The Inheritance of Loss (38 page)

________

Sai began to laugh a bit as well.

"Momo?" she said, switching to a pleading tone.

Then, in a flash he veered back, was angry again. Remembered this was not a conversation he wished to end in laughter. The infantile nickname, the tender feel of her eyes—it aroused his ire. Her getting him to apologize, trying to smother him, swaddle him, drag him to drown in this pish pash mash, sicky sticky baby sweetieness . . .
eeeshhh. . . .

He needed to be a man. He needed to stand tall and be rough. Dryness, space, good firm gestures. Not this fritter, flutter, this worming in sugar. . . .

________

Oh yes, how he needed to be strong—

For, if truth be told, as the weeks went by, he, Gyan, was scared—he who had thought there was no joy like screaming victory over oppression, he who had raised his fist to authority, who had found the fire of his college friends purifying, he who had claimed the hillside, enjoyed the thought of those Mon Ami sisters with their fake English accents blanching and trembling—he, who was hero for the homeland. . . .

He listened with growing trepidation as the conversation in Gompu’s gained in fervor. When did shouting and strikes get you anywhere, they said, and talked of burning the circuit house, robbing the petrol pump.

When Chhang and Bhang, Gyan, Owl and Donkey had leaped into jeeps, filled up at the petrol station and driven off without paying, Gyan had been shaking just as much as the pump manager on the other side of the window, the muscles of his heart performing uncontrollable spasms.

There were those who were provoked by the challenge, but Gyan was finding that he wasn’t one of these. He was angry that his family hadn’t thought to ban him, keep him home. He hated his tragic father, his mother who looked to him for direction, had always looked to him for direction, even when he was a little boy, simply for being male. He spent the nights awake, worrying he couldn’t live up to his proclamations.

But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn’t leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?

________

Yes, he owed much to his rejection of Sai.

The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way. In pushing her away, an energy was born, a purpose whittled. He wouldn’t sweetly reconcile.

"You hate me," said Sai, as if she’d read his thoughts, "for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me. You aren’t being fair."

"
What’s fair? What’s fair?
Do you have any
idea
of the world? Do you bother to
look?
Do you have any
understanding
of how justice operates or, rather, does NOT operate? You’re not a baby anymore, you know. . . ."

"And how grown-up are you?! Too scared even to come for tuition because you know you’ve behaved nastily and you’re too much of a coward to admit it!

You’re probably just sitting waiting for your mummy to arrange your marriage.

Low-class family, uncultured, arranged-marriage types . . . they’ll find you a silly fool to marry and you’ll be delighted all your life to have a dummy. Why not admit it, Gyan??"

Coward! How dare she? Who would marry her!

"You think it’s brave of me to sit on your veranda? I can’t spend my life eating
cheese toast, can I?
"

"I didn’t ask you to. You did it of your own free will, and pay us back for it, if that’s what you think." She found a new attack and went after it even though she grew steadily more horrified by the vermin that coursed from her mouth, but it was as if she were on a stage; the role was more powerful than herself.

"Ate it for free . . . typical of you people, demand and take and then spit on what you’ve been given. There is exactly one reason why you will get nowhere—

"
Because you don’t deserve to.
Why did you eat it if it was beneath you?"

"Not
beneath
me. Nothing to DO with me, YOU FOOL—"

"Don’t call me FOOL. Through this whole conversation you’ve been repeating it, FOOL FOOL—"

Lunging at him with hands and nails, having learned something from the conduct of the common chicken some minutes ago, she scratched his arms in red streaks and—"
You told them about the guns, didn’t you?
"
she was shouting all of a sudden. "
You told them to come to Cho Oyu? You did, didn’t you, DIDN’T

YOU?
"

It all came bursting out although she hadn’t considered this possibility before. Suddenly her anger, Gyan’s absences, his ignoring her in Darjeeling—all came together.

His guilt hooked unawares, rose in his eye, disappeared reappeared.

Wriggling leaping trying to get away like a caught fish. "
You’re crazy.
"

"I saw that," pounced Sai. Jumped to seize it from his eyes. But he caught her before she reached him and then threw her aside into the lan-tana bushes and beat about with a stick.

________

"Gyan
bhaiya?
"
His sister’s tentative voice as Sai managed to stand.

They both turned in horror. It had all been observed. He dropped the stick and told his sister: "Don’t stick your nose here. Go back. Or I’ll smack you hard."

And he shouted at Sai, "Never come here again." Oh, and now it would all be reported to his parents.

Sai screamed at the sister: "Good you saw, good that you heard. Go and tell your parents what your brother has been up to, telling me he loves me, making all kinds of promises and then sending robbers to our house. I’ll go to the police and then let’s see what happens to your family. Gyan will get his eyes pulled out, his head cut off, and then let’s see when you all come crying to beg. . . .
Hah!
"

The sister was trying to hear but Gyan had her by the braids and was pulling her home. Sai had betrayed him, led him to betray others, his own people, his family. She had enticed him, sneaked up on him, spied on him, ruined him, caused him to behave badly. He couldn’t wait for the day his mother would show him the photograph of the girl he was to marry, a charming girl, he hoped, with cheeks like two Simla apples, who hadn’t allowed her mind to traverse the gutters and gray areas, and he would adore her for the miracle she was.

