The Inheritance of Loss (28 page)

A modest geometry of morning light lay on the floor, a small rhombus falling through the grate. "Naaty boy," Harish-Harry waggled his finger like a joke. The geometrical shape began to leak light, became shifty, exited slithering up the walls.

Return.

Come back.

Somebody in one of the kitchens of Biju’s past had said: "It could not be so hard or there would not be so many of you here."

But it
WAS
so hard and
YET
there were so many here. It was terribly, terribly hard. Millions risked death, were humiliated, hated, lost their families—YET

there were so many here.

But Harish-Harry knew this. How could he say "Return—come back," in that easy oiled way?

"Naaty boy . . ." he said again when he brought Biju
prasad
from the temple in Queens. "Giving so much worry and trouble."

And in that
prasad
Biju knew not to expect anything else. It was a decoy, an old Indian trick of master to servant, the benevolent patriarch garnering the loyalty of staff; offering slave wages, but now and then a box of sweets, a lavish gift. . . .

So Biju lay on his mattress and watched the movement of the sun through the grate on the row of buildings opposite. From every angle that you looked at this city without a horizon, you saw more buildings going up like jungle creepers, starved for light, holding a perpetual half darkness congealed at the bottom, the day shafting through the maze, slivering into apartments at precise and fleeting times, a cuprous segment visiting between 10 and 12 perhaps, or between 10 and 10:45, between 2:30 and 3:45. As in places of poverty where luxury is rented out, shared, and passed along from neighbor to neighbor, its time of arrival was noted and anticipated by cats, plants, elderly people who might sit with it briefly across their knees. But this light was too brief for real succor and it seemed more the visitation of a beautiful memory than the real thing.

________

After two weeks, Biju could walk with the aid of a stick. Two more weeks and the pain left him, but not, of course, the underlying green card problem. That continued to make him ill.

His papers, his papers. The green card, green card, the
machoot sala oloo ka
patha chaar sau bees
green card that was not even green. It roosted heavily, clumsily, pinkishly on his brain day and night; he could think of nothing else, and he threw up sometimes, embracing the toilet, emptying his gullet into its gullet, lying over it like a drunk. The post brought more letters from his father, and as he picked them up, he cried. Then he read them and he grew violently angry.

"Please help Oni. . . . I asked you in my previous letter but you have not replied. . . . He went to the embassy and the Americans were very impressed with him. He will be arriving in one month’s time. . . . Maybe he can stay with you until he finds something. . . ." Biju began to grind his teeth through his nightmares, woke one morning with a tooth that had cracked across.

"You sound like a cement mixer," complained Jeev, "I just can’t sleep myself, what with you grinding and the rats running."

One night, Jeev woke and trapped a rat in the metal garbage can where it was foraging.

He poured in lighter fluid and set the rat aflame.

"Shut the fuck up, motherfucker," men shouted from up above. "Shithead.

What the fuck. For fuck’s sake. Asshole. Fuck you." A rain of beer bottles crashed around them.

________

"Ask me the price of any shoes all over Manhattan and I’ll tell you where to get the best price."

Saeed Saeed again. How did he come popping up all over the city?

"Come on, ask me."

"I don’t know."

"Pay attention, man," he said with strict kindness. "Now you are here, you are not back home. Anything you want, you try and you can do." His English was good enough now that he was reading two books,
Stop Worrying and Start
Living
and
How to Share Your Life with Another Person.

He owned twenty-five pairs of shoes at this point; some were the wrong size, but he had bought them anyway, just for the exquisite beauty of them.

Biju’s leg had mended.

What if it hadn’t?

Well, it had.

Maybe, though, maybe he would return. Why not? To spite himself, spite his fate, give joy to his enemies, those who wanted him gone from here and those who would gloat to see him back—maybe he
would
go home.

While Saeed was collecting shoes, Biju had been cultivating self-pity.

Looking at a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept in sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn’t afford them anymore.

"Stay there as long as you can," the cook had said. "Stay there. Make money.

Don’t come back here."

Thirty-one

In the month of March,
Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Lola, Noni, and Sai sat in the Swiss Dairy jeep on their way to the Darjeeling Gymkhana to exchange their library books before the trouble on the hillside got any worse.

It was some weeks after the gun robbery at Cho Oyu and a program of action newly drawn up in Ghoom, threatened:

Roadblocks to bring economic activity to a standstill and to prevent the trees of the hills, the boulders of the river valleys, from leaving for the plains. All vehicles would be stopped.

Black flag day on April 13.

A seventy-two-hour strike in May.

No national celebrations. No Republic Day, Independence Day, or Gandhi’s birthday.

Boycott of elections with the slogan "We will not stay in other people’s state of West Bengal."

Nonpayment of taxes and loans (very clever).

Burning of the Indo-Nepal treaty of 1950.

Nepali or not, everyone was encouraged (required) to contribute to funds and to purchase calendars and cassette tapes of speeches made by Ghising, the top GNLF man in Darjeeling, and by Pradhan, top man in Kalimpong.

It was requested (required) that every family—Bengali, Lepcha, Tibetan, Sikkimese, Bihari, Marwari, Nepali, or whatever else in the mess—send a male representative to every procession, and they were also to show up at the burning of the Indo-Nepal treaty.

If you didn’t, they would know and . . . well, nobody wanted them to finish the sentence.

________

"Where is your bum?" said Uncle Potty to Father Booty as he got into the jeep.

He studied his friend severely. A bout of flu had rendered Father Booty so thin his clothes seemed to be hanging on a concavity. "Your bum has gone!"

