The Inheritance of Loss (21 page)

________

There in the dim space, at the back, amid lentils splattered about and spreading grease transparencies on the cloths of abandoned tables yet uncleared, sat Harish-Harry, who, with his brothers Gaurish-Gary and Dhansukh-Danny, ran a triplet of Gandhi Cafés in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He didn’t look up as Biju entered. He had his pen hovering over a request for a donation sent by a cow shelter outside Edison, New Jersey.

If you gave a hundred dollars, in addition to such bonus miles as would be totted up to your balance sheet for lives to come, "We will send you a free gift; please check the box to indicate your preference": 1. A preframed decorative painting of Krishna-Lila: "She longs for her lord and laments."

2. A copy of the
Bhagavad Gita
accompanied by commentary by Pandit so-and-so (B.A., MPhil., Ph.D., President of the Hindu Heritage Center), who has just completed a lecture tour in sixty-six countries.

3. A CD of devotional music beloved by Mahatma Gandhi.

4. A gift-coupon to the Indiagiftmart: "Surprise the special lady in your life with our special
choli
in the colors of onion and tender pink, coupled with a butter
lehnga.
For the woman who makes your house a home, a set of twenty-five spice jars with vacuum lids. Stock up on Haldiram’s Premium Nagpur Chana Nuts that you must have been missing. . . ."

His pen hovered. Pounced.

To Biju he said: "Beef? Are you crazy? We are an all-Hindu establishment.

No Pakistanis, no Bangladeshis, those people don’t know how to cook, have you been to those restaurants on Sixth Street?
Bilkul bekaar.
. . ."

One week later, Biju was in the kitchen and Gandhi’s favorite tunes were being sung over the sound system.

Twenty-three

Gyan and Sai’s romance
was flourishing and the political trouble continued to remain in the background for them.

Eating
momos
dipped in chutney, Gyan said: "You’re my
momo.
"

Sai said: "No you’re mine."

Ah, dumpling stage of love—it had set them off on a tumble of endearments and nicknames. They thought of them in quiet moments and placed them before each other like gifts. The
momo,
mutton in dough, one thing plump and cozy within the other—it connoted protection, affection.

But during the time they ate together at Gompu’s, Gyan had used his hands without a thought and Sai ate with the only implement on the table—a tablespoon, rolling up her roti on the side and nudging the food onto the spoon with it. Noticing this difference, they had become embarrassed and put the observation aside.

"
Kishmish,
"
he called her to cover it up, and "
Kaju
" she called him, raisin and cashew, sweet, nutty, and expensive. Because new love makes sightseers out of couples even in their own town, they went on excursions to the Mong Pong Nature Reserve, to Delo Lake; they picnicked by the Teesta and the Relli. They went to the sericulture institute from which

came a smell of boiling worms. The manager gave them a tour of the piles of yellowy cocoons moving subtly in a corner, machines that tested waterproofing, flexibility; and he shared his dream of the future, of the waterproof and drip-dry sari, stain-proof, prepleated, zippable, reversible, super duper new millennium sari, named for timeless Bollywood hits like
Disco Dancer.
They took the toy train and went to the Darjeeling zoo and viewed in their free, self-righteous, modern love, the unfree and ancient bars, behind which lived a red panda, ridiculously solemn for being such a madly beautiful thing, chewing his bamboo leaves as carefully as a bank clerk doing numbers. They visited the Zang Dog Palri Fo Brang Monastery on Durpin Dara, where little monks were being entertained by the gray-haired ones, running up and down pulling the children on rice sacks, sailing them over the polished monastery floor, before the murals of demons and Guru Padmasambhava with his wrathful smile ensconced in a curly mustache, his carmine cloak, diamond scepter, lotus hat with a vulture feather; before a ghost riding a snow lion and a green Tara on a yak; sailing the children before the doors that opened like bird wings onto the scene of mountains all around.

