed against the windows, hundreds of pairs of eyes half dead, like animals on their way to death; as if the journey had been so exhausting, their spirits had already been extinguished. The bus had vomit-strewn sides, great banners of brown flared back by the wind. Several other vehicles waited in line after the bus for the same treatment, barred from going on by a metal pole across the road.