Sai was not miraculous; she was an uninspiring person, a reflection of all the contradictions around her, a mirror that showed him himself far too clearly for comfort.

________

Sai began to follow brother and sister but then stopped. Shame caught up with her. What had she done? It would be her they would laugh at, a desperate girl who had walked all this way for unrequited love. Gyan would be slapped on the back and cheered for his conquest. She would be humiliated. He had hit on the age-old trick that remade him into a hero, "the desired male". . . . The more he insulted her behind her back—"Oh, that crazy girl is following me . . ."—the more the men would cheer, the more his status would grow at Thapa’s Canteen, the more Sai would be remade behind her back into a lunatic female, the more Gyan would fatten with pride. . . . She felt her own dignity departing, watched it from far away as Gyan and his sister walked down the path. As they turned into their house, it vanished as well.

________

She walked home very slowly, sick, sick. The mist was thickening, smoke adding to the dusk and the vapor. The smell of potatoes cooking came from
busti
houses all along the way, a smell that would surely connote comfort to souls across the world, but that couldn’t comfort her. She felt none of the pity she’d felt earlier while contemplating this scene; even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her . . .

________

When she arrived home she saw two people on the veranda talking to the cook and the judge.

A woman was pleading: "Who do you go to when you’re poor? People like us have to suffer. All the
goondas
come out and the police go hand in hand with them."

"Who are you?"

It was the wife, begging for mercy, of the drunk the police had caught and questioned about the gun robbery and on whom they had practiced their new torture strategy. They, at Cho Oyu, had forgotten about this man, but the man’s wife had traced the connection and she’d come with her father-in-law to see the judge, walking half a day from a village across the Relli River.

"What will we do?" she begged. "We are not even Nepalis, we are Lepchas. .

. . He was innocent and the police have blinded him. He knew nothing about you, he was in the market as usual, everyone knows," sobbed the wife, looking to her father-in-law for help.

What use is it for a woman to protest and cry?

But her father-in-law was too scared. He said nothing at all, just stood there; his expression couldn’t be told apart from his wrinkles. His son, when he was not drinking, had worked to rebuild the roads in the district, filling stones from the Teesta riverbed into contractors’ trucks, unloading them at building sites, clearing landslides that tumbled over and over in the same eternal motion as the river coming down. His son’s wife worked on the highways as well, but no work was being done now that the GNLF had closed down the roads.

"Why come to me? Go to the police. They are the ones who caught your husband, not I. It’s not my fault," said the judge, alarmed into eloquence. "You had better leave from here."

"You can’t send this woman to the police," said the cook, "they’ll probably assault her."

The woman looked raped and beaten already. Her clothes were very soiled and her teeth resembled a row of rotten corn kernels, some of them missing, some blackened, and she was quite bent from carrying stone—

common sight, this sort of woman in the hills. Some foreigners had actually photographed her as proof of horror . . .

"
George!. . . ! George!
"
said a shocked wife to her husband with a camera.

And he had leaned out of the car: Click! "Got it, babe . . . !"

"Help us," she begged.

The judge seemed suddenly to remember his personality, stiffened, and said nothing, set his mouth in a mask, would look neither left nor right, went back to his game of chess.

In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. He was embarrassed by the attention that was being drawn to his humiliation yet again, the setting of the table with the tablecloth, the laughter, the robbery of the rifles that had never contributed to a fast-forward death ballet come duck season.

Now, typically, the mess had grown.

This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority. He had done his duty as far as it was any citizen’s duty to report problems to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a bit and one could find oneself supporting the whole family forever after, a constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food, the husband might be blind and with broken legs, and the woman might be anemic and bent, but they’d still pop out an infant every nine months. If you let such people get an inch, they’d take everything you had—

the families yoked together because of guilt on one side, and an unending greed and capacity for dependance on the other—and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.

________

The cook looked at the man and woman and sighed.

They looked at Sai. "
Didi. . .,
"the woman said. Her eyes were too devastated to look at directly.

Sai turned away and told herself she didn’t care.

She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favored her she would, perhaps, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth in their own image, a perfect devilish student to the devil gods. . . .

It took a while for them to leave. They went and sat outside the gate, the cook forced to herd them out like cows, and then for a long while they squatted down on their haunches and didn’t move, just stared emotionless, as if drained of hope and initiative.

They watched the judge taking Mutt for her walk and feeding her. He was angry and embarrassed that they were watching. Why didn’t they
GO!

"Tell them to leave or else we’ll call the police," he told the cook.

"
Jao, jao,
"
the
cook said, "
jao jao,
"
through the gate, but they only retreated up the hill, behind the bushes and settled back down with the same blank look on their faces.

Sai climbed to her room, slammed the door, and flung herself at her reflection in the mirror:

What will happen to me?!

Gyan would find adulthood and purity in a quest for a homeland and she would be left forever adolescent, trapped in shameful dramatics. This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot. . . .

She cried for a while, tears taking on their own momentum, but despite herself the image of the begging woman came back. She went downstairs and asked the cook: "Did you give them anything?"

"No," said the cook, also miserable. "What can you do," he said flatly, as if giving an answer, not asking a question.