by Kiran Desai
______
Not long after the results were declared, Jemubhai with his trunk that read “Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver,” drove in a hired cab away from the house on Thornton Road and turned back to wave for the sake of the dog with pork pies in its eyes. It was watching him out of a window and he felt an echo of the old heartbreak of leaving Piphit.
Jemubhai, who had lived on ten pounds a month, could now expect to be paid three hundred pounds a year by the secretary of state for India for the two years of probation. He had found more expensive lodgings which he could now afford, closer to the university.
The new boardinghouse boasted several rooms for rent, and here, among the other lodgers, he was to find his only friend in England: Bose.
They had similar inadequate clothes, similar forlornly empty rooms, similar poor native’s trunks. A look of recognition had passed between them at first sight, but also the assurance that they wouldn’t reveal one another’s secrets, not even to each other.
Bose was different from the judge in one crucial aspect, though. He was an optimist. There was only one way to go now and that was forward. He was further along in the process: “Cheeri-o, right-o, tickety boo, simply smashing, chin-chin, no siree, how’s that, bottom’s up, I say!” he liked to say. Together they punted clumsily down the glaceed river to Grant-chester and had tea among the jam-sozzled wasps just as you were supposed to, enjoying themselves (but not really) as the heavy wasps fell from flight into their laps with a low-battery buzz.
They had better luck in London, where they watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, avoided the other Indian students at Veeraswamy’s, ate shepherd’s pie instead, and agreed on the train home that Trafalgar Square was not quite up to British standards of hygiene—all those defecating pigeons, one of which had done a masala-colored doodle on Bose. It was Bose who showed Jemubhai what records to buy for his new gramophone: Caruso and Gigli. He also corrected his pronunciation: Jheelee, not Giggly. Yorker. Edinburrah. Jane Aae, a word let loose and lost like the wind on the Bronte heath, never to be found and ended; not Jane Aiyer like a South Indian. Together they read A Brief History of Western Art, A Brief History of Philosophy, A Brief History of France, etc., a whole series. An essay on how a sonnet was constructed, the variations on the form. A book on china and glass: Waterford, Salviati, Spode, Meissen, and Limoges. Crumpets they investigated and scones, jams, and preserves.
Thus it was that the judge eventually took revenge on his early confusions, his embarrassments gloved in something called “keeping up standards,” his accent behind a mask of a quiet. He found he began to be mistaken for something he wasn’t—a man of dignity This accidental poise became more important than any other thing. He envied the English. He loathed Indians. He worked at being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become, he would be despised by absolutely everyone, English and Indians, both.
At the end of their probation, the judge and Bose signed the covenant of service, swore to obey His Majesty and the viceroy, collected circulars giving up-to-date information on snakebites and tents, and received the list of supplies they were required to purchase: breeches, riding boots, tennis racket, twelve-bore gun. It made them feel as if they were embarking on a giant Boy Scout expedition.
On board the Strathnaver on his way back, the judge sipped beef tea and read How to Speak Hindustani, since he had been posted to a part of India where he did not speak the language. He sat alone because he still felt ill at ease in the company of the English.
______
His granddaughter walked by his door, went into her bathroom, and he heard the eery whistle of half water—half air in the tap.
Sai washed her feet with whatever piddled into the bucket, but she forgot her face, wandered out, remembered her face, went back in and wondered why, remembered her teeth, put the toothbrush into her pocket, came out again, remembered her face and her teeth, went back, rewashed her feet, reemerged—
Paced up and down, bit off her fingernails—
She prided herself on being able to take anything—
Anything but gentleness.
Had she washed her face? She went back into the bathroom and washed her feet again.
The cook sat with a letter in front of him; blue ink waves lapped the paper and every word had vanished, as so often happened in the monsoon season.
He opened the second letter to find the same basic fact reiterated: there was literally an ocean between him and his son. Then, once again, he shifted the burden of hope from this day to the next and got into his bed, hooked onto his pillow—he had recently had the cotton replaced—and he mistook its softness for serenity.
