by Kiran Desai
If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.
______
They all grow fat there….
The cook knew about them all growing fat there. It was one of the things everyone knew:
“Are you growing fat, beta, like everyone in America?” he had written to his son long ago, in a departure from their usual format.
“Yes, growing fat,” Biju had written back, “when you see me next, I will be myself times ten.” He laughed as he wrote the lines and the cook laughed very hard when he read them; he lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air like a cockroach.
“Yes,” Biju had said, “I am growing fat—ten times myself,” and was shocked when he went to the ninety-nine-cent store and found he had to buy his shirts at the children’s rack. The shopkeeper, a man from Lahore, sat on a high ladder in the center and watched to make sure nobody stole anything, and his eyes clutched onto Biju as soon as he entered, making Biju sting with a feeling of culpability. But he had done nothing. Everyone could tell that he had, though, for his guilty look was there for all to see.
He missed Saeed. He wanted to look, once again, if briefly, at the country through the sanguine lens of his eyes.
______
Biju returned to the Gandhi Café where they had not noticed his absence.
“You all come and watch the cricket match, OK?” Harish-Harry had brought in a photo album to show his staff pictures of the New Jersey condominium for which he had just made a down payment. He had already mounted a giant satellite dish smack-bang in the middle of the front lawn despite the fact that the management of this select community insisted it be placed subtly to the side like a discreet ear; he had prevailed in his endeavor, having cleverly cried, “Racism! Racism! I am not getting good reception of Indian channels.”
That left just his daughter to worry about. Their friend and competitor, Mr. Shah’s wife, had hooked a bridegroom by making Galawati kebabs and Fed-Exing them overnight all the way to Oklahoma. “Some dehati family in the middle of the cornfield,” Harish-Harry told his wife. “And you should see this fellow they are showing off about—what a lutoo. American size—he looks like something you would use to break down the door.”
He told his daughter: “It used to be a matter of pride for a girl to have a pleasant personality. Act like a stupid now and you can regret later on for the rest of your life…. Then don’t come crying to us, OK?”
Thirty-seven
The situation will improve, the SDO had said, but though they had begun to torture random people all over town, it didn’t.
A series of strikes kept businesses closed.
A one-day strike.
A three-day strike.
Then a seven day.
When Lark’s General Store opened briefly one morning, Lola fought a victorious battle with the Afghan princesses over the last jars and cans. Later that month the princesses could think of nothing but jam, furious about it, in the midst of murder and burning properties: “That thoroughly nasty woman!”
Lola gloated each day as she spread the Druk’s marmalade thin so it would last.
A thirteen-day strike.
A twenty-one-day strike.
More strike than no strike.
More moisture in the air than air. It was hard to breathe and there was a feeling of being stifled in a place that was, after all, generous with space if nothing else.
Finally, the shops and offices didn’t open at all—the Snow Lion Travel Agency and the STD booth, the shawl shop, the deaf tailors, Kan-shi Nath & Sons Newsagents—everyone terrorized to keep their shutters down and not even poke their noses out of the windows. Roadblocks stopped traffic, prevented timber and stone trucks from leaving, halted tea from being transported. Nails were scattered on the road, Mobil oil spilled all about. The GNLF boys charged large sums of money if they let you through at all and coerced you to buy GNLF speeches on cassette tapes and Gorkhaland calendars.
Men arrived in trucks from Tindharia and Mahanadi, gathered outside the police station, and threw bricks and bottles. Tear gas didn’t scatter them; neither did the lathi charge.
“Well, how much land do they want?” asked Lola gloomily.
Noni: “The subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong, and extending to the foothills, parts of Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar districts, from Bengal into Assam.”
“No peace for the wicked,” said Mrs. Sen, knitting needles going, for she was making a sweater for the prime minister out of sympathy for his troubles. Even in Delhi it gets cold… especially in those drafty bungalows in which they house top government officials. But she was not an accomplished knitter. Very slow. Unlike her mother, who, in the course of watching a movie, could knit a whole baby blanket.
“Who’s wicked?” said Lola. “Not us. It’s they who are wicked. And we are the ones who have no peace. No peace for the not wicked.”
What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.
______
They were done with their library books, but of course there was no question of returning them. One morning when the trim major who ran the Gymkhana Club arrived, he found the GNLF had scuttled out the librarians and desk clerks and were enjoying the most space and privacy they’d ever had in their lives, sleeping between the bookshelves, cavorting in the ladies’ cloakroom, where, not so long ago, Lola had blown on her puff and delicately powdered her nose.
No tourists arrived from Calcutta in hilarious layers as if preparing for the Antarctic, weaving the cauterizing smell of mothballs through the town. No visitors came, with their rich city fat, to burden scabied nags on pony rides. This year the ponies were free.
