by Kiran Desai
Biju sat on his belongings in the bus station until the man finally took pity on him.
“Listen,” he said, “go to Panitunk and you might find some vehicle from there, but it’s very dangerous. You will have to beg the GNLF men.”
Biju waited there for four days until a GNLF jeep was leaving. They were renting extra seats for extortionary amounts.
“No room,” the men told him.
He opened his new wallet to dollars.
He paid. Abraham Lincoln, in God we trust…. The men had never seen American money, passed the bills around and studied them.
“But you can’t take so much luggage.”
He paid some more, they piled his cases onto the roof and banded them with rope, and then they left, riding high on the thin road above the flooded fields, through the incandescence of young rice and banana, through a wildlife sanctuary with giant signs, “DO NOT DISTURB THE WILD ANIMALS,” hammered onto the trees. He felt so light-hearted to be back, even this journey with these men didn’t unsettle him. He poked his head out and looked up at his bags to make sure they were still properly fastened.
The road tilted, barely a ledge over the Teesta, an insane river, he remembered, leaping both backward and forward within each moment. Biju hung on to the metal frame of the jeep as it maneuvered through ridged gullies and ruts and over rocks—there were more holes in the road than there was road and everything from his liver to his blood was getting a good shake. He looked down over at oblivion, hurried his vision back to the gouged bank. Death was so close—he had forgotten this in his eternal existence in America—this constant proximity of one’s nearest destination.
So, hanging tightly on to the metal carapace, they twisted uphill. There were many butterflies of myriad varieties, and when it rained a bit, the butterflies disappeared. The rain stopped and they returned; another little spasm, and they vanished again. Clouds blew in and out of the jeep, obscuring the men from one another every now and again. All along, the frogs sang lustily. There were at least a dozen landslides on the road between Siliguri and Kalimpong, and as they waited for them to be cleared, vendors came by offering momos in buckets, coconuts cut into triangle slices. This was where his father lived and where he had visited him and where they had hatched the plot to send him to America, and Biju had, in his innocence, done just what his father had, in his own innocence, told him to do. What could his father have known? This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.
Fifty-one
The judge, exhausted from waiting, fell asleep and dreamed that Mutt was dying—for a moment she came out of a delirium, gave him a familiar look, wagged with a heroic effort, and then, in a second it was gone, the soul behind the eyes.
“Mutt?” The judge bent toward her, searching for a flicker.
“No,” said the cook, also in the judge’s dream, “she’s dead, look,” he insisted with an air of finality, and he lifted one of Mutt’s legs and let it go. It didn’t snap back. It settled slowly. She was stiffening, and he flicked her with his nails, but she didn’t flinch.
“Don’t touch her! I’ll kill you!” screamed the judge aloud, waking himself up, convinced by the logic of his dream.
______
The next day when he came back from another fruitless search, he repeated the words. “If you don’t find her RIGHT NOW,” he said, shrilly, to the cook, “I’LL KILL YOU. That’s it. I’ve had enough. It’s your fault. It was your responsibility to watch her when I went for my bath.”
Here was the difference: the cook had been fond of Mutt. He had taken her for walks, made toast for her breakfast with an egg in the wintertime, made her stew, called to her, “Mutty, Ishtu, Ishtoo,” but it was clear, always, that she was just an animal to him.
The judge and his cook had lived together for more years than they had with anyone else, practically in the same room, closer to each other than to any other human being and—nothing, zero, no understanding.
It was so long since Mutt had gone missing. She would be dead now if she’d been bitten by a snake or she’d have starved to death if lost or injured far away.
“But FIND OUT,” he told the cook. “FIND HER. RIGHT NOW.”
“How, how can I, sahib?” He begged…. “I am trying, I have tried….”
“FIND HER. It’s your fault. Mutt was in your care! I will KILL YOU. Wait and see. You didn’t do your duty. You didn’t watch over her. It was your duty and you let her be stolen. How dare you? How dare you??”
The cook wondered if he had done something wrong and his guilt began to grow. Had he indeed been negligent? He had failed in his duty, hadn’t he? He hadn’t looked hard enough. He hadn’t shown respect. He should have been watching the dog the day she went missing….
He began to weep without looking at anyone or anything and disappeared into the forest.
It occurred to him as he stumbled about that he’d done something so awful, he’d be paid back by fate and something even more awful would happen—
Sai now walked up and down the path shouting into the trees for the cook: “Come home, it’s all right, he doesn’t mean it, he is so sad he’s crazy, he doesn’t know what he’s saying….”
The judge was drinking on the veranda and telling himself he felt no remorse, he was perfectly justified in what he had said to the cook…. Ofcourse he was! I’ll kill you!
“Where are you?” called Sai, walking under the Milky Way, which, she had read in My Vanishing Tribe, the Lepchas called Zo-lungming, “World of rice.”
Uncle Potty called out—”Did you find the dog?”
“No, and now the cook has also gone.”
“He’ll be back. Join me for a tipple?”
But she continued.