From Durpin Dara, where you could see so far and high, the world resembled a map from a divine perspective. One could see the landscape stretching below and beyond, rivers and plateaus. Gyan asked Sai about her family, but she felt uncertain about what she should say, because she thought if she told him about the space program, he might feel inferior and ashamed. "My parents eloped and nobody spoke to them again. They died in Russia where my father was a scientist."

But his own family story also led overseas, he told Sai, quite proudly. They had more in common than they thought.

________

The story went like this:

In the 1800s his ancestors had left their village in Nepal and arrived in Darjeeling, lured by promises of work on a tea plantation. There, in a small hamlet bordering one of the remoter tea estates, they had owned a buffalo renowned for its astonishingly creamy milk. By and by along came the Imperial Army, measuring potential soldiers in villages all over the hills with a measuring tape and ruler, and they had happened upon the impressive shoulders of Gyan’s great-grandfather, who had grown so strong on the milk of their buffalo that he had beaten the village sweet-seller’s son in a wrestling match, an exceptionally glossy and healthy boy. An earlier

recruit from their village reported soldiers were kept in ladylike comfort—warm and dry with blankets and socks, butter and ghee, mutton twice a week, an egg each day, water always in the taps, medicine for every ailment, every whim and scuff. You could solicit help for an itch on the bottom or a bee sting without shame, all for no more work than to march up and down the Grand Trunk Road.

The army offered far more money to this boy grown strong on buffalo milk than his father had ever earned, for his father labored as a runner for the plantation; left before dawn with a big conical basket divided into sections on his back and strove to return by sundown, struggling uphill. The basket would now be filled with a vegetable layer and a live chicken pecking at the weave; eggs, toilet paper, soap, hairpins, and letter paper on top for the memsahib to write: "My darling daughter, it is wildly beautiful here and the beauty almost, almost makes up for the loneliness. . . ."

So he swore allegiance to the Crown, and off he went, the beginning of over a hundred years of family commitment to the wars of the English.

At the beginning, the promise had held true—all Gyan’s greatgrandfather did was march for many prosperous years, and he acquired a wife and three sons.

But then they sent him to Mesopotamia where Turkish bullets made a sieve of his heart and he leaked to death on the battlefield. As a kindness to the family, that they might not lose their income, the army employed his eldest son, although the famous buffalo, by now, was dead, and the new recruit was spindly. Indian soldiers fought in Burma, in Gibraltar, in Egypt, in Italy.

Two months short of his twenty-third birthday, in 1943, the spindly soldier was killed in Burma, shakily defending the British against the Japanese. His brother was offered a job and this boy died, too, in Italy, outside Florence, not fighting at all, but making jam from apricots for the major of the battalion in a villa housing British troops. Six lemons, he had been instructed, and four cups of sugar. He stirred the pot in the un-threatening Italian countryside, pheasants whirring over the olives and the vines, the resistance army unearthing truffles in the woods. It was a particularly bountiful spring, and then, they were bombed—

When Gyan was quite small, the last family recruit had one day climbed off the bus in Kalimpong’s bus station and arrived missing a toe. There was nobody who could remember him, but finally, their father’s childhood memories were resurrected and the man was recognized as an uncle. He had lived with Gyan’s family until he died, but they never discovered where he traveled to, or which countries he had fought against. He

came of a generation, all over the world, for whom it was easier to forget than to remember, and the more their children pressed, the more their memory dissipated. Once Gyan had asked: "Uncle, but what is England
like?
"

And he said: "I don’t know. . . ."

"How can you not know???"

"But I have never been."

All these years in the British army and he had never been to England! How could this be? They thought he had prospered and forgotten them, living like a London lord. . . .

Where
had
he been, then?

The uncle wouldn’t say. Once every four weeks he went to the post office to collect his seven-pound-a-month pension. Mostly he sat on a folding chair, silently moving an expressionless face like a sunflower, a blank handicapped insistence following the sun, the only goal left in his life to match the two, the orb of his face and the orb of light.