In the spare room, Gyan was wondering what he had done—had he done the right thing or the wrong, what courage had entered his foolish heart and enticed him beyond the boundaries of propriety? It was the bit of rum he had drunk, it was the strange food. It couldn’t be real, but incredibly, it was. He felt frightened but also a little proud. “Aiyaiyai aiyai yai, “he said to himself.
All four inhabitants lay awake as outside the rain and wind whooshed and banged, the trees heaved and sighed, and the lightning shamelessly unzipped the sky over Cho Oyu.
Nineteen
“Biju! Hey man.” It was Saeed Saeed oddly wearing a white kurta pa-jama with sunglasses, gold chain, and platform shoes, his dreadlocks tied in a ponytail. He had left the Banana Republic. “My boss, I swear he keep grabbing my ass. Anyway,” he continued, “I got married.”
“You’re married?!”
“That’s it, man.”
“Who did you marry???”
“Toys.”
“Toys?”
“Toys.”
“All of a sudden they ask for my green card, say they forget to look when I apply, so I ask her, ‘Will you marry me for papers?’”
“Flakey,” they had all said, in the restaurant where they worked, he in the kitchen, she as a waitress. “She’s a flake.”
Sweet flake. Heart like a cake. She went to city hall with Saeed—rented tuxedo, flowery dress—said “I do,” under the red white and blue.
Now they were practicing for the INS interview:
“What kind of underwear does your husband wear, what toothpaste does your wife favor?”
If they were suspicious, they would separate you, husband in one room, wife in another, asking the same questions, trying to catch you out. Some said they sent out spies to double-check; others said no—the INS didn’t have the time or money.
“Who buys the toilet paper?”
“I do, man, I do, Softy, and you should see how much she use. Every two days I am going to the Rite Aid.”
______
“But her parents are letting her?” asked Biju, incredulous.
“But they LOVE me! Her mother, she LOVE me, she LOVE me.”
He had been to visit them and found a family of long-haired Vermont hippies feeding on pita bread spread with garlic and baba ghanoush. They pitied anyone who didn’t eat their food brown, co-op organic, in bulk, and unprocessed. Saeed, who enjoyed his basics white—white rice, white bread, and white sugar—had to join their dog, who shared his disdain for the burdock burger, the nettle soup, the soy milk, and Tofutti—“She’s a fast-food junkie!”—in the backseat of Grandma’s car painted in rainbow colors putt-putting down to the Burger’n Bun. And there they were, Saeed and Buckeroo Bonzai, two Big Boy Burgers spilling from two big grins, in the picture taken for the INS photo album. He showed it to Biju, taking it from his new briefcase specially bought to carry these important documents.
“I like the pictures very much,” Biju assured him.
There was also Saeed with the family at the Bread & Puppet theater festival posing with the evil insurance-man puppet; Saeed touring the Grafton cheese factory; Saeed by the compost heap with his arm around Grandma, braless in her summer muumuu, salt-and-pepper armpit hair shooting off in several directions.
Oh, the United States, it’s a wonderf
ul country. A wonderful country. And its people are the most delightful in the world. The more he told them about his family in Zanzibar, his faked-up papers, of how he had one passport for Saeed Saeed and one for Zulfikar—the happier they got. Stayed up late into the zany Vermont night, stars coming down coming down, cheering him on. Any subversion against the U.S. government—they would be happy to help.
Grandma wrote a letter to the INS to assure them Zulfikar of Zanzibar was a welcome—no, more than that—a cherished new member of the ancient clan of the Mayflower Williams.
______
He slapped Biju on the back. “See you around,” he said and he left to practice kissing for the interview. “Have to look right or they will sus-pect.
Biju continued on his way, tried to smile at female American citizens: “Hi. Hi.” But they barely looked at him.
______
The cook went back to the post office. “You are getting the letters wet. Taking no care.”
