The Inheritance of Loss (34 page)

"
Noise, noise,
"said the watchman’s family, "
Can’t hear?
"

The cook waved them away angrily, "
Shshshshsh
"
immediately terrified, then, at the loss of a precious second with his son. He turned back to the phone, still shooing them away from behind, almost sending his hand off with the vehemence of his gestures.

They retreated for a moment and then, growing accustomed to the dismissive motion, were no longer intimidated, and returned.

"HELLO?"

"KYA?"

"KYA?"

The shadow of their words was bigger than the substance. The echo of their own voices gulped the reply from across the world.

"THERE IS TOO MUCH NOISE."

The watchman’s wife went outside and studied the precarious wire, the fragile connection trembling over ravines and over mountains, over Kanchenjunga smoking like a volcano or a cigar—a bird might have alighted upon it, a nightjar might have swooped through the shaky signal, the satellite in the firmament could have blipped—

"Too much wind, the wind is blowing," said the watchman’s wife, "the line is swaying like this, like this"—her hand undulating.

The children climbed up the tree and tried to hold the line steady.

A gale of static inflicted itself on the space between father and son.

"WHAT HAPPENED?"—shrieking even louder—"EVERY-THING ALL

RIGHT?!"

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

"Let it go," the wife said, plucking the children from the tree, "you’re making it worse."

"WHAT IS HAPPENING? ARE THERE RIOTS? STRIKES?"

"NO TROUBLE NOW." (Better not worry him.) "NOT NOW!!"

"Is he going to come?" said the watchman.

"ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?" Biju shrieked on the New York street.

"DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME. DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING

HERE. ARE THERE PROPER ARRANGEMENTS FOR EATING AT THE

HOTEL? IS THE RESTAURANT GIVING YOU ACCOMMODATION? ARE

THERE ANY OTHER PEOPLE FROM UTTAR PRADESH THERE?"

"Give accommodation. Free food. EVERYTHING FINE. BUT ARE YOU

ALL RIGHT?" Biju asked again.

"EVERYTHING QUIET NOW."

"YOUR HEALTH IS ALL RIGHT?"

"YES. EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT."

"Ahh, everything all right," everyone said, nodding. "Everything all right?

Everything all right."

Suddenly, after this there was nothing more to say, for while the emotion was there, the conversation was not; one had bloomed, not the other, and they fell abruptly into emptiness.

"When is he coming?" the watchman prompted.

"WHEN ARE YOU COMING?"

"I DON’T KNOW. I WILL TRY. . . ."

Biju wanted to weep.

"CAN’T YOU GET LEAVE?"

He hadn’t even attained the decency of being granted a holiday now and then. He could not go home to see his father.

"WHEN WILL YOU GET LEAVE?"

"I DON’T KNOW. . . ."

"HELLO?"

"
La ma ma ma ma ma ma,
he can’t get leave. Why not? Don’t know, must be difficult there, make a lot of money, but one thing is certain, they have to work very hard for it. . . . Don’t get something for nothing. . . nowhere in the world. . .

."

"HELLO? HELLO?"

"PITAJI, CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

They retreated from each other again—

Beep beep honk honk trr butt ock,
the phone went dead and they were stranded in the distance that lay between them.

"HELLO? HELLO?"—into the rictus of the receiver.

"Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?" they echoed back to themselves.

The cook put down the phone, trembling.

"He’ll ring again," said the watchman.

But the phone remained mute.

Outside, the frogs said
tttt tttt,
as if they had swallowed the dial tone.

He tried to shake the gadget back into life, wishing for at least the customary words of good-bye. After all, even on clichéd phrases, you could hoist true emotion.

"There must be a problem with the line." Yes, yes, yes.

As always, the problem with the line.

"He will come back fat. I have heard they all come back fat," said the watchman’s sister-in-law abruptly, trying to comfort the cook.

________

The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced. He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other’s lives except for the hope that they
would
be
relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual
Fuck-ShitCockDickPussyLoveWar,
swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse—the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart.

If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his
pitaji
again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.

________

They all grow fat there. . . .

The cook knew about them all growing fat there. It was one of the things everyone knew:

"Are you growing fat,
beta,
like everyone in America?" he had written to his son long ago, in a departure from their usual format.

"Yes, growing fat," Biju had written back, "when you see me next, I will be myself times ten." He laughed as he wrote the lines and the cook laughed very hard when he read them; he lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air like a cockroach.

"Yes," Biju had said, "I am growing fat—ten times myself," and was shocked when he went to the ninety-nine-cent store and found he had to buy his shirts at the children’s rack. The shopkeeper, a man from Lahore, sat on a high ladder in the center and watched to make sure nobody stole anything, and his eyes clutched onto Biju as soon as he entered, making Biju sting with a feeling of culpability. But he had done nothing. Everyone could tell that he had, though, for his guilty look was there for all to see.

He missed Saeed. He wanted to look, once again, if briefly, at the country through the sanguine lens of his eyes.

________

Biju returned to the Gandhi Café where they had not noticed his absence. "You all come and watch the cricket match, OK?" Harish-Harry had brought in a photo album to show his staff pictures of the New Jersey condominium for which he had just made a down payment. He had already mounted a giant satellite dish smack-bang in the middle of the front lawn despite the fact that the management of this select community insisted it be placed subtly to the side like a discreet ear; he had prevailed in his endeavor, having cleverly cried, "Racism! Racism! I am not getting good reception of Indian channels."

