by Kiran Desai
But now he was forced to depend on local currency. Tashi’s retarded cousin was running back and forth carrying bottles between Gompu’s and the pool table, so the men could continue drinking as they played and talked of the movement. A sud of vomit lay all around.
Sai walked by the deserted classrooms of Kalimpong college, dead insects boiled in piles against rimy windows, bees noosed by spiders’ silk, blackboard still with its symbols and calculations. Here, in this chloroformed atmosphere, Gyan had studied. She walked around to the other side of the mountain that overlooked the Relli River and Bong Busti, where he lived. It was two hours downhill to his house in a poor part of Kalimpong quite foreign to her.
He had told her the story of his brave ancestors in the army, but why didn’t he ever speak of his family here and now? In the back of her mind, Sai knew she should stay home, but she couldn’t stop herself.
She walked by several churches: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals. The old English church stood at the town’s heart, the Americans at the edge, but then the new ones had more money and more tambourine spirit, and they were catching up fast. Perfect practitioners, too, of the hide-behind-the-tree-and-pop-out technique to surprise those who might have run away; of the salwar kameez disguise (all the better to gobble you up, my dear…); and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear…), that was it—they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba.
But Sai walked by unmolested. The churches were dark; the missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace.
She passed by fields and small clusters of houses, became confused in a capillary web of paths that crisscrossed the mountains, perpendicular as creepers, dividing and petering into more paths leading to huts perched along eyebrow-width ledges in the thick bamboo. Tin roofs promised tetanus; outhouses gestured into the ether so that droppings would fall into the valley. Bamboo cleaved in half carried water to patches of corn and pumpkin, and wormlike tubes attached to pumps led from a stream to the shacks. They looked pretty in the sun, these little homes, babies crawling about with bottoms red through pants with the behinds cut out so they could do their susu and potty; fuschia and roses—for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it. Sai knew that once the day failed, though, you wouldn’t be able to ignore the poverty, and it would become obvious that in these homes it was cramped and wet, the smoke thick enough to choke you, the inhabitants eating meagerly in the candlelight too dim to see by, rats and snakes in the rafters fighting over insects and birds’ eggs. You knew that rain collected down below and made the earth floor muddy, that all the men drank too much, reality skidding into nightmares, brawls, and beating.
A woman holding a baby passed by. The woman smelled of earth and smoke and an oversweet intense smell came from the baby, like corn boiling.
“Do you know where Gyan lives?” Sai asked.
She pointed at a house just ahead; there it stood and Sai felt a moment of shock.
It was a small, slime-slicked cube; the walls must have been made with cement corrupted by sand, because it came spilling forth from pock-marks as if from a punctured bag.
Crows’ nests of electrical wiring hung from the corners of the structure, split into sections that disappeared into windows barred with thin jail grill. She could smell an open drain that told immediately of a sluggish plumbing system failing anew each day despite being so rudimentary. The drain ran from the house under a rough patchwork of stones and emptied over the property that was marked with barbed wire, and from under this wire came a perturbed harem of sulfurous hens being chased by a randy rooster.
The upper story of the house was unfinished, presumably abandoned for lack of funds, and, while waiting to stockpile enough to resume building, it had fallen into disrepair; no walls and no roof, just a few posts with iron rods sprouting from the top to provide a basic sketch of what was to have followed. An attempt had been made to save the rods from rust with upturned soda bottles, but they were bright orange anyway.
Still, she could tell it was someone’s precious home. Marigolds and zinnias edged the veranda; the front door was ajar and she could see past its puckered veneer to a gilt clock and a poster of a bonneted golden-haired child against a moidering wall, just the kind of thing that Lola and Noni made merciless fun of.
There were houses like this everywhere, of course, common to those who had struggled to the far edge of the middle class—just to the edge, only just, holding on desperately—but were at every moment being undone, the house slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal—modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next.
______
The house didn’t match Gyan’s talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn’t match his future. Every single thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world. Sisters’ marriages, younger brother’s studies, grandmother’s teeth—all on hold, silenced, until he left, strove, sent something back.
Sai felt shame, then, for him. How he must have hoped his silence would be construed as dignity. Of course he had kept her far away. Of course he had never mentioned his father. The dilemmas and stresses that must exist within this house—how could he have let them out? And she felt distaste, then, for herself. How had she been linked to this enterprise, without her knowledge or consent?
She stood staring at the chickens, unsure of what to do.
______
Chickens, chickens, chickens bought to supplement a tiny income. The birds had never revealed themselves to her so clearly; a grotesque bunch, rape and violence being enacted, hens being hammered and pecked as they screamed and flapped, attempting escape from the rapist rooster.