“Babaji, just look outside—how are we to keep them dry? It is humanly impossible, they are getting wet as we transfer them from van to office.”
Next day: “Post came?”
“No, no, roads closed. Nothing today. Maybe the road will open in the afternoon. Come back later.”
Lola was hysterically trying to make a phone call from the STD booth because it was Pixie’s birthday: “What do you mean it doesn’t work, for a week it hasn’t worked!”
“For a month it hasn’t worked,” a young man who had also been in line corrected her, but he seemed content. “The microwave is down,” he explained.
“What?”
“The microwave.” He turned for affirmation to the others in the office. “Yes,” they said, nodding; they were all men and women of the future. He turned back. “Yes, the satellite in the sky,” he indicated, pointing up, “it’s fallen down.” And he pointed at the plebeian floor, gray concrete all stamped about with local mud.
No way to telephone, no way for letters to get through. She and the cook, running into each other, commiserated a moment and then he went on sadly to the butcher and she went to get some Baygon spray and swatters, for the insects. Each day of this fecund season scores of tiny souls lost their brief lives to Lola’s poisons. Mosquitoes, ants, termites, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, woodworms, beetles. Yet, what did it matter? Each day a thousand new ones were born…. Entire nations appeared boldly overnight.
Twenty
Gyan and Sai. At subsequent pauses in the rain they measured ears, shoulders, and the span of their rib cages.
Collar bones, eyelashes, and chins.
Knees, heels, arch of the feet.
Flexibility of fingers and toes.
Cheekbones, necks, muscles of the upper arm, the small complexities of the hinge bones.
The green and purple of their veins.
The world’s most astonishing tongue display: Sai, tutored by her friend Arlene in the convent, could touch her nose with her tongue and showed Gyan.
He could wiggle his eyebrows, slide his head off his neck from left to right to left like a Bharat Natyam dancer, and he could stand on his head.
Now and then, she recalled certain delicate observations she had made during her own explorations before the mirror that had been overlooked by Gyan, on account of the newness of landscape between them. It was, she knew herself, a matter of education to learn how to look at a woman, and worried that Gyan wasn’t entirely aware of how lucky he was.
Ear lobes downy as tobacco leaves, the tender substance of her hair, the transparent skin of the inner wrist….
She brought up the omissions at his next visit, proffered her hair with the zeal of a shawl merchant: “See—feel. Like silk?”
“Like silk,” he confirmed.
Her ears she displayed like items taken from under the counter and put before a discerning customer in one of the town’s curio shops, but when he tried to test the depth of her eyes with his, her glance proved too slippery to hold; he picked it up and dropped it, retrieved it, dropped it again until it slid away and hid.
So they played the game of courtship, reaching, retreating, teasing, fleeing—how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours. But as they eliminated the easily revealable and exhausted propriety, the unexamined portions of their anatomies exerted a more severely distilled potential, and once again the situation was driven to the same desperate pitch of the days when they sat forcing geometry.
Up the bones of the spine.
Stomach and belly button—
______
“Kiss me!” he pleaded.
“No,” she said, delighted and terrified.
She would hold herself ransom.
Oh, but she had never been able to stand suspense.
A fine drizzle spelled an ellipsis on the tin roof….
Moments clocked by precisely, and finally she couldn’t bear it—she closed her eyes and felt the terrified measure of his lips on hers, trying to match one shape with the other.
______
Just a week or two later, they were shameless as beggars, pleading for more.
“Nose?” He kissed it.
“Eyes?” Eyes.
“Ears?” Ears.
“Cheek?” Cheek.
“Fingers.” One, two, three, four, five.
“The other hand, please.” Ten kisses.
“Toes?”
They linked word, object, and affection in a recovery of childhood, a confirmation of wholeness, as at the beginning—
Arms legs heart—
All their parts, they reassured each other, were where they should be.
