by Kiran Desai
He had thought his vigilance would protect his dog from all possible harm.
The price of such arrogance had been great.
He went to see the subdivisional officer who had visited Cho Oyu after the robbery, but trouble had upset the SDO’s good nature. He was no longer the gardening enthusiast who had complimented the judge’s passionflower.
“My dear sir,” he said to the judge, “I am fond of animals myself, but in these times… it’s a luxury we can’t afford—”
He had given up his special cherry tobacco, as well—it seemed an embarrassment at a time like this. One always felt compelled to go back to Gandhian-style austerity when the integrity of the nation was being threatened, rice-dal, roti-namak, over and over. It was just horrible….
The judge persisted, “But can’t you do anything…” and he became angry, threw up his hands.
“A dog! Justice, just listen to yourself. People are being killed. What can I do? Of course I have such high regard…. I have made time despite worry of being accused of favoritism… but we are in an emergency situation. In Calcutta, in Delhi, there is great concern about this severe deterioration of law and order, and in the end that’s what we must think of, isn’t it so? Our country. We must suffer inconvenience and I don’t need to tell someone of your experience this….” The SDO fixed the judge with a certain gluey look that convinced him he meant to be rude.
The judge went on to the police station where the sound of a man’s screaming issued from the inner chamber on purpose, the judge thought, to intimidate him, to extract a bribe.
He looked at the policemen in front of him. They looked insolently back.
They were waiting in the front room, biding time until they would all go in and give the man a final lesson he couldn’t unlearn. They began to snigger. “Ha, ha, ha. Come about his dog! Dog? Ha, ha ha ha ha…. Madman!” They became angry halfway through their humor. “Don’t waste our time,” they said. “Get out.”
Did they perhaps know the name of the person they had picked up after the gun robbery? The judge persisted. He wondered, just a thought, could he be responsible?
Which person?
The one whom they had accused of stealing his guns… he wasn’t blaming the police in any way, but the man’s wife and father had visited him and seemed upset…. There was no such person, they said, what was he talking about? Now, would he stop wasting their time and get out? The sound of the victim screaming in the back intensified as if on cue to give the judge a not so subtle message.
______
He couldn’t conceive of punishment great enough for humanity. A man wasn’t equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone any harm. “We should be dying,” the judge almost wept.
______
The world had failed Mutt. It had failed beauty; it had failed grace. But by having forsaken this world, for having held himself apart, Mutt would suffer.
The judge had lost his clout…. A bit of “Sir sahib huzoor” for politeness’ sake, but that was just residual veneer now; he knew what they really thought of him.
He remembered all of a sudden why he had gone to England and joined the ICS; it was clearer than ever why—but now that position of power was gone, frittered away in years of misanthropy and cynicism.
“Biscuit, pooch, din din, milkie, khana, ishtoo, porridge, dalia, chalo, car, pom-pom, doo-doo, walkie”—
He shouted all the language that was between Mutt and himself, sending nursery words of love flying over the Himalayas, rattled her leash so it clinked the way that made her jump—whoop!—up on all four legs together, as if on a pogo stick.
“Walkie, baba, muffin….
“Mutt, mutton, little chop…” he cried, then, “forgive me, my little dog…. Please let her go whoever you are….”
He kept burning the image of Mutt, how she sometimes lay on her back with all four legs in the air, warming her tummy as she snoozed in the sun. How he’d recently tempted her to eat her lousy pumpkin stew by running around the garden making buzzing noises as if the vegetable were a strange insect, and then he’d popped the cube into her wide-open-with-surprise mouth, and in amazement she’d hastily swallowed.
He pictured the two of them cozy in bed: good night, good morning. The army came out at dusk to make sure curfew was strictly enforced.
“You must return, sir,” said a soldier.
“Get out of my way,” he said in a British accent to make the man back away, but the soldier continued to follow at a safe distance until the judge turned angrily toward home while pretending not to be hurried.
Please come home, my dear, my lovely girl,
Princess Duchess Queen,
Soo-soo, Poo-poo, Cuckoo, good good smelly smell,
Naughty girl,
Treat-treat, dinnertime,
Diamond Pearl,
Teatime! Biscuit!
Sweetheart! Chicki!
Catch the bone!
How ridiculous it all sounded without a dog to receive the words.
The soldier followed meekly, surprised at what was coming from the judge’s mouth.
Something was wrong, he told his wife back in the quarters for married servicemen, concrete blocks defacing the wilderness.
Something indecent was happening.
“What?” she said, newly married, absolutely delighted by her modern plumbing and cooking gadgets.
“God knows what happens, these senile men and their animals… you know,” he said, “all kinds of strange things….”