Nobody came to the Himalayan Hotel and sat under the Roerich painting of a mountain lit up by the moon like a ghost in bedsheets, to “Experience a Quaint Return to Yesteryears” as the brochure suggested, to order Irish stew, and chew chew chew on the scrawny goats of Kalimpong.
The company guesthouses closed. The watchmen who always had to move at this time of year from their illicit occupation of the main houses during winter into their peripheral huts; who had to alter their expressions from dignity to “Ji huzoor” servitude; replace cupboard locks they had picked to disinter televisions and made-in-Japan electric heaters; this year, they found their comforts uninterrupted.
And while they stayed put, children were being plucked from boarding schools as parents opened the papers to read with horror of the salubrious climate of the hills being disturbed by separatist rebels and guerilla tactics. The mounting hysteria all around was perhaps to blame for the last group of boys at St. Xavier’s disgracing themselves. When instructed to help with the preparation of dinner (cooks having vanished into the mist), they discovered that a chicken’s head was best removed by twisting and popping it like a cork—much better than sawing away with a blunt knife. An orgy of blood and feathers ensued, a great skauwauking kerfuffle, headless birds running about spilling guts and excrement. The boys screamed until they cried with disgraceful laughter, their laughs drowning and struggling in sobs, and sobs bubbling and rising with laughter. The
master in charge turned on the hosepipe to blast them into sense with cold water, but of course by now there was no water left in the tanks.
______
No gas either, or kerosene. They were all back to cooking on wood.
There was no water.
“Left the buckets out in the garden,” said Lola to Noni, “to fill with rain. We better not flush the toilet anymore. Just add some Sunny Fresh to keep the smell down. For small jobs anyway.”
There was no electricity, because the electricity department had been burned to protest arrests made at the roadblocks.
When the fridge shuddered silent the sisters were forced to cook all the perishable food at once. It was Kesang’s day off.
Outside, rain was falling and it was almost time for curfew; drawn by the poignant smell of mutton cooking, a group of passing GNLF boys searching for shelter climbed through the kitchen window.
“Why your front door is locked, Aunty?”
The enormous locks that were usually on the tin trunks containing valuables had been moved to the front and back doors as extra precaution. Above their heads, in the attic, several objects of worth had been left vulnerable. Family puja silver from their preaetheist days; Bond Street baby cups with trowellike utensils that had once gathered and packed Farex into their own guppy mouths; a telescope made in Germany; their great-grandmother’s pearly nose ring; bat eyeglasses from the sixties; silver marrow spoons (they had always been a great family for eating their marrow); damask napkins with a pocket sewn in to enfold triangles of cucumber sandwich—”Just a sprinkle of water, remember, to dampen the cloth before you set off for the picnic….” Magpie things gleaned from a romantic version of the West and a fanciful version of the East that contained power enough to maintain dignity across the rotten offences between nations.
“What do you want?” Lola asked the boys and her face showed them that she had something to protect.
“We are selling calendars, Aunty, and cassettes for the movement.”
“What calendars, cassettes?”
Balanced against the forced entry and their rebel camouflage attire was their disconcerting politeness.
The cassettes were recorded with the favorite washing-bloody-kukris-in-the-mother-waters-of-the-Teesta speech.
“Don’t give them anything,” hissed Lola in English, feeling faint, thinking they wouldn’t understand. “Once you start, they’ll keep coming back.”
But they did understand. They understood her English and she didn’t understand their Nepali.
“Any contribution to the effort for Gorkhaland is all right.”
“All right for you, not all right for us.”
“Shhh,” Noni shushed her sister. “Don’t be reckless,” she gasped.
“We will issue you a receipt,” said the boys, eyes on the food lying on the counter—intestinal-looking Essex Farm sausages; frozen salami with a furze of permafrost melting away.
“Nothing doing,” said Lola.
“Shhkh,” Noni said again. “Give us a calendar then.”
“Only one, Aunty?”
“All right, well, two.”
“But you know how we need money….”
They invested in three calendars and two cassettes. Still the boys did not leave.
“Can we sleep on the floor? The police will never search for us here.”
“No,” said Lola.
“Fine, but please don’t make any noise or trouble,” said Noni.
The boys ate all the food before they slept.
______
Lola and Noni barricaded the door to their bedroom by moving the chest of drawers in front of it as quietly as they could. The boys heard and laughed loudly: “Don’t worry. You are too old for us, you know.”
The sisters spent the night awake, eyes aching against the dark. Mustafa sat rigid in Noni’s arms, feeling his self-respect assaulted, the hole of his bottom a tight exclamation point of anger, his tail a straight and uncompromising line above it.