Gyan was twenty and Sai sixteen, and at the beginning they had not paid very much attention to the events on the hillside, the new posters in the market referring to old discontents, the slogans scratched and painted on the side of government offices and shops. “We are stateless,” they read. “It is better to die than live as slaves,” “We are constitutionally tortured. Return our land from Bengal.” Down the other way, the slogans persisted and multiplied along the landslide reinforcements, jostled for place between the “Better late than never” slogans, the “If married don’t flirt with speed,” “Drinking whisky is risky,” that flashed by as you drove toward the Teesta.
The call was repeated along the road to the army cantonment area; began to pop up in less obvious places; the big rocks along thin paths that veined the mountains, the trunks of trees amid huts made of bamboo and mud, corn drying in bunches under the veranda roofs, prayer flags flying overhead, pigs snorting in pens behind. Climbing perpendicular to the sky, arriving breathless at the top of Ringkingpong hill, you’d see “LIBERATION!” scrawled across the waterworks. Still, for a while nobody knew which way it would go, and it was dismissed as nothing more serious than the usual handful of students and agitators. But then one day fifty boys, members of the youth wing of the GNLF, gathered to swear an oath at Mahakaldara to fight to the death for the formation of a homeland, Gorkhaland. Then they marched down the streets of Darjeeling, took a turn around the market and the mall. “Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army.” They were watched by the pony men and their ponies, by the proprietors of souvenir shops, by the waiters of Glenary’s, the Planter’s Club, the Gymkhana, and the Windamere as they waved their unsheathed kukris, sliced the fierce blades through the tender mist under the watery sun. Quite suddenly, everyone was using the word insurgency.
Twenty-one
“They have a point,” said Noni, “maybe not their whole point, but I’d say half to three-quarters of their point.”
“Nonsense.” Lola waved her sister’s opinion away. “Those Neps will be after all outsiders now, but especially us Bongs. They’ve been plotting this a long while. Dream come true. All kinds of atrocities will go on—then they can skip merrily over the border to hide in Nepal. Very convenient.”
In her mind she pictured their watchman, Budhoo, with her BBC radio and her silver cake k
nife, living it up in Kathmandu along with various other Kanchas and Kanchis with their respective loot.
______
They were sitting in the Mon Ami drawing room having tea after Sai’s lesson.
An opaque scene through the window resembled something from folk art: flat gray mountain and sky, flat white row of Father Booty’s cows on the crest of the hill, sky showing through their legs in squarish shapes. Indoors, the lamp was on, and a plate of cream horns lay in the tawny light and there were tuberoses in a vase. Mustafa climbed onto Sai’s lap and she thought of how, since her romance with Gyan, she had a new understanding of cats. Uncaring of the troubles in the market, Mustafa was wringing forth ecstasies, pushing against her ribs to find a bone to ribble his chin against.
“This state-making,” Lola continued, “biggest mistake that fool Nehru made. Under his rules any group of idiots can stand up demanding a new state and get it, too. How many new ones keep appearing? From fifteen we went to sixteen, sixteen to seventeen, seventeen to twenty-two….” Lola made a line with a finger from above her ear and drew noodles in the air to demonstrate her opinion of such madness.
“And here, if you ask me,” she said, “it all started with Sikkim. The Neps played such a dirty trick and began to get grand ideas—now they think they can do the same thing again—you know, Sai?”
Mustafa’s bones seemed to be dissolving under Sai’s stroking, and he twirled on her knees in a trance, eyes closed, a mystic knowing neither one religion nor another, neither one country nor another, just this feeling.
“Yes,” she said absentmindedly, she had heard the story so many times before: Indira Gandhi had maneuvered a plebiscite and all the Nepalis who had flooded Sikkim voted against the king. India had swallowed the jewel-colored kingdom, whose blue hills they could see in the distance, where the wonderful oranges came from and the Black Cat rum that was smuggled to them by Major Aloo. Where monasteries dangled like spiders before Kanchenjunga, so close you’d think the monks could reach out and touch the snow. The country had seemed unreal—so full of fairy tales, of travelers seeking Shangri-la—it had proved all the easier to destroy, therefore.