by Kiran Desai
But despite their opinion of Russia and Sai’s parents, over the years they grew very fond