by Kiran Desai
“Saeed!”
A boy with a gold chain as fat as a bathtub attachment, his prosperity flashing out, slapped Saeed on the back….
“What does he do?” Biju asked about the boy.
Saeed laughed. “Hustling.”
To further chili-pepper the occasion, Saeed regaled them with a story of how he had been helping one of the tribes move; and a car stopped while they were struggling with boxes of patched clothes, an alarm clock, shoes, a blackened pot all the way from Zanzibar thrown into the suitcase by a tearful mother—and a gun came out of the car window and a voice said: “Put it in the back, boys.” The trunk opened, and “That’s all?” the voice behind the gun said in disgust. Then the car had driven off.
______
They waited at the corner, sweating away, my God, my God…. Finally a battered van came by and they paid into the cracked open door, handed over their photographs taken according to INS requirements showing a single bared ear and a three-quarter profile, and were thumbprinted through the crack. Two weeks later, they waited once more—
they waited—
and waited—
and…. The van did not come back. The cost of this endeavor once again emptied Biju’s savings envelope.
Omar suggested they console themselves since they were in the neighborhood.
Kavafya said he would join him.
Only thirty-five dollars.
Prices not raised.
Biju blushed to remember what he had said in his hot dog days. “Smell awful… black women…. Hubshi hubshi.”
“It’s too hot,” he said, “for me to go.”
They laughed.
“Saeed?”
But Saeed didn’t have to go to whores.
He was meeting a new pooky pooky.
“What happened to Thea?” asked Biju.
“She has gone for hiking outside the city. I told her, ‘AFRICAN MEN don’t look at leaves!!’ Anyway, man, I still have one or two pooky pookies that Thea don’t know about.”
“You better watch out,” said Omar. “White women, they look good when they’re young, but wait, they fall apart fast, by forty they look so ugly, hair falling out, lines everywhere, and those spots and those veins, you know what I’m talking about….”
Saeed said, “Ah ah ah ha ha, I know, I know.” He understood their jealousy.
______
At the bakery a customer found an entire mouse baked inside a sunflower loaf. It must have gone after the seeds….
A team of health inspectors arrived. They entered in the style of U.S. Marines, the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD; burst in: HANDS UP!
They found a burst sewage pipe, a hiccuping black drain, knives stored behind the toilet, rat droppings in the flour, and in a forgotten basin of eggs, single-celled organisms so comfortable they were reproducing on their own without inspiration from another.
The boss, Mr. Bocher, was called.
“The friggin’ electricity blew,” said Mr. Bocher, “It’s hot outside, what the fuck are we supposed to do?”
But the same episode had occurred twice, in the days before Biju, Saeed, Omar, and Kavafya when there had been Karim, Nedim, and Jesus. The Queen of Tarts would be closed in favor of a Russian establishment.
“Fucking Russians! Crazy borscht and shit!” shouted Mr. Bocher in anger, but to no avail, and abruptly, it was all over again. “Fuck you, you fuckers,” he yelled at the men who had worked for him.
______
“Come and visit uptown sometime, Biju man.” Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.
Biju knew he probably wouldn’t see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again. Adresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore.
Lying on his basement shelf that night, he thought of his village where he had lived with his grandmother on the money his father sent each month. The village was buried in silver grasses that were taller than a man and made a sound, shuu shuuuu, shu shuuu, as the wind turned them this way and that. Down a dry gully through the grasses, you reached a tributary of the Jamuna where you could watch men traveling downstream on inflated buffalo skins, the creatures’ very dead legs, all four, sticking straight up as they sailed along, and where the river scalloped shallow over the stones, they got out and dragged their buffalo skin boats over. Here, at this shallow place, Biju and his grandmother would cross on market trips into town and back, his grandmother with her sari tucked up, sometimes a sack of rice on her head. Fishing eagles hovered above the water, changed their horizontal glide within a single moment, plunged, rose sometimes with a thrashing muscle of silver. A hermit also lived on this bank, positioned like a stork, waiting, oh waiting, for the glint of another, an elusive mystical fish; when it surfaced he must pounce lest it be lost again and never return…. On Diwali the holy man lit lamps and put them in the branches of the peepul tree and sent them down the river on rafts with marigolds—how beautiful the sight of those lights bobbing in that young dark. When he had visited his father in Kalimpong, they had sat outside in the evenings and his father had reminisced: “How peaceful our village is. How good the roti tastes there! It is because the atta is ground by hand, not by machine… and because it is made on a chooldh, better than anything cooked on a gas or a kerosene stove…. Fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk still warm from the buffalo….” They had stayed up late. They hadn’t noticed Sai, then aged thirteen, staring from her bedroom window, jealous of the cook’s love for his son. Small red-mouthed bats drinking from the jhora had swept over again and again in a witch flap of black wings.