The cook didn’t hear her because he had stumbled into Thapa’s Canteen, full of men drinking, spending the dregs of their money. He told them what had happened and it made them laugh, a bit of humor in these frightening days. Dog died! The hilarity spread. They could barely stop laughing. In a place where people died without being given any attention. They died of TB, hepatitis, leprosy, plain old fever…. And no jobs, no work, nothing to eat—this commotion over a dog! Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
“It’s not something funny,” said the cook, but he laughed a bit, too, out of relief that this was clearly humorous, but then he felt worse, doubly guilty, and he resumed his mewling. He had ignored his duty…. Why hadn’t he watched that kutti….
In a corner of Thapa’s Canteen was Gyan, who had been let out of the house again. He wasn’t laughing. Oh, that awful day when he had told the boys about the judge’s guns. What, after all, had Sai done to him? The guilt took over again and he felt dizzy and nauseous. When the cook left, he went out after him.
“I haven’t been coming for tuition because of all this trouble…. How is Sai?” he mumbled.
“She is very worried about the dog. She is crying all the time.”
“Tell her that I will look for Mutt.”
“How will you?”
“Tell her that I promise. I will find the dog. Don’t worry at all. Be sure and tell her. I will find Mutt and bring her to the house.”
He uttered this sentence with a conviction that had nothing to do with Mutt or his ability to find her.
The cook looked at him suspiciously. He hadn’t been impressed by Gyan’s capabilities. In fact, Sai herself had told the cook that her tutor was not very bright.
But again Gyan nodded his assurance. Next time he saw Sai, he would have a present for her.
Fifty-two
Biju hadn’t seen such vastness in a long time—the sheer, overwhelming enormity of mountainside and scree coming down the flank of it. In places, the entire mountain had simply fallen out of itself, spread like a glacier with boulders, uprooted trees. Across the de
struction, the precarious ant trail of the road was washed away. He felt exhilarated by the immensity of wilderness, by the lunatic creepers, the shooting hooting abundance of green, the great caterwauling vulgarity of frogs that was like the sound of the earth and the air itself. But the problems of the road were tedious. So, feeling patient in the way one feels before the greatness of nature, impatient in the way one feels with human details, he waited to see his father. The work of recarving a path through this ruin was, of course, usually contracted to teams of hunchbacked midget men and women, rebuilding things stone by stone, putting it all together again each time their work was rent apart, carrying rocks and mud in wicker baskets attached to bands around their foreheads, staggering loony with the weight, pounding on hulking river boulders over and over for hours with hammers and chisels until a bit chipped off, then another bit. They laid out the stones and the surface was tarred again—Biju remembered how, as a child, his father had always made him walk across newly spread pitch whenever they encountered some, in order to reinforce, he said, the thin soles of Biju’s shoes. Now that the government had suspended repairs, the GNLF men in the jeep were forced to clamber out themselves and roll boulders aside, remove fallen tree trunks, shovel clods of earth…. They went through seven landslides. At the eighth they kept getting mired in the mud, the jeep rolling back down.
They backed up, needing space to rev up the engine and gather enough momentum to get over the ruts and the unmade soil and drove forward again at high speed. Again and again the engine stalled and shut off and they rolled back down. Backed up and went whroom whroom whroom-ing!…
They got out again, all of them except the driver, untied the luggage, and piled it on the mud. Finally, on the eleventh try, backing up a good long way and rushing, engine surging—the jeep went flustering over, and they applauded with relief, piled up the bags again, clambered in, and went on. They were almost a whole day into a journey that should have taken two hours. Surely they would soon arrive.
Then they veered off onto a smaller road, even harder to traverse.
“Is this the Kalimpong road?” Biju asked, bewildered.
“We have to drop some men off first…. Detour.”
Hours passed…. The ninth landslide and the tenth.
______
“But when will we reach Kalimpong?” asked Biju. “Will we reach it by night?”
“Calm down, bhai.” They didn’t seem worried, although the sun was sinking fast and a cool damp darkness spilled from the jungle.
It was late evening by the time they reached a few small huts along a dirt track of churned mud and deep puddles of water. The men got out and took down all their belongings, including Biju’s boxes and cases.
“How long are we staying?”
“This is as far as we are going. You can walk up to Kalimpong by yourself,” they said and pointed at a path through the trees. “Shortcut.”
Panic lurched in him. “How will I take my things?”
“Leave them here. Safekeeping.” They laughed. “We’ll send them to you later.”
“No,” said Biju, terrified by the realization that he was being robbed.
“Go!” They pointed.
He stood there. The foliage loomed in a single mass; the sound of frogs swelled into the same tone that had expanded in Biju’s ear through the phone that day when he called his father from the streets of New York.
Up above, the mountains stretched—
Below, they dropped straight down, as in a nightmare, all the way to the Teesta.
“Go, will you?! Bhago,” a man said, pointing now with his rifle. Biju turned.
“But give us your wallet and remove your shoes before you go.”
He turned around again.
“His belt is also nice,” said another of the men, eyeing the leather. “Such nice clothes you get in America. The quality is very good.”
Biju handed over his wallet. He took off his belt.
“You’re forgetting your shoes.”
He took them off. Under fake soles were his savings.
