The Inheritance of Loss (32 page)

The afternoon sun lay thick and golden on the trees, and with the light so bright, the shadows in the foliage, by the car, and between the blades of grass and the rocks were black as night. It was hot here in the valley, but the river, when Sai dipped her hand in, was icy enough to numb her veins.

"Take your time, Sai, long wait anyway, the cars are backed up."

Father Booty got out himself, walked up and down, stretching his limbs, glad of the rest to his aching behind, when he spotted a remarkable butterfly.

The Teesta valley was renowned for its butterflies, and specialists came from around the world to paint and record them. Rare and spectacular creatures depicted in the library volume
Marvelous Butterflies of the North-Eastern
Himalayas
were flying about before their eyes. One summer, when she was twelve, Sai had made up names for them—"Japanese mask butterfly, butterfly of the far mountain, Icarus falling from the sun butterfly, butterfly that a flute set free, kite festival butterfly"—and written them into a book labeled "My Butterfly Collection" and accompanied the names with illustrations.

"Astonishing." said Father Booty. "Just look at this one here." Peacock blue and long emerald streamer tails. "Oh goodness, and that one"—black with white spots and a pink flame at its heart. . . . "Oh my camera . . . Potty, can you just rummage in the glove com-partment?"

Uncle Potty was reading
Asterix
:
Ave Gaul! By Toutatis!!!!# @***!!
,
but he roused himself and handed the little Leica through the window.

As the butterfly fluttered beguilingly on a cable of the bridge, Father Booty snapped the photograph. "Oh dear, I think I shook, the picture might be blurry."

He was about to try again when the guards began to shout and one of them came racing up. "Photography strictly prohibited on the bridge." Didn’t he know?

Oh dear, he did, he did, a mistake, he had forgotten in his excitement. "So sorry, officer." He knew, he knew. It was a very important bridge, this, India’s contact with the north, with the border at which they might have to fight the Chinese again someday, and now, of course, there was the Gorkha insurgency as well.

It didn’t help that he was a foreigner.

They took his camera and began to search the jeep.

A disturbing smell.

"What is that smell?"

"Cheese."

"
Kya cheez?
"
said a fellow from Meerut.

They had never heard of cheese. They looked unconvinced. It smelled far too suspicious and one of them reported that he thought it smelled of bomb-making materials. "Gas
maar raha hai,
"
said the Meerut boy.

"What did he say?" asked Father Booty.

"Something is
whacking
gas. Something is
firing
gas."

"Throw it out," they told Father Booty. "It’s gone bad."

"No it hasn’t."

"Yes, it has, the whole vehicle is smelling."

The checkpoint guards now began to examine the pile of books, regarding them with the same wrinkled noses as the unclaimed cheese that had been destined for Glenary’s.

"What is this?" They hoped for literature of an antinational and inflammatory nature.

"Trollope," Lola said brightly, excited and aroused by the turn of events. "I always said," she turned to the others in a frivolous fashion, "that I would save Trollope for my dotage; I knew it would be a perfect slow indulgence when I had nothing much to do and, well, here I am. Old-fashioned books is what I like. Not the new kind of thing, no beginning, no middle, no end, just a thread of. . . free-floating plasma . . .

"English writer," she told the guard.

He flipped through:
The Last Chronicle of Barset: The Archdeacon goes to
Framley, Mrs. Dobbs Broughton Piles her Fagots.

"Did you know," Lola asked the others, "that he also invented the post box?"

"Why are you reading it?"

"To take my mind off all of this." She gestured vaguely and rudely at the scene in general and the guard himself. Who had his pride. Knew he was something. Knew his mother knew he was something. Not even an hour ago she had fed her belief and her son
with pari aloo
accompanied by a lemony-limy-luscious Limca, the fizz from which had made a mini excitement about his nose.

Angry at Lola’s insolence, his face still awake from the soda spray, he gave orders for the book to be placed in the police jeep.

"You can’t take it," she said, "it’s a library book, you foolish little man. I’ll get into trouble at the Gymkhana. You’re not going to pay them to replace it."

"And this?" The guard examined another book.

Noni had picked a sad account of police brutality during the Nax-alite movement by Mahashveta Devi, translated by Spivak who, she had recently read with interest in the
Indian Express,
was made cutting edge by a sari and combat boots wardrobe. She had also selected a book by Amit Chaudhuri that contained a description of electricity failure in Calcutta that caused people across India to soften with communal nostalgia for power shortage. She had read it before but returned every now and then to half drink, half drown in those beautiful images.

Father Booty had a treatise on Buddhist esotericism, written by a scholar from one of the legendary monastic universities of Lhasa, and Agatha Christie’s
Five
Little Pigs.
And Sai had
Wuthering Heights
in her bag.

"We have to take these to the station for inspection."

"Why? Please sir," said Noni, trying to persuade him, "we’ve especially gone. . . . What will we read. . . . Stuck at home. . . . All those hours of curfew. . .

."

"But officer, you only have to look at us to know we’re hardly the people to waste your time on," said Father Booty. "So many
goondas
around. . . ."

But they had no sympathy for bookworms, and Lola began to shout,

"Thieves, that’s what you police are. Everybody knows it. Hand in hand with
goondas.
I will go to the army major, I will go to the SDO. What kind of situation is this, bullying the population, you little men throwing your weight around. I’m not going to bribe you, if that’s what you’re hoping—forget about it.

Let us go," she said grandly to the others.

"
Chalo yaar,
"
said Uncle Potty and glanced at his bottles to indicate they might have one or two IF . . .

But the man said, "Serious trouble. Even five bottles will not be enough."

And it became obvious what Kalimpong was in for.

"Calm down, madam," the policeman said to Lola, offending her still more.