The family had since invested their fortunes in schoolteaching and Gyan’s father taught in a tea plantation school beyond Darjeeling.

________

Then the story stopped. "What about your father? What is he like?" Sai asked, but she didn’t press him. After all, she knew about stories having to stop.

________

The nights were turning chilly already, and it grew dark earlier. Sai, returning late and fumbling for the road beneath her feet, stopped at Uncle Potty’s for a torch.

"Where’s that handsome fellow. . . ?" Uncle Potty and Father Booty teased her.

"Goodness. Those Nepali boys, high cheekbones, arm muscles, broad shoulders.

Men who can
do
things, Sai, cut down trees, build fences, carry heavy boxes . . .

mmm mmm.
"

The cook was waiting at the gate with a lantern when she finally reached Cho Oyu. His bad-tempered wrinkled face peered from an assortment of mufflers and sweaters. "I’ve been waiting, waiting. . . . In this darkness you have not come home!" he complained, waddling in front of her along the path from gate to house, looking round and womanish.

"Why don’t you leave me alone?" she said, conscious for the first time of the unbearable stickiness of family and friends when she had found freedom and space in love.

The cook felt hurt to his chutney core. "I’ll give you one smack," he shouted. "From childhood I have brought you up! With so much love! Is this any way to talk? Soon I’ll die and then who will you turn to? Yes, yes, soon I’ll be dead. Maybe then you’ll be happy. Here I am, so worried, and there you are, having fun, don’t care. . . ."

"Ohhoho." As usual she ended by attempting to placate him. He wouldn’t be placated and then he was, just a little.

Twenty-four

In the Gandhi Café,
the lights were kept low, the better to hide the stains. It was a long journey from here to the fusion trend, the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita. This was the real thing, generic Indian, and it could be ordered complete, one stop on the subway line or even on the phone: gilt and red chairs, plastic roses on the table with synthetic dewdrops, cloth paintings portraying—

Oh no, not again—

Yes again—

Krishna and the gopis, village belle at the well. . . .

And the menu—

Oh no, not again—

Yes, again—

Tikka masala, tandoori grill, navrattan vegetable curry, dal makhni, pappadum. Said Harish-Harry: "Find your market. Study your market. Cater to your market." Demand-supply. Indian-American point of agreement. This is why we make good immigrants. Perfect match. (In fact, dear sirs, madams, we were practicing a highly evolved form of capitalism long before America was America; yes, you may think it’s your success, but all civilization comes from India, yes).

But was he underestimating his market? He didn’t care.

The customers—poor students, untenured professors—filled up at the lunch buffet, "ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $5.99," tottered out overcome by the tipsy snake charmer music and the heaviness of the meal.

________

To add up the new numbers that came clinking in, Harish-Harry’s wife arrived on Sunday mornings after she had washed her hair. A horsetail of sopping tresses, bound loosely in a gold ribbon from a Diwali fruit-and-nut box, dripped onto the floor behind.

"
Arre,
Biju . . .
to sunao kahani,
"
she always said, "
batao . . .
what’s the story?"

But it didn’t matter that he had no story to tell, because she went immediately to the ledgers kept under a row of gods and incense sticks.

"Hae hae," her husband laughed with pleasure, diamond and gold glints coming forth on the black velvet of his pupils, "You can’t make a fool of Malini.

She get on the phone, she get the best deal of anybody."

________

It had been Malini who had suggested the staff live down below in the kitchen.

"Free housing," Harish-Harry told Biju.

By offering a reprieve from NYC rents, they could cut the pay to a quarter of the minimum wage, reclaim the tips for the establishment, keep an eye on the workers, and drive them to work fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-hour donkey days.

Saran, Jeev, Rishi, Mr. Lalkaka, and now Biju. All illegal. "We are a happy family here," she said, energetically slapping vegetable oil on her arms and face,

"no need for lotions-potions,
baba,
this works just as well."