Then they forgot the conversation, because the army was still being well fed and the wife informed her husband that they had been allotted so much butter that they could share it with their extended family, even though this was against the law, and that while a broiler chicken was usually between six hundred and eight hundred grams, the chicken they had been delivered was almost double the weight: was the army poultry supplier injecting the birds with water?
Forty-seven
In the meantime, in the aftermath of the parade, the police had been reinforced and were hunting down the GNLF boys, combing remote hamlets, trying to weed Gorkhaland supporters from the Marxists, from the Congress supporters, from those who didn’t care either way. They raided tea gardens as they were closing down; managers recalling the attacks by rebels on plantation owners in Assam left on private planes for Calcutta.
Wanted men, on the run, were dodging the police, sleeping in the homes of the wealthier people in town—Lola and Noni, the doctor, the Afghan princesses, retired officials, Bengalis, outsiders, anyone whose home would not be searched.
______
There were reports of comings and goings over the Nepal and Sikkim border, of retired army men controlling the movement, offering quick training on how to wire bombs, ambush the police, blow up the bridges. But anyone could see they were still mostly just boys, taking their style from Rambo, heads full up with kung fu and karate chops, roaring around on stolen motorcycles, stolen jeeps, having a fantastic time. Money and guns in their pockets. They were living the movies. By the time they were done, they would defeat their fictions and the new films would be based on them….
They arrived with masks in the night, climbed over gates, ransacked houses. Seeing a woman walking home bundled in a shawl, they made her unwrap it and took the rice and the bit of sugar she’d concealed.
On the road to the market, the trees were hung with the limbs of enemies—which side and whose enemy? This was the time to make anyone you didn’t like disappear, to avenge ancient family vendettas. Screams continued from the police station though a bottle of Black Label could save your life. Injured men, their spilling guts wrapped in chicken skins to keep them fresh, were rushed on bamboo stretchers to the doctor to be stitched up; a man was found buried in the sewage tank, every inch of his body slashed with a knife, his eyes gouged out….
But while the
residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all. Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of as they sat at home with nothing to do, and found that it was possible, faced with the stench of unimaginable evil, for a human being to grow bored, yawn, be absorbed by the problem of a missing sock, by neighborly irritations, to feel hunger skipping like a little mouse inside a tummy and return, once again, to the pressing matter of what to eat…. There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice—the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event.
Forty-eight
After Delhi, the Gulf Air flight landed in Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport. Biju smelled again, the distinctive smell of a floor being disinfected with phenyl by a sweeper woman both destitute and with a talent for being exceedingly irritating. Eyes lowered and swatting bare feet with a filthy rag, she introduced some visitors for the first time to that potent mixture of intense sympathy and intense annoyance.
There was an unruly crowd around the luggage conveyer belts because several planes were in at the same time and even more varieties of Indians than the ones showcased on Gulf Air were on display, back in the common soup after deliberate evolution into available niches abroad. There was the yuppie who had taken lessons on wine, those who were still maintaining their culture and going to the temple in Bern, or wherever. The funky Bhangra boy with earring and baggy pants. The hippie who had hit on the fact that you could escape from being a drab immigrant and have a fantastic time as an Indian among the tie-dyed, spout all kinds of Hindu-mantra-Tantra-Mother-Earth-native-peoples-single-energy—organic-Shakti-ganja-crystal-shaman-intuition stuff. There were computer boys who’d made a million. Taxi drivers, toilet cleaners, and young straight-laced businessmen who tried to be cool by having friends over for “Some really hot curry, man, how spicy can you take it?”
Indians who lived abroad, Indians who traveled abroad, richest and poorest, the back-and-forth ones maintaining green cards. The Indian student bringing back a bright blonde, pretending it was nothing, trying to be easy, but every molecule tense and self-conscious: “Come on, yaar, love has no color….” He had just happened to stumble into the stereotype; he was the genuine thing that just happened to be the cliché….
Behind him a pair of Indian girls made vomity faces.
“Must have got off the plane and run for an American dame so he could get his green card and didn’t care if she looked like a horse or no. Which she does!!!!”
“Our ladies are the most beautiful in the world,” said one man earnestly to the Indian girls, perhaps worried they would feel hurt, but it sounded as if he were trying to console himself.
“Yes, our women are the best in the world,” said another woman, and our men are the absolute worst gadhas in the whole wide world.”
“Dadi Amma!” everyone shouting. “Dadi Amma!” A granny, sari hitched high for action, showing limp, flesh-colored socks and hairy legs, was racing about with the luggage trolley, whacking into ankles, clambering over the luggage belt.
Two men with disdain on their faces, off the Air France flight, had sought each other out, “Where are you from, man?” hanging aloof.
“Ohio.”
“Columbus?”
“No, a little outside.”
“Where?”