Eighteen
“Oh, bat, bat,” said Lola, panicking, as one swooped by her ear with its high-pitched choo choo.
“What does it matter, just a bit of shoe leather flying about,” said Noni, looking, in her pale summer sari, as if she were a blob of melting vanilla ice cream….
“Oh shut up,” said Lola.
“It’s too hot and stuffy,” Lola said then, by way of apology to her sister. The monsoon must be on its way.
It was just two months after Gyan had arrived to teach Sai, and Sai had at first confused the tension in the air with his presence.
But now everyone was complaining. Uncle Potty sat limply. “It’s building. Early this year. Better get me rum in, dolly, before the old boy is maroooooned.”
Lola sipped a Disprin that fizzed and hopped in the water.
When the papers, too, reported the approach of storm clouds, she became quite merry: “I told you. I can always tell. I’ve always been very sensitive. You know how I am—the princess and the pea—my dear, what can I say—the princess and the pea.”
______
At Cho Oyu, the judge and Sai sat out on the lawn. Mutt, catching sight of the shadow of her own tail, leapt and caught it, began to whizz around and around, confused as to whose tail it was. She would not let go, but her eyes expressed confusion and beseeching—how could she stop? what should she do?—she had caught a strange beast and didn’t know it was herself. She went skittering helplessly about the garden.
“Silly girl,” said Sai.
“Little pearl,” said the judge when Sai left, in case Mutt’s feelings had been bruised.
______
Then, in a flash, it was upon them. An anxious sound came from the banana trees as they began to flap their great ears for they were always the first to sound the alarm. The masts of bamboo were flung together and rang with the sound of an ancient martial art.
The cook clamped everything shut, doors and windows, but then Sai opened the door just as he was sifting the flour to get rid of the weevils, and up the flour gusted and covered them both.
“Ooof ho. Look what you’ve done.” Little burrowing insects ran free and overexcitedly on the floor and walls. Looking at each other covered with white, they began to laugh.
“Angrez ke tarah. Like the English.”
“Angrez ke tarah. Angrez jaise.”
Sai put her head out. “Look,” she said, feeling jolly, “just like English people.”
The judge began to cough as an acrid mix of smoke and chili spread into the drawing room. “Stupid fool,” he said to his granddaughter. “Shut the door!”
But the door shut itself along with all the doors in the house. Bang bang bang. The sky gaped, lit by flame; blue fire ensnared the pine tree that sizzled to an instant death leaving a charcoal stump, a singed smell, a Crosshatch of branches over the lawn. An unending rain broke on them and Mutt turned into a primitive life form, an amoebic creature, slithering about the floor.
A lightning conductor atop Cho Oyu ran a wire into an underground pit of salt, which would save them, but Mutt couldn’t understand. With renewed thunder and a blast upon the tin roof, she sought refuge behind the curtains, under the beds. But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds in the empty soda bottles: whoo hoooo hooo.
“Don’t be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It’s just rain.”
She tried to smile, but her tail kept folding under and her eyes were those of a soldier in war, finished with caring for silly myths of courage. Her ears strained beyond the horizon, anticipating what didn’t fail to arrive, yet another wave of bombardment, the sound of civilization crumbling—she had never known it was so big—cities and monuments fell—and she fled again.
______
This aqueous season would last three months, four, maybe five. In Cho Oyu, a leak dripping into the toilet played a honky-tonk, until it was interrupted by Sai, who held an umbrella over herself when she went inside the bathroom. Condensation fogged the glass of clocks, and clothes hanging to dry in the attic remained wet for a week. A white scurf sifted down from the beams, a fungus spun a shaggy age over everything. Bits of color, though, defined this muffled scene: insects flew in carnival gear; bread, in a day, turned green as grass; Sai, pulling open her underwear drawer, found a bright pink jelly scalloping the layers of dreary cotton; and the bound volumes of National Geographic fell open to pages bruised with flamboyant disease, purple-yellow molds rivaling the bower birds of Papua New Guinea, the residents of New Orleans, and the advertisements—”It’s better in the Bahamas!”—that it showcased.
______
Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these months, the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense and she could experience the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible. She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail. Phones emitted a death rattle, televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour. And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing, chilly and solitary—not anything you could grasp. The world vanished, the gate opened onto nothing—no Gyan around the bend of the mountain—and that terrible feeling of waiting released its stranglehold. Even Uncle Potty was impossible to visit for the jhora had overflowed its banks and carried the bridge downstream.
At Mon Ami, Lola, fiddling the knob of the radio, had to relinquish proof that her daughter Pixie still prevailed in a dry place amid news of bursting rivers, cholera, crocodile attacks, and Bangladeshis up in their trees again. “Oh well,” Lola sighed, “perhaps it will wash out the hooligans in the bazaar.”