And Budhoo, their watchman?
They waited for him to arrive with his gun and scare the boys away, but Budhoo did not arrive.
“I told you….” Lola said in a scorched whisper, “these Neps! Hand in hand….”
“Maybe the boys threatened him,” spat Noni.
“Oh, come on. He’s probably uncle to one of them! We should have told them to go and now you’ve started this, Noni, they’ll come all the time.”
“What choice did we have? If we had said no, we would have paid for it. Don’t be naïve.”
“You’re the one who is naïve: ‘They have a point, they have poiiiintt, three-fourths of their point if not the whole poiiintt,’ now look… you stupid woman!”
______
“Are you worried you’ll be caught by the police,” one of them asked with a smirk next morning, “for sheltering us? Is that what you’re worried about? The police won’t touch rich people, only people like us, but if you say anything we will be forced to take action against you.”
“What action?”
“You’ll find out, Aunty.”
Still, their exquisite politeness.
They left with the rice and the soap, the oil, and the garden’s annual output of five jars of tomato chutney, and as they climbed down the steps, they noticed what they hadn’t seen in the darkness of their arrival—how nicely the property stretched into a lawn, then dropped into tiers below. There was quite enough land to accommodate a thin line of huts. Overhead, a grim leathern bobble of electrocuted bats hanging on wires strung between the trees indicated a powerful supply of electricity during peaceful times. The market was close; a beautiful tarred road was right in front; so they might walk to shops and schools in twenty minutes instead of two hours, three hours, each way….
Not a month had passed before the sisters woke one morning to find that, under cover of night, a hut had come up like a mushroom on a newly cut gash at the bottom of the Mon Ami vegetable patch. They watched with horror as two boys calmly chopped down a bamboo from their property and carried it off right in front of their noses, a long taut drumstick, still cloudy and shivering with the push and pull, the contradiction between flexibility and contrariness, long enough to span an entire home of not-so-modest a size.
They rushed out: “This is our land!”
“It is not your land. It is free land,” they countered, putting down the sentence, flatly, rudely.
“It is our land.”
“It is unoccupied land.”
“We’11 call the police.”
They shrugged, turned back, and kept on working.
Thirty-eight
It didn’t come from nothing, even Lola knew, but from an old feeling of anger that couldn’t be divorced from Kalimpong. It was part of every breath. It was in the eyes that waited, attached themselves to you as you approached, rode on your back as you walked on, with a muttered remark you couldn’t catch in the moment of passing; it was in the snickering of those gathered at Thapa’s Canteen, at Gompu’s, at every unnamed roadside shack that sold eggs and matches.
These people could name them, recognize them—the few rich—but Lola and Noni could barely distinguish between the individuals making up the crowd of poor.
Only before, the sisters had never paid much attention for the simple reason that they didn’t have to. It was natural they would incite envy, they supposed, and the laws of probability favored their slipping through life without anything more than muttered comments, but every now and then, somebody suffered the rotten luck of being in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time when it all caught up—and generations worth of trouble settled on them. Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past—Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas—all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong.
It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country; it did matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the ev
ening, even one that sparked and shocked; it did matter to fly to London and return with chocolates filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not. They had pretended it didn’t, or had nothing to do with them, and suddenly it had everything to do with them. The wealth that seemed to protect them like a blanket was the very thing that left them exposed. They, amid extreme poverty, were baldly richer, and the statistics of difference were being broadcast over loudspeakers, written loudly across the walls. The anger had solidified into slogans and guns, and it turned out that they, they, Lola and Noni, were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations.
______
Lola went to pay a visit to Pradhan, the flamboyant head of the Kalimpong wing of the GNLF, so as to complain about the illegal huts being built by his followers on Mon Ami property.
Pradhan said: “But I have to accommodate my men.” He looked like a bandit teddy bear, with a great beard and a bandana around his head, gold earrings. Lola didn’t know much about him, merely that he had been called the “maverick of Kalimpong” in the newspapers, renegade, fiery, unpredictable, a rebel, not a negotiator, who ran his wing of the GNLF like a king his kingdom, a robber his band. He was wilder, people said, and angrier than Ghising, the leader of the Darjeeling wing, who was the better politician and whose men were now occupying the Gymkhana Club. Ghising’s résumé had appeared in the last Indian Express to get through the roadblocks: “Born on Manju tea estate; education, Singbuli tea estate; Ex-army Eighth Gorkha Rifles, action in Nagaland; actor in plays; author of prose works and poems [fifty-two books—could it be?]; bantamweight boxer; union man.”
Behind Pradhan stood a soldier with a wooden stock rifle pointed out into the room. He looked, to Lola’s eyes, like Budhoo’s brother with Budhoo’s gun.