“Small town, you wouldn’t know.”
“?”
“Paris, Ohio.” He said this a little defensively. “You?”
“South Dakota.”
He brightened. “Just look at this,” he said, gesturing outward, relieving them both of pressure, “each time you come back you think something must have changed, but it’s always the same.”
“That’s right,” said the other man. “You don’t like to say it, but you have to. Some countries don’t get ahead for a reason….”
They were waiting for their suitcases, but they didn’t arrive.
Many bags didn’t arrive and Biju overheard a fight at the Air France counter where the passengers had to fill out lost-luggage forms:
“They are only giving compensation to nonresident Indians and foreigners, not to Indian nationals, WHY?” All the Indian nationals were screaming, “Unfair unfair UNFAIR UNFAIR!”
“This is Air France airline policy sir,” said the official, trying to calm them, “Foreigners need money for hotel/toothbrush—”
“So, our family is in Jalpaiguri, we are traveling on” said one woman, “and now we have to stay overnight and wait for our suitcases…. What kind of argument are you giving us? We are paying as much as the other fellow. Foreigners get more and Indians get less. Treating people from a rich country well and people from a poor country badly. It’s a disgrace. Why this lopsided policy against your own people??”
“It IS Air France policy, madam,” he repeated. As if throwing out the words Paris or Europe would immediately intimidate, assure non-corruption, and silence opposition.
“How am I supposed to travel to Jalpaiguri in my dirty underwear? As it is I am smelling so badly, I am ashamed even to go near anyone,” the same lady said, holding her own nose with an anguished expression to show how she was ashamed even to be near herself.
______
All the NRIs holding their green cards and passports, looked complacent and civilized. That’s just how it was, wasn’t it? Fortune piled on more good fortune. They had more money and because they had more money, they would get more money. It was easy for them to stand in line, and they stood patiently, displaying how they didn’t have to fight anymore; their manners proved just how well taken care of they were. And they couldn’t wait for the shopping—”Shopping ke liye jaenge, bhel puri khaenge… dollars me kamaenge, pum pum pum. “Only eight rupees to the tailor, only twenty-two cents!” they would say, triumphantly translating everything into American currency; and while the shopping was converted into dollars, tips to the servants could be calculated in local currency: “Fifteen hundred rupees, is he mad? Give him one hundred, even that’s too much.”
A Calcutta sister accompanying a Chicago sister “getting value for her daaller, getting value for her daaller,” discovering the first germ of leprous, all-consuming hatred that would in time rot the families irreversibly from within.
______
American, British, and Indian passports were all navy-blue, and the NRIs tried to make sure the right sides were turned up, so airline officials could see the name of the country and know right away whom to treat with respect.
There was a drawback, though, in this, for though the staff of Air France might be instructed differently, somewhere along the line—immigration, luggage check, security—you might get the resentful or nationalist kind of employee who would take pains to slow-torture you under any excuse. “Ah jealousy, jealousy”—they inoculated themselves in advance so no criticism would get through during the visit—”ah just jealous, jealous, jealous of our daallars.”
______
“Well, hope you make it out alive, man,” said the Ohio man to the South Dakota man after they had filled out their claims, feeling double happy, once for the Air France money, twice to have it all reconfirmed: “Oh ho ho, incompetent India, you’ve got to be expecting this, typical, typical!”
They passed by Biju who was inspecting his luggage that had finally arrived, and had arrived intact.
“But the problem occurred in France,” said someone, “Not here. They didn’t load the suitcases there.”
But the men were too gratified to pay attention.
“Good luck,” they said to each other with a slap on the back, and the Ohio man left, glad to be bolstered by the story of the lost bag—ammunition against his father, because he knew his father was not proud of him. How could he not be? But he wasn’t.
He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a he
roic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey. Ohio was the first place he loved, for there he had at last been able to acquire a poise—
But then his father looked at him, sitting in his pajama kurta working away at his teeth with his toothpick, and he knew that his father thought it was the sureness that comes from putting yourself in a small place. And the son wouldn’t be able to contain his anger: Jealous, jealous, even of your own son, he would think, jealousy, third-world chip on the shoulder—
Once, his father came to the States, and he had not been impressed, even by the size of the house:
“What is the point? All that space lying there useless, waste of water, waste of electricity, waste of heating, air-conditioning, not very intelligent is it? And you have to drive half an hour to the market! They call this the first world??? Ekdum bekaar!”
The father on the hot dog: “The sausage is bad, the bun is bad, the ketchup is bad, even the mustard is bad. And this an American institution! You can get a better sausage in Calcutta!”
Now the son had the lost-luggage story.
______
Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, and he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother’s lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of color from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan “Good food makes good mood.” Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home—he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing—that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.