Several minutes passed. Should she leave, should she stay?
The door was pushed open farther, and a girl of about ten came out of the house with a cooking pot to scrub out with mud and gravel at the outside tap.
“Does Gyan live here?” Sai asked despite herself.
Suspicion shadowed the girl’s face. It was an old, unsurprised sure-ness of ulterior motives, a funny look in a child.
“He’s my mathematics tutor.”
Still looking as if someone like Sai could only mean trouble, she set down the pot and went back into the house as the rooster rushed forth to peck the grain stuck at the bottom, climbing right inside, giving the hens a reprieve.
At that moment, Gyan came out, caught her expression of distaste before she had a chance to disguise it, and was outraged. How dare she seek him out to find her indulgence in pity! He had been feeling guilty about his extended silence, was considering returning to see her, but now he knew he was quite right. The rooster climbed out of the pot and began to strut about. He was the only grand thing around, crowned, spurred, crowing like a colonial.
______
“What do you want?”
She saw his thoughts recast his eyes and mouth, remembered that he had abandoned her, not the other way around, and she was bitterly angry.
Dirty hypocrite.
Pretending one thing, living another. Nothing but lies through and through.
Farther away, she could see an outhouse made of four bamboo poles and threadbare sacking over an alarming drop.
Perhaps he’d hoped he’d wheedle his way into Cho Oyu; maybe his whole family could move in there, if he played his cards right, and use those capacious bathrooms, each as big as his entire home. Cho Oyu might be crumbling, but it had once been majestic; it had its past if not its future, and that might be enough—a gate of black lace, the name worked into imposing stone pil
lars with mossy cannonballs on top as in To the Manor Born.
The sister was looking at them curiously.
“What do you want?” Gyan’s refrigerated voice repeated.
To think that she had come to call him momo, cosy scoop of minced mutton in charming dimpled wrapping, that she had come to climb into his lap, ask why he hadn’t forgiven her as before at the Christmastime fight, but she wouldn’t satisfy him by admitting any vulnerability now.
Instead she said she had come about Father Booty.
______
Her outrage at the injustice done to her friend returned to her in a rush. Dear Father Booty, who had been forced onto a jeep leaving for the Siliguri airport, having lost everything but his memories: the time he had given a lecture on how dairies might create a mini Swiss-style economy in Kalimpong and had been greeted with a standing ovation; his poem on a cow in the Illustrated Weekly; and “Nothing so sweet, dear friends”—evenings on Uncle Potty’s veranda, when the music ended on a drawn-out note of honey, and the moon—it was whole—sailed upward, an alchemist’s marvel of illuminated cheese. How fast the earth spun! It was all over.
How was he to live where, he despaired, he would be snipped into an elderly person supported by the state and packaged in a very clean box alongside other aged people with supposedly everything in common with him—
He had left his friend Uncle Potty in mourning, drinking, the world breaking in waves about him; chair going one way, the table and stove the other; the whole kitchen rocking back and forth.
______
“Look at what you people are doing,” she accused Gyan.
“What am I doing? What have I to do with Father Booty?”
“Everything.”
“Well, if that’s what it will take, so be it. Should Nepalis sit miserably for another two hundred years so the police don’t have an excuse to throw out Father Booty?” He came out of the gate, marched her away from his house.
“Yes,” said Sai. “You, for one, are better gone than Father Booty. Think you’re wonderful… well, you know what? You’re not! He’s done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside.”
Gyan became seriously angry.
“In fact, good thing they kicked him out,” he said, “who needs Swiss people here? For how many thousands of years have we produced our own milk?”
“Why don’t you then? Why don’t you make cheese?”
“We live in India, thank you very much. We don’t want any cheese and the last thing we need is chocolate cigars.”
“Ah, that same old thing again.” She wished to claw him. She wanted to pluck out his eyes and kick him black-and-blue. The taste of blood, salty, dark—she could anticipate its flavor. “Civilization is important,” she said.
“That is not civilization, you fool. Schools and hospitals. That is.”
You fool—how dare he!
“But you have to set a standard. Or else everything will be brought down to the same low level as you and your family.”
She was shocked at herself as she spoke, but in this moment she was willing to believe anything that lay on the other side of Gyan.
“I see, Swiss luxury sets a standard, chocolates and watches set the standard…. Yes, soothe your guilty conscience, stupid little girl, and hope someone doesn’t burn down your house for the simple reason that you are a fool.”