______
Recently a series of strikes and processions had indicated growing political discontent. And now a three-day strike and a raasta roko roadblock endeavor were postponed because of the weather. What was the point of preventing rations from getting through if they weren’t getting through anyway? How to force offices to close when they were going to remain closed? How to shut down streets when the streets had gone? Even the main road into Kalimpong from Teesta Bazaar had simply slipped off the incline and lay in pieces down in the gorge below.
______
Between storms, a grub-white sun appeared and everything began to sour and steam as people rushed to market.
Gyan, though, walked in the other direction, to Cho Oyu.
He was worried about the tuition and worried his payment might be denied him, that he and Sai had fallen far behind in the syllabus. So he told himself, slipping about the slopes, clutching onto plants.
Really, though, he walked in this direction because the rain’s pause had brought forth, once again, that unbearable feeling of anticipation, and under its influence he couldn’t sit still. He found Sai among the newspapers that had arrived on the Siliguri bus, two weeks’ worth bunched together. Each leaf had been ironed dry separately by the cook. Several species of ferns were bushy about the veranda, frilled with drops; elephant ears held trembling clutches of rain spawn; and all the hundreds of invisible spiderwebs in the bushes around the house had become visible, lined in silver, caught with trailing tissues of cloud. Sai was wearing her kimono, a present from Uncle Potty, who had found it in a chest of his mother’s, a souvenir of her voyage to Japan to see the cherry blossoms. It was made of scarlet silk, gilded with dragons, and thus Sai sat, mysterious and highlighted in gold, an empress of a wild kingdom, glowing against its lush scene.
______
The country, Sai noted, was coming apart at the seams: police unearthing militants in Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram; Punjab on fire with Indira Gandhi dead and gone in October of last year; and those Sikhs with their Kanga, Kachha, etc., still wishing to add a sixth K, Khalistan, their own country in which to live with the other five Ks.
In Delhi the government had unveiled its new financial plan after much secrecy and debate. It had seen fit to reduce taxes on condensed milk and ladies’ undergarments, and raise them on wheat, rice, and kerosene.
“Our darling Piu,” an obituary outlined in black had a photo of a smiling child—”Seven years have passed since you left for your heavenly abode, and the pain has not gone. Why were you so cruelly snatched away before your time? Mummy keeps crying to think of your sweet smile. We cannot make sense of our lives. Anxiously awaiting your reincarnation.”
______
“Good afternoon,” said Gyan.
She looked up and he felt a deep pang.
Back at the dining table, the mathematics books between them, tortured by graphs, by decimal points of perfect measurement, Gyan was conscious of the fact that a being so splendid should not be seated before a shabby textbook; it was wrong of him to have forced this ordinariness upon her—the bisection and rebisection of the bisection of an angle. Then, as if to reiterate the fact that he should have remained at home, it began to pour again and he was forced to shout over the sound of rain on the tin roof, which imparted an epic quality to geometry that was clearly ridiculous.
An hour later, it was still hammering down. “I had better go,” he said desperately.
“Don’t,” she squeaked, “you might get killed by lightning.”
It began to hail.
“I really must,” he said.
“Don’t,” warned the cook, “In my village a man stuck his head out of the door in a hailstorm, a big goli fell on him and he died right away.”
The storm’s grip intensified, then weakened as night fell, but it was far too dark by this time for Gyan to pick his way home through a hillside of ice eggs.
______
The judge
looked irritably across the chops at Gyan. His presence, he felt, was an insolence, a liberty driven if not by intent then certainly by foolishness. “What made you come out in such weather, Charlie?” he said. “You might be adept at mathematics, but common sense appears to have eluded you.”
No answer. Gyan seemed ensnared by his own thoughts.
The judge studied him.
He detected an obvious lack of familiarity, a hesitance with the cutlery and the food, yet he sensed Gyan was someone with plans. He carried an unmistakable whiff of journey, of ambition—and an old emotion came back to the judge, a recognition of weakness that was not merely a feeling, but also a taste, like fever. He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner. Bitterness flooded the judge’s mouth.
“So,” he said, slicing the meat expertly off the bone, “so, what poets are you reading these days, young man?” He felt a sinister urge to catch the boy off guard.
“He is a science student,” said Sai.
“So what of that? Scientists are not barred from poetry, or are they?
“Whatever happened to the well-rounded education?” he said into the continuing silence.
Gyan racked his brains. He never read any poets. “Tagore?” he answered uncertainly, sure that was safe and respectable.
“Tagore!” The judge speared a bit of meat with his fork, dunked it in the gravy, piled on a bit of potato and mashed on a few peas, put the whole thing into his mouth with the fork held in his left hand.
“Overrated,” he said after he had chewed well and swallowed, but despite this dismissal, he gestured an order with his knife: “Recite us something, won’t you?”
“Where the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls…. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let me and my country awake.” Every schoolchild in India knew at least this.