The Inheritance of Loss (33 page)

They sat together, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, and Sai. In the background, a tape of Abida Parveen was playing. "
Allah hoo, Allah hoo Allah hoo.
. . ." God was just wilderness and space, said the husky voice, careless with the loss of love. It took you to the edge of all you could bear and then—it let go, let go. . . .

"
Mujhe jaaaane do. . .
."All one should desire was freedom. But Father Booty wasn’t comforted by Uncle Potty’s assurance, for it had to be admitted that his friend was an alcoholic and undependable. In a drunken state he would allow anything to happen, he might sign on any line, but it was Father Booty’s own fault: why hadn’t he applied for an Indian passport? Because it was just as silly as NOT applying

for an American or a Swiss? He felt a lack in himself, despised his conformity to the ideas of the world even as he disagreed with them.

A mongoose loped like water over the grass, matching the color of the evening, only its movement betraying it.

Anger strained against Sai’s heart. This was Gyan’s doing, she thought. This is what he had done and what people like him were doing in the name of decency and education, in the name of hospitals for Nepalis and management positions. In the end, Father Booty, lovable Father Booty who, frankly, had done much more for development in the hills than any of the locals, and without screaming or waving kukris, Father Booty was to be sacrificed.

In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, noses, enveloping their faces. The black climed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kanchenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink. . . . each of them separately remembered how many evenings they’d spent like this . . . how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. "Nothing so sweet, dear friends—"Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank.

There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour. . . .

But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty—half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one. . . .

Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was gone now, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.

Her mind returned to the day of the gun robbery at Cho Oyu—the start of everything going wrong.

Thirty-five

How foolishly those rifles
had been left mounted on the wall, retired artifacts relegated to history, seen too often to notice or think about. Gyan was the last one to take them down and examine them—boys liked things like that. Even the Dalai Lama, Sai had read, had a collection of war games and toy soldiers. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might be resurrected into use. Would there be crimes committed that would, when dot was linked to dot, be traced to their doorstep?

________

"My grandfather used to go hunting," Sai had told Gyan, trying to impress him, but why had she been proud? Of something that should be shaming?

The cook had told her the stories:

"A great shikari he was, Saibaby. He was very handsome, and he looked very brave and stylish on his horse. The villagers would call him if there was ever a man-eater around."

"Was there often one?" Goose pimples.

"Oh, all the time.
Rrrr-rrrr,
you would hear them, and the sound was of wood being sawed. I can remember waking up and listening. In the morning you could see pug marks by the river, sometimes even around the tents."

The cook couldn’t help but enjoy himself, and the more he repeated his stories, the more they became truer than the truth.

________

The police had come to investigate the crime and, in the cook’s quarter, sent Biju’s letters flying. . . .

"They had to do it," said the cook. "This is a serious matter."

The seriousness was proved when, one morning not long after Father Booty heard the news of his exile, the subdivisional officer arrived at Cho Oyu. The judge and Sai were on the lawn and he had to search to locate them within the camouflage of their own shadows and the shadows of leaves.

"The perpetrators are still absconding," said the SDO surrounded by three policemen with guns and
lathis,
"but please don’t worry, sir. We will nip this in the bud. Crack down on antisocial elements.

"You know, my father was also a great shikari," he continued over tea. "If only he had been less adept, I told him, you would have left something for us as well! Isn’t it so? Ha ha," he laughed, but his laugh would have registered bright pink on the litmus test. "Justice Sahib, you shikaris were too good, lions and leopards. . . . Now if you go into the forest and if you see a chicken that has escaped from somewhere, you are lucky, no?"

Silence. Had he gone too far?

"But no need to worry, we will catch the criminals. They are using the problems of Bhutan, Assam as an excuse to make trouble here. This country of ours is always being torn apart and it’s sad for people like us, brought up with national feeling, and worst for you, sir, who struggled for our freedom. . . . These antinationals have no respect for anything or anyone, not even for themselves. . .

. The whole economy is under threat."

"Do you know," he turned to Sai, "what are the three 7s of the Dar-jeeling district? Can you tell me?" She shook her head. Disappointed in her, triumphant in himself, he intoned:

"
Tea!

"
Timber!
"
lounsm!

As he left, he stopped at a flowering creeper. "Beautiful blossom, Justice Sahib. If you see such a sight, you will know there is a God." The passionflower was a glorious bizarre thing, each bloom lasting just a day, purple and white striped tentacles, half sea anemone, half flower—all by itself, it proffered enough reason for faith.

"I have become a keen gardener," said the SDO, "since I arrived in Kalimpong. I look after my plants exactly as if they were babies. Well, let me know if you have any more trouble. I think you won’t, but no doubt this is a very touchy situation." He did up his shawl like a nationalist—Flap! Wrap! Things to do! No time to waste! Nation calls! And he got back into his jeep. The driver backed out of the gate, roared away.

"Let’s see what he does," said the cook.

"They never find anyone," said the judge.

Sai didn’t speak because she couldn’t stop returning to the thought of Gyan avoiding her.

________

Some days later the police picked up a miserable drunk for the crime. The drunk was a customary sight lying oblivious to the world in a ditch by the side of the market road. Some passerby or the other would haul him up, smack his cheeks, and send him lurching home, crisscrossed with patterns of grasses, stars in his eyes.