Again he was calling her fool—
“ If this is what you’ve been thinking, why didn’t you boycott the cheese instead of gobbling it down? Now you attack it? Hypocrite! But it was very nice to eat the cheese when you got a chance, no? All that cheese toast? Hundreds of pieces of cheese toast you must have eaten. Let alone the chocolate cigars…. So greedy, eating them like a fat pig. And tuna fish on toast and peanut butter biscuits!”
By now, with the conversation disintegrating, his sense of humor began to return to him, and Gyan began to giggle, his eyes to soften, and she could see his expression shift. They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn’t believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring coziness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A wild daring love to bicycle them into the sky, but also a rice and dal love blessed by the unexciting feel of everyday, its surprises safely enmeshed in something solidly familiar like marrying the daughter or son of your father’s best friend and grumbling about the cost of potatoes, the cost of onions. Every single contradiction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction.
______
Sai began to laugh a bit as well.
“Momo?” she said, switching to a pleading tone.
Then, in a flash he veered back, was angry again. Remembered this was not a conversation he wished to end in laughter. The infantile nickname, the tender feel of her eyes—it aroused his ire. Her getting him to apologize, trying to smother him, swaddle him, drag him to drown in this pish pash mash, sicky sticky baby sweetieness… eeeshhh….
He needed to be a man. He needed to stand tall and be rough. Dryness, space, good firm gestures. Not this fritter, flutter, this worming in sugar….
______
Oh yes, how he needed to be strong—
For, if truth be told, as the weeks went by, he, Gyan, was scared—he who had thought there was no joy like screaming victory over oppression, he who had raised his fist to authority, who had found the fire of his college friends purifying, he who had claimed the hillside, enjoyed the thought of those Mon Ami sisters with their fake English accents blanching and trembling—he, who was hero for the homeland….
He listened with growing trepidation as the conversation in Gompu’s gained in fervor. When did shouting and strikes get you anywhere, they said, and talked of burning the circuit house, robbing the petrol pump.
When Chhang and Bhang, Gyan, Owl and Donkey had leaped into jeeps, filled up at the petrol station and driven off without paying, Gyan had been shaking just as much as the pump manager on the other side of the window, the muscles of his heart performing uncontrollable spasms.
There were those who were provoked by the challenge, but Gyan was finding that he wasn’t one of these. He was angry that his family hadn’t thought to ban him, keep him home. He hated his tragic father, his mother who looked to him for direction, had always looked to him for direction, even when he was a little boy, simply for being male. He spent the nights awake, worrying he couldn’t live up to his proclamations.
But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn’t leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?
______
Yes, he owed much to his rejection of Sai.
The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way. In pushing her away, an energy was born, a purpose whittled. He wouldn’t sweetly reconcile.
“You hate me,” said Sai, as if she’d read his thoughts, “for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me. You aren’t being fair.”
“What’s fair? What’s fair? Do you have any idea of the world? Do you bother to look? Do you have any understanding of how justice operates or, rather, does NOT operate? You’re not a baby anymore, you know….”
“And how grown-up are you?! Too scared even to come for tuition because you know you’ve behaved nastily and you’re too much of a coward to admit it! You’re probably just sitting waiting for your mummy to arrange your marriage. Low-clas
s family, uncultured, arranged-marriage types… they’ll find you a silly fool to marry and you’ll be delighted all your life to have a dummy. Why not admit it, Gyan??”
Coward! How dare she? Who would marry her!
“You think it’s brave of me to sit on your veranda? I can’t spend my life eating cheese toast, can I?”
“ I didn’t ask you to. You did it of your own free will, and pay us back for it, if that’s what you think.” She found a new attack and went after it even though she grew steadily more horrified by the vermin that coursed from her mouth, but it was as if she were on a stage; the role was more powerful than herself.
“Ate it for free… typical of you people, demand and take and then spit on what you’ve been given. There is exactly one reason why you will get nowhere—
“Because you don’t deserve to. Why did you eat it if it was beneath your?”
“Not beneath me. Nothing to DO with me, YOU FOOL—”
“Don’t call me FOOL. Through this whole conversation you’ve been repeating it, FOOL FOOL—”
Lunging at him with hands and nails, having learned something from the conduct of the common chicken some minutes ago, she scratched his arms in red streaks and—“You told them about the guns, didn’t you?” she was shouting all of a sudden. “You told them to come to Cho Oyu? You did, didn’t you, DIDN’T YOU?”
It all came bursting out although she hadn’t considered this possibility before. Suddenly her anger, Gyan’s absences, his ignoring her in Darjeeling—all came together.