The Inheritance of Loss (41 page)

If you were Bengali, people who had known you your whole life wouldn’t acknowledge you in the street.

Even the Biharis, Tibetans, Lepchas, and Sikkimese didn’t acknowledge you.

They, the unimportant shoals of a minority population, the small powerless numbers that might be caught up in either net, wanted to put the Bengalis on the other side of the argument from themselves, delineate them as the enemy.

"All these years," said Lola, "I’ve been buying eggs at that Tshering’s shop down the road, and the other day he looked at me right in the face and said he had none. ‘I see a basket of them right there,’ I said, ‘how can you tell me you have none?’ ‘They have been presold,’ he said.

"Pem Pem," Lola had exclaimed on her way out, seeing her friend Mrs.

Thondup’s daughter come in. Just a few months ago Lola and Noni had partaken of fine civilities in her home that had harkened to another kind of life in another place, quail eggs with bamboo shoots, fat Tibetan carpets under their toes.

"Pem Pem??"

Pem Pem gave Lola a beseeching embarrassed look and rushed past.

"All of a sudden wrong side, no?" said Lola, "There is nobody who won’t abandon you."

On the ledge below Mon Ami, among the row of illegal huts, the sisters had noticed a small temple flying a red and gold flag, ensuring that no matter what, into eternity, no official—police, government, nobody—would dare dispute the legitimacy of the landgrab. The gods themselves had blessed it now. Little shrines were springing up all over Kalimpong, adjoining constructions forbidden by the municipality—squatter genius. And the trespassers were tapping phone lines, water pipes, electric lines in jumbles of illegal connections. The trees that provided Lola and Noni with pears, so many that they had cursed it, "Stewed pears and cream, stewed pears and cream every damn day!" had been stripped overnight. The broccoli patch was gone, the area near the gate was being used as a bathroom. Little children lined up in rows to spit at Lola and Noni as they walked by, and when Kesang, their maid, was bitten by one of the sqatter’s dogs, she screamed away, "Look your dog has bitten me, now you must put oil and turmeric on the wound so I don’t die from an infection."

But they just laughed.

________

The GNLF boys had burned down the government rest house by the river, beyond the bridge where Father Booty had photographed the polka-dotted butterfly. In fact, forest inspection bungalows all over the district were burning, upon whose verandas generations of ICS men had stood and admired the serenity, the hovering, angelic peace of dawn and dusk in the mountains.

The circuit house was burned, and the house of the chief minister’s niece.

Detonators set off landslides as negotiations went nowhere. Kalimpong was transformed into a ghost town, the wind tumbling around the melancholy streets, garbage flying by unhindered. Whatever point the GNLF might have had, it was severely out of hand; even one man’s anger, in those days, seemed enough to set the hillside alight.

________

Women rushed by on the roads. The men trembled at home for fear of being picked up, being tortured on any kind of flimsy excuse, the GNLF accusing them of being police informers, the police accusing them of being militants. It was dangerous to drive even for those who might, for a car was just a trap; vehicles were being surrounded and stolen; they could be more nimble on their feet, hide in the jungle at the sound of trouble, wade through the
jhoras
and make their way home on footpaths. Anyway, after a while, there was no more fuel because the GNLF boys had siphoned off the last of it, and the pumps were closed.

________

The cook tried to calm himself by repeating, "It will be all right, everything goes through a bad time, the world goes in a cycle, bad things happen, pass, and things are once again good. . ." But his voice had more pleading in it than conviction, more hope than wisdom.

After this—after the gun robbery and after the parade, after his seeing the frailty of his life here as a non-Nepali—he couldn’t manage to compose himself properly; there was nobody, nothing—but a sinister presence loomed—he was sure something even worse stood around the corner. Where was Biju, where was he? He leaped at every shadow.

So, it was usually Sai who walked to the shuttered market searching for a shop with a half open back door signaling quick secret business, or a cardboard sign propped at the window of a hut of someone selling a handful of peanuts or a few eggs.

Excepting these meager purchases Sai made, the garden was feeding them almost entirely. For the first time, they in Cho Oyu were eating the real food of the hillside.
Dalda saag,
pink-flowered, flat-leafed;
bhutiya dhaniya
growing copiously around the cook’s quarter; the new tendrils of squash or pumpkin vine; curled
ningro
fiddleheads,
churbi
cheese and bamboo shoots sold by women who appeared from behind bushes on

forest paths with the cheese wrapped in ferns and the yellow slices of bamboo shoots in buckets of water. After the rains, mushrooms pushed their way up, sweet as chicken and glorious as Kanchenjunga, so big, fanning out. People collected the oyster mushrooms in Father Booty’s abandoned garden. For a while the smell of them cooking gave the town the surprising air of wealth and comfort.

________

One day, when Sai arrived home with a kilo of damp
atta
and some potatoes, she found two figures, familiar from a previous occasion, on the veranda, pleading with the cook and judge.

"Please, sahib. . . ." It was the same wife and father of the tortured man.

"Oh no," the cook had said in horror when he saw them, "oh no,
baap re,
what are you coming here for?" although he knew.

It was the impoverished who walked the line so thin it was questionable if it existed, an imaginary line between the insurgents and the law, between being robbed (who would listen to them if they went to the police?) and being hunted by the police as scapegoats for the crimes of others.

They were hungriest.

________

"Why are you coming here making trouble? We already told you we had nothing to do with the police picking up your husband. We were hardly the ones to accuse him or beat him. . . . Had they told us, we would have gone at once and said this is not the man . . . we were not informed. . . . What do we owe you?"

said the cook. But he was giving them the
atta
Sai had brought back . . . when the judge barked, "Don’t give them anything," and continued his chess game.