Now, instead, the drunk was transported to the police station, where he sat on the floor, his hands and feet trussed. The policemen stood about looking bored. All of a sudden, though, triggered by something unappar-ent, they recovered from their malaise, jumped up, and began beating the man.

The more he screamed the harder they beat him; they reduced him to a pulp, bashed his head until blood streamed down his face, knocked out his teeth, kicked him until his ribs broke—

You could hear him up and down the hillside begging and screaming. The police watched with disgust. He was claiming his innocence: "I didn’t steal guns from anybody, I didn’t go to anyone’s house, nothing, nothing, some mistake. . .

."

His were the first screams and they heralded the end of normal life on the hillside.

"I didn’t do anything, but I am sorry." For hours they continued, the desperate shrieks tearing up the air, "I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. . . ."

But the police were just practising their torture techniques, getting ready for what was coming. When the man crawled out on his knees, his eyes had been extinguished. They would heal into horizonless, flat blanks that would forever cause others to recoil in fear and disgust.

The only grace was that he wouldn’t see them recoiling and would disappear entirely inside the alcohol that had always given him solace.

Thirty-six

It was Mr. Iype
the newsagent who said offhandedly, waving a copy of
India
Abroad
:
"You’re from Darjeeling side, no? Lot of trouble over there. . . ."

"Why?"

"Nepalis making trouble . . . very troublesome people. . . ."

"Strikes?"

"Much worse,
bhai,
not only strikes, the whole hillside is shut down." "It is?"

"For many months this has been going on. Haven’t you heard?"

"No. I haven’t had any letters for a long time."

"Why do you think?"

Biju had blamed usual disruptions—bad weather, incompetance—for the break in his father’s correspondence.

"They should kick the bastards back to Nepal," continued Mr. Iype.

"Bangladeshis to Bangladesh, Afghans to Afghanistan, all Muslims to Pakistan, Tibetans, Bhutanese, why are they sitting in our country?"

"Why are we sitting here?"

"This country is different," he said without shame. "Without us what would they do?"

Biju went back to work.

Through the day, with gradually building momentum, he became convinced his father was dead. The judge wouldn’t know how to find him if he would try to find him at all. His unease began to tighten.

________

By the next day he couldn’t stand it anymore; he slipped out of the kitchen and purchased a twenty-five-dollar number from a bum who had a talent for learning numbers by lingering outside phone booths, overhearing people spell out their calling codes and recording them in his head. He had loitered behind one unsuspecting Mr. Onopolous making a phone call and charging it to his platinum—

"But be quick," he told Biju, "I’m not sure about this number, a couple of people have already used it. . . ."

The receiver was still moist and warm from the last intimacy it had conducted, and it breathed back at Biju, a dense tubercular crepitation. As there was no phone at Cho Oyu, Biju rang the number for the MetalBox guesthouse on Ringkingpong Road.

"Can you get my father? I will call again in two hours."

________

So, one evening, some weeks before the phone lines were cut, before the roads and bridges were bombed, and they descended into total madness, the MetalBox watchman came rattling the gate at Cho Oyu. The cook had a broth going with bones and green onions—

"La! Phone! La! Telephone! Telephone call from your son. La! From America. He will phone again in one hour. Come quick!"

The cook went immediately, leaving the rattling skeleton bones topped by dancing scrappy green, for Sai to watch—"Babyji!"

"Where are you going?" asked Sai, who had been pulling burrs from Mutt’s pantaloons while thinking of Gyan’s absence—

But the cook didn’t reply. He was already out of the gate and running.

________

The phone sat squat in the drawing room of the guesthouse encircled by a lock and chain so the thieving servants might only receive phone calls and not make them. When it rang again, the watchman leapt at it, saying, "Phone, la! Phone!
La
mai!
"
and his whole family came running from their hut outside. Every time the phone rang, they ran with committed

loyalty. Upkeepers of modern novelties, they would not,
would not,
let it fall to ordinariness.

"HELLO?"

"HELLO? HELLO?"

They gathered about the cook, giggling in delicious anticipation.

"HELLO?"

"HELLO? PITAJI??"

"BIJU?" By natural logic he raised his voice to cover the distance between them, sending his voice all the way to America.

"Biju, Biju," the watchman’s family chorused, "it’s Biju," they said to one another. "Oh, it’s your son," they told the cook. "It’s his son," they told one another. They watched for his expressions to change, for hints as to what was being said at the other end, wishing to insinuate themselves deeply into the conversation, to
become it,
in fact.

"HELLO HELLO????"

"???? HAH? I CAN’T HEAR. YOUR VOICE IS VERY FAR."

"I CAN’T HEAR. CAN YOU HEAR?"

"He can’t hear."

"WHAT?"

"
Still can’t hear?
"
they asked the cook.

The atmosphere of Kalimpong reached Biju all the way in New York; it swelled densely on the line and he could feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green-black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gestures of ferns; he could hear the croak
trrrr whonk, wee wee butt ock butt ock
of frogs in the spinach, the rising note welding imperceptibly with the evening. . . .

"HELLO? HELLO?"