“Your jacket.” And when his denim jacket was off, they decided even his jeans and T-shirt were desirable.
Biju began to quake, and fumbling, tripping, he took off the last items of clothing, stood in his white underpants.
By this time, dogs from all over the busti had arrived galloping. They were battered and balding from fights and disease, but they, like their masters, had the air of outlaws. They surrounded Biju with gangster swagger, tails curved up over them like flags, growling and barking.
Children and women peered from the shadows.
“Let me go,” he begged.
One of the men, laughing wildly, pulled a nightgown off a hedge where it was drying. “No, no, don’t give that to him,” squealed a toothless crone, clearly the owner of the garment. “Let him have it, we’ll buy you another. He’s come from America. How can he go and see his family naked?”
They laughed.
And Biju ran—
He ran into the jungle chased by the dogs, who also seemed in on the joke, grinning and snapping.
Finally, when Biju had passed what the dogs deemed their line of control, they tired of him and wandered back.
Darkness fell and he sat right in the middle of the path—without his baggage, without his savings, worst of all, without his pride. Back from America with far less than he’d ever had.
He put on the nightgown. It had large, faded pink flowers and yellow, puffy sleeves, ruffles at the neck and hem. It must have been carefully picked from a pile at the bazaar.
______
Why had he left? Why had he left? He’d been a fool. He thought of Harish-Harry—”Go for a rest and then return.” Mr. Kakkar, the travel agent, who had warned him—”My friend, I am telling you, you are making a big mistake.”
He thought of Saeed Saeed.
One last time, Biju had run into him.
“Biju, man, I see this girl, Lutfi’s sister, she is visiting from Zanzibar, and the MINUTE I see her, I say to Lutfi, ‘I think she is the ONE, man.’”
“You’re already married.”
“But in four years I get my green card and… fsshht… out of there…. I get divorced and I marry for real. Now we are only going to have a ceremony in the mosque…. This girl… she is….”
Biju waited.
Saeed exploded with amazement: “SO….”
Biju waited.
“CLEAN!! She smell… SO NICE! And size fourteen. BEST SIZE!”
Saeed showed him with his hands apart what a sweet handful his second wife was.
“But when I meet her, I don’t even touch her. Not even like this—” He stuck out his finger like a coy snail from a shell. “I behave myself. We will buy a house in New Jersey. I’m taking a course in airplane maintenance.”
______
Biju sat there in terror of what he’d done, of being alone in the forest, and of the men coming after him again. He couldn’t: stop thinking of all that he’d bought and lost. Of the money he’d hidden under fake soles in his shoes. Of his wallet. Suddenly, he felt an old throbbing of the knee that he had hurt slipping on Harish-Harry’s floor.
Fifty-three
At Cho Oyu, the frogs were croaking in the jhora, in the bed of spinach, and high in the water tank above the trees. Late into the night, the cook made his way through the nightshade and knocked on the judge’s door.
“What is it?” asked the judge.
The cook opened the door wrapped in such a haze of alcohol, it watered his own eyes like an onion. After his stop at Thapa’s Canteen and all the drinking he’d done there, he’d returned to his own supply of chhang and imbibed that as well.
“If I have been disobedient,” he slurred, approaching the foot of the judge’s bed with unfocused eyes, “beat me.”
“What?” said the judge, sitting up in bed and switching on the light, drunk himself. He on whiskey.
“What?”
“I’m a bad man,” c
ried the cook, “I’m a bad man, beat me, sahib, punish me.”
How dare he—
How dare he lose Mutt how dare he not find her how dare he presume to come and disturb the judge—
“WHAT ARE YOU SAYING????!!!” the judge yelled.
“Sahib, beat me—
“If it will make you feel better,” said the judge, “all right.”
“I’m a wicked man, a weak man. I’d be better dead than alive.”
The judge got out of bed. In bed he was heavy; standing he was light. He had to keep moving…. If he didn’t extend himself into action, he would fall. He smacked the cook over the head with his slipper. “If this is what you want!”
Then the cook fell at his feet, clasping one of them and weeping for mercy. “I’m a bad man, forgive me, forgive me….”
“Leave,” said the judge, repulsed, trying to wrench his foot free. “Leave.”
The cook would not. He held tighter. He wept and slobbered on it. Slime came from his nose, tears from his eyes.
The judge began to beat him harder and harder to get him to let go. He kicked out and hit.
“Sahib. I drink. I’m a bad man. Beat me. Beat me.”
Smacking him, beating him, beating him—
“I’ve been bad,” the cook said, “I’ve been drinking I ate the same rice as you not the servant’s rice but the Dehradun rice I ate the meat and lied I ate out of the same pot I stole liquor from the army I made chhang I did the accounts differently for years I have cheated you in the accounts each and every day my money was dirty it was false sometimes I kicked Mutt I didn’t take her for walks just sat by the side of the road smoked a bidi and came home I’m a bad man I watched out for nobody and nothing but myself—Beat me!”
The surge of anger was familiar to the judge.
He said, “You filth, you hypocrite. If you want punishment I’ll give it to you!”