"Please, sahib," they begged with hands folded, heads bent. "Who comes to our help? Can we live on no food at all? We will be your servants forever . . .

God will repay you . . . God will reward you. . . ."

But the judge was adamant.

Again, herded out, they sat outside the gate.

"Tell them to go," he told the cook.

"
Jao jao,
" said the cook, although he was concerned that they might need to rest before having to walk another five to six hours through the forest to their village.

Again they moved and sat farther up so as not to give offense. Again they saw Mutt. She was attached by her snout to her favorite whiffy spot, unaware of anything else. The woman suddenly brightened and said to the man, "Sell that kind of dog and you can get a lot of money. . . ." Mutt didn’t budge from the smell for a long, long time. If the judge hadn’t been there, they could have reached out—and grabbed her.

________

Some days later, when they at Cho Oyu had again forgotten these two unimportant if upsetting people, they returned.

But they didn’t come to the gate; they secreted themselves immediately in the
jhora
ravine and waited for Mutt, that connoisseur of smells, to appear for her daily round of the property. Rediscovering scents and enhancing them was an ever evolving art form. She was involved with an old favorite, grown better with age, that brought forth certain depths and facets of her personality. She was wholly absorbed, didn’t notice the intruders who crept up to her and pounced!

Startled, she yelped, but immediately they clamped her muzzle with hands strong from physical labor.

The judge was having his bucket bath, the cook was churning butter, Sai was in her bed whispering venomously, "Gyan, you bastard, you think I’m going to cry over you?" They didn’t see or hear a thing.

The trespassers lifted Mutt up, bound her with rope, and put her in a sack.

The man slung the sack over his shoulders, and they carried her through town without drawing any attention to themselves. They walked around the mountainside, then all the way down and across the Relli and over three ridges that billowed like blue-green ocean, to a small hamlet that was far from any paved road.

"You don’t think they’ll find us?" the father asked his daughter-in-law.

"They won’t walk so far and they can’t drive here. They don’t know our names, they don’t know our village, they asked us no questions."

She was right.

Even the police hadn’t bothered to find out the name of the man they had beaten and blinded. They would hardly bother to look for a dog.

Mutt was healthy, they noticed, when they pinched her through the sack; fat and ready to make them a little money. "Or maybe we can use her to breed and then we can sell the puppies. . . ." (They didn’t know, of course, that she had been fixed long ago by a visiting vet when she was beginning to attract love from all kinds of scurrilous loafers on the hillside, wheedling strays, conniving gentleman dogs. . . .)

"Should we take her out of the sack?"

"Better leave her in for now. She’ll just start barking. . . ."

Forty-five

Like a failing bus
laboring through the sky, the Gulf Air plane seemed barely to be managing, though most of the passengers felt immediately comfortable with this lack of oomph. Oh yes, they were going home, knees cramped, ceiling level at their heads, sweat-gluey, fate-resigned, but happy.

The first stop was Heathrow and they crawled out at the far end that hadn’t been renovated for the new days of globalization but lingered back in the old age of colonization.

All the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European—North American travelers came and went, making those brisk no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named The Milano.

Frankfurt. The planeload spent the night in a similar quarantined zone, a thousand souls stretched out as if occupying a morgue, even their faces covered to block the buzzing tube lights.

Like a bus, New York-London-Frankfurt-Abu Dhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta, the plane stopped again to allow men from the Gulf countries to clamber on. They came racing—Quick! Quick! . . . Quick!!—

unzipping their carry-ons for the Scotch, drinking straight from the bottle’s mouth. Crooked little ice crystals formed on the plane window. Inside, it was hot.

Biju ate his tray of chicken curry, spinach and rice, strawberry ice cream, rinsed his mouth into the empty ice-cream cup, then tried to get another dinner. "As it is we are short," the stewardesses said, harassed by the men, drunk and hooting, pinching them as they passed, calling them by name, "Sheila! Raveena! Kusum!

Nandita!"

Added to the smell of sweat, there was now the thick odor of food and cigarettes, the recycled breathing of an entire plane, the growing fetor of the bathroom.

In the mirror of this bathroom, Biju saluted himself. Here he was, on his way home, without name or knowledge of the American president, without the name of the river on whose bank he had lingered, without even hearing about any of the tourist sights—no Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, Little Italy, Brooklyn Bridge, Museum of Immigration; no bialy at Barney Greengrass, soupy dumpling at Jimmy’s Shanghai, no gospel churches of Harlem tour. He returned over the lonely ocean and he thought that this kind of perspective could only make you sad. Now, he promised himself, he would forget the insight, begin anew. He would buy a taxi. His savings were small, collected in his shoe, his sock, his underwear, through all these years, but he thought he could manage it. He’d drive up and down the mountainside on market days, gold tinsel, gods above the dashboard, a comical horn,
PAWpumPOMpaw
or
TWEE-deee-deee DEE-TWEE-deee-deee.
And he’d build a house with solid walls, a roof that wouldn’t fly off every monsoon season. Biju played the scene of meeting his father again and again like a movie in his head, wept a bit at the thought of so much happiness and emotion. They’d sit out in the evenings, drink
chhang,
tell jokes of the kind he had overheard on the plane being exchanged by drunk men: So one day Santa Singh and Banta Singh are doing nothing, passing the time, staring at the sky, and all of a sudden an airforce plane flies by, men parachute out of it, get into military jeeps waiting for them in the fields, and go home.
‘Arre, sala,
this is the life,’ says Santa to Banta, ‘what a way to make your money.’ So off they go to the recruitment agency and a few months later, there they are in the plane.
‘Wahe Guruji Ka Khalsa, Wahe
Guruji Ki Fateh,
‘says Santa and jumps.
‘Wahe Guruji Ka Khalsa, Wahe Guruji
Ki Fateh,
’ says Banta and jumps.