The priest sat on an inflatable swimming ring, for his gaunt rear ached from riding in that rough jeep running on diesel, just a few skeleton bars and sheets of metal and a basic engine attached, the windscreen spider-webbed with cracks delivered by stones flying up off the broken roads. It was twenty-three years old, but it still worked and Father Booty claimed no other vehicle on the market could touch it.

In the back were the umbrellas, books, ladies, and several wheels of cheese for Father Booty to deliver to the Windamere Hotel and Loreto Convent, where they ate it on toast in the mornings, and an extra cheese for Glenary’s Restaurant in case he could persuade them to switch from Amul, but they wouldn’t. The manager believed that when something came in a factory tin with a name stamped on it, when it was showcased in a national advertising campaign, naturally it was better than anything made by the farmer next door, some dubious Thapa with one dubious cow living down the lane.

"But this is made by local farmers, don’t you wish to support them?" Father Booty would plead.

"Quality control, Father," he countered, "all-India reputation, name brand, customer respect, international standards of hygiene."

Father Booty was with hope, anyway, whizzing through the spring, every flower, every creature preening, flinging forth its pheromones.

The garden at St. Joseph’s Convent was abuzz with such fecundity that Sai wondered, as they drove by in the jeep, if it discomfited the nuns. Huge, spread-open Easter lilies were sticky with spilling anthers; insects chased each other madly through the sky, zip zip; and amorous butterflies, cucumber green, tumbled past the jeep windows into the deep marine valleys; the delicacy of love and courtliness apparent even between the lesser beasts.

________

Gyan and Sai—she thought of the two of them together, of their fight over Christmas; it was ugly, and how badly it contrasted with the past. She remembered her face in his neck, arms and legs over and under, bellies, fingers, here then there, so much so that at times she kissed him and found instead that she’d kissed herself.

"Jesus is coming," read a sign on the landslide reinforcements as they nose-dived to the Teesta.

"To become a Hindu," someone had added in chalk underneath.

This struck Father Booty as very funny, but he stopped laughing when they passed the Amul billboard.

Utterly Butterly Delicious—

"
Plastic!
How can they call it butter and cheese? It’s
not. You could use it for
waterproofing!
"

________

Lola and Noni were waving out of the jeep window. "Hello, Mrs. Thondup."

Mrs. Thondup, from an aristocratic Tibetan family, was sitting out with her daughters Pern Pern and Doma in jewel-colored
bakus
and pale silk blouses woven subtly with the eight propitious Buddhist signs. These daughters, who attended Loreto Convent, were supposed to make friends with Sai—once, long ago, so the adults had conspired—but they didn’t want to be her friends. They had friends already. All full up. No room for oddness.

"What an elegant lady," Lola and Noni always said when they saw her, for they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful: the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx.

Thus, they did not wave to Mrs. Sen emerging from the post office. "They keep begging and begging my daughter to
please just
take a green card," Lola mimicked her neighbor. Liar, liar, pants on fire. . . .

They waved again as they passed the Afghan princesses sitting on cane chairs among white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick. From their house came the unmistakable smell of chicken.

"Soup?" shouted Uncle Potty, already hungry, nose trembling with excitement. He had missed his usual leftovers-inside-an-omelet breakfast.

"Soup!"

Waving, then, at the Graham’s School orphans in the playground—they were so angelically beautiful, they looked as if they had already died and gone to heaven.

The army came jogging along overlaid by courting butterflies and the colorful dashes—blue, red, orange—of dragonflies, hinged in the severely cricked geometric angles of their mating. The men puffed and panted, their spindly legs protruding from comically wide shorts: how would they defend India against the Chinese so close over the mountains at Nathu-La?

From the army mess kitchens came rumors of increasing vegetarianism.

Lola often encountered young officers who were not only vegetarian, but also teetotalers. Even the top command.

"I think to be in the army you should eat fish at least," she said.

"Why?" asked Sai.

"To kill you must be carnivorous or otherwise you’re the hunted. Just look at nature—the deer, the cow. We are animals after all and to triumph you must taste blood." But the army was retreating from being a British-type army and was becoming a true Indian army. Even in choice of paint. They passed the Striking Lion’s Club that was painted a bridal pink.

"Well," said Noni, "they must be tired of that mud color over every single thing."

"FLOWERS," it read on a grand sign nearby as part of the Army Beautification Program, though it was the only spot on the hill where there were none.

________

They stopped for a pair of young monks crossing to the gates of a mansion recently bought by their order.

"Hollywood money," Lola said. "And once upon a time the monks used to be grateful to Indians, the only country to take them in! Now they despise us. Waiting for Americans to take them to Disneyland. Fat chance!"

"God, they’re so handsome," said Uncle Potty, "who wants them to leave?"

He remembered the time he and Father Booty had first met. . . their admiring eyes on the same monk in the market. . . the start of a grand friendship.

. . .

"Everyone says poor Tibetans—poor Tibetans," Lola continued, "but what brutal people, barely a Dalai Lama survived—they were all popped off before their time. That Potala Palace—the Dalai Lama must be thanking his lucky stars to be in India instead, better climate, and let’s be honest, better food. Good fat mutton
momos.
"

Noni: "But
he
must be vegetarian, no?"

"These monks are not vegetarian. What fresh vegetables grow in Tibet? And in fact, Buddha died of greed for pork."

"What a situation," said Uncle Potty. "The army is vegetarian and the monks are gobbling down meat. . . ."

________

Down they hurtled through the
sal
trees and the
pani saaj,
Kiri te Kanawa on the cassette player, her voice soaring from valley level to hover around the five peaks of Kanchenjunga.