That left just his daughter to worry about. Their friend and competitor, Mr.

Shah’s wife, had hooked a bridegroom by making Galawati kebabs and Fed-Exing them overnight all the way to Oklahoma. "Some
dehati
family in the middle of the cornfield," Harish-Harry told his wife. "And you should see this fellow they are showing off about—what a
lutoo.
American size—he looks like something you would use to break down the door."

He told his daughter: "It used to be a matter of pride for a girl to have a pleasant personality. Act like a stupid now and you can regret later on for the rest of your life. . . . Then don’t come crying to us, OK?"

Thirty-seven

The situation will improve,
the SDO had said, but though they had begun to torture random people all over town, it didn’t.

A series of strikes kept businesses closed.

A one-day strike.

A three-day strike.

Then a seven day.

When Lark’s General Store opened briefly one morning, Lola fought a victorious battle with the Afghan princesses over the last jars and cans. Later that month the princesses could think of nothing but jam, furious about it, in the midst of murder and burning properties: "That thoroughly nasty woman!"

Lola gloated each day as she spread the Druk’s marmalade thin so it would last.

A thirteen-day strike.

A twenty-one-day strike.

More strike than no strike.

More moisture in the air than air. It was hard to breathe and there was a feeling of being stifled in a place that was, after all, generous with space if nothing else.

Finally, the shops and offices didn’t open at all—the Snow Lion Travel Agency and the STD booth, the shawl shop, the deaf tailors, Kan-shi Nath & Sons Newsagents—everyone terrorized to keep their shutters down and not even poke their noses out of the windows. Roadblocks stopped traffic, prevented timber and stone trucks from leaving, halted tea from being transported. Nails were scattered on the road, Mobil oil spilled all about. The GNLF boys charged large sums of money if they let you through at all and coerced you to buy GNLF

speeches on cassette tapes and Gorkhaland calendars.

Men arrived in trucks from Tindharia and Mahanadi, gathered outside the police station, and threw bricks and bottles. Tear gas didn’t scatter them; neither did the
lathi
charge.

"Well, how much land do they want?" asked Lola gloomily.

Noni: "The subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong, and extending to the foothills, parts of Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar districts, from Bengal into Assam."

"No peace for the wicked," said Mrs, Sen, knitting needles going, for she was making a sweater for the prime minister out of sympathy for his troubles.

Even in Delhi it gets cold . . . especially in those drafty bungalows in which they house top government officials. But she was not an accomplished knitter. Very slow. Unlike her mother, who, in the course of watching a movie, could knit a whole baby blanket.

"Who’s wicked?" said Lola. "Not us. It’s they who are wicked. And we are the ones who have no peace. No peace for the
not wicked.
"

What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.

________

They were done with their library books, but of course there was no question of returning them. One morning when the trim major who ran the Gymkhana Club arrived, he found the GNLF had scuttled out the librarians and desk clerks and were enjoying the most space and privacy they’d ever had in their lives, sleeping between the bookshelves, cavorting in the ladies’ cloakroom, where, not so long ago, Lola had blown on her puff and delicately powdered her nose.

No tourists arrived from Calcutta in hilarious layers as if preparing for the Antarctic, weaving the cauterizing smell of mothballs through the town. No visitors came, with their rich city fat, to burden scabied nags on pony rides. This year the ponies were free.

Nobody came to the Himalayan Hotel and sat under the Roerich painting of a mountain lit up by the moon like a ghost in bedsheets, to "Experience a Quaint Return to Yesteryears" as the brochure suggested, to order Irish stew, and chew chew chew on the scrawny goats of Kalimpong.

The company guesthouses closed. The watchmen who always had to move at this time of year from their illicit occupation of the main houses during winter into their peripheral huts; who had to alter their expressions from dignity to "
Ji
huzoor
"
servitude; replace cupboard locks they had picked to disinter televisions and made-in-Japan electric heaters; this year, they found their comforts uninterrupted.

And while they stayed put, children were being plucked from boarding schools as parents opened the papers to read with horror of the salubrious climate of the hills being disturbed by separatist rebels and guerilla tactics. The mounting hysteria all around was perhaps to blame for the last group of boys at St. Xavier’s disgracing themselves. When instructed to help with the preparation of dinner (cooks having vanished into the mist), they discovered that a chicken’s head was best removed by twisting and popping it like a cork—much better than sawing away with a blunt knife. An orgy of blood and feathers ensued, a great skauwauking kerfuffle, headless birds running about spilling guts and excrement.

The boys screamed until they cried with disgraceful laughter, their laughs drowning and struggling in sobs, and sobs bubbling and rising with laughter. The master in charge turned on the hosepipe to blast them into sense with cold water, but of course by now there was no water left in the tanks.

________

No gas either, or kerosene. They were all back to cooking on wood.

There was no water.

"Left the buckets out in the garden," said Lola to Noni, "to fill with rain. We better not flush the toilet anymore. Just add some Sunny Fresh to keep the smell down. For small jobs anyway."