"If there is nothing in your books, we will return them."

The red-hot library books were taken carefully away. Father Booty’s camera, too, was confiscated and delivered to their supervisor’s desk; his case they would review separately.

________

Sai didn’t notice much, for she was still thinking about Gyan ignoring her, and she didn’t care the books were gone.

Why was he there? Why hadn’t he wanted to acknowledge her? He had said:

"I can’t resist you . . . I have to keep coming back. . . ."

At home the cook was waiting, but she went to bed without her dinner, and this greatly offended the cook, who took it to mean that she had eaten fancily in a restaurant and now despised the offerings at home.

Sensitive to his jealousy, she usually came home and complained, "The spices were not ground properly—I almost broke my tooth on a peppercorn, and the meat was so tough, I had to swallow it without chewing, all in a big lump with glasses of water." He would laugh and laugh. "Ha ha, yes, nobody takes the time to clean and tenderize the meat properly anymore, to grind the spices, roast them. . . ." Then, growing suddenly serious, he would exclaim, holding up a finger to make his point like a politician: "And for this they charge a lot of money!" Nodding hard, wise to the horrors of the world. Now, in a spoiled mood, he banged the dishes.

"What is going on!" shouted the judge. A statement, not a question, that was to be responded to by silence.

"Nothing," he said, beyond caring, "what can be going on? Babyji went to sleep. She ate at the hotel."

Thirty-four

A week after
the library trip, the books were returned, having been declared harmless, but the authorities didn’t take a similar view of the photograph of the butterfly, which showed, beyond its beguiling wings of black, white and pink, the sentry post at the bridge, and the bridge itself, spanning the Teesta. In fact, it was focused, they noted, not on the butterfly, but on the bridge.

"I was in a hurry," said Father Booty, "I forgot to focus properly and then just as I was going to try again, I was nabbed."

But the police didn’t listen and that evening they visited him at home, turned everything upside down; took away his alarm clock, his radio, some extra batteries, a package of nails he had bought to finish work on his cowshed, and a bottle of illegal Black Cat rum from Sikkim. They took all that away.

"Where are your papers?"

Father Booty was now found to be residing in India illegally. Oh dear, he had not expected contact with the authorities; he had allowed his residence permit to lapse in the back of a moldy drawer for to renew the permit was such bureaucratic hell, and never again did he plan to leave or to reenter India. . . . He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything but an
Indian
foreigner. . . .

He had two weeks to leave Kalimpong.

"But I have lived here forty-five years."

"That is of no consequence. It was your privilege to be residing here, but we cannot tolerate abuse of privilege."

Then the messenger grew kinder, remembering that his own son was being taught by Jesuits, and he hoped to send the boy to England or America. Or even Switzerland would be all right. . . .

"Sorry, Father," he said, "but these days. . . . I myself will lose my job.

Another time I could slip you through, maybe, but just now. . . please go at once to the Snow Lion Travel Agency and book your ticket. We will provide free passage on a government jeep to Siliguri. Think of it as a holiday, Father, and keep in touch. When this is finished, apply for the proper papers and return. No problem." How easy it was to say these words. He grew happier at being able to be so civilized and nice.

Return. No problem. Take rest. Have a holiday.

Father Booty went running to everyone he knew who might help him, the police chief and the SDO who made regular trips to the dairy for sweet curd, Major Aloo in the cantonment who enjoyed the chocolate cigars he made, the forest department officials who had given him oyster mushroom spawn so he might have mushrooms in his garden during fungus season. One year when the bamboo clump on his property bloomed and bees from the whole district descended whrooming upon the white flowers, the forest department had bought the seeds from him, because they were valuable—bamboo flowered only once in a hundred years. When the clump died after this extravagant effort, they gave him new bamboo to plant, young spears with their tips like braids.

But now, all those who in peaceful times had enjoyed his company and chatted about such things as curd, mushrooms, and bamboo were too busy or too scared to help.

"We cannot allow a threat to our national security."

"What about my home? What about my dairy, the cows?"

But they were as illegal as he was.

"Foreign nationals can’t own property and you know that, Father. What business do you have owning all of this?"

The dairy was actually in the name of Uncle Potty, because long ago, when this tetchy little problem had come up, he had signed the papers on behalf of his friend. . . .

But empty property was a great risk, for Kalimpong had long ago been demarcated an "area of high sensitivity," and according to the laws, the army was entitled to appropriate any unoccupied land. They paid rock-bottom rent, slapped concrete about, and filled the homes they took over with a string of temporary people who didn’t care and wrecked the place. That was the usual story.

Father Booty felt his heart fail at the thought of his cows being turned out in favor of army tanks; looked about at his craggy bit of mountainside—violet bamboo orchids and pale ginger lilies spicing the air; a glimpse of the Teesta far below that was no color at all right now, just a dark light shining on its way to join the Brahmaputra. Such wilderness could not incite a gentle love—he loved it fiercely, intensely.

But two days later, Father Booty received another visitor, a Nepali doctor who wished to open a private nursing home and without being invited to do so, walked through the gate to gaze at the same view Father Booty had looked out on and caressed it with his eyes. He examined the solidly constructed house that Father Booty had named
Sukhtara.
Star of Happiness. He knocked his knuckles against the cowsheds with the approval of ownership. Twenty-five rich patients in a row. . . . And then he made an offer to buy the Swiss dairy for practically nothing.

"That isn’t even the cost of the shed, let alone the main house."

"You will not get any other offers."

"Why not?"

"I have arranged it and you have no choice. You are lucky to get what I am giving you. You are residing in this country unlawfully and you must sell or lose everything."

________

"I will look after the cows, Booty," said his friend Uncle Potty. "No worries. And when the trouble is over, you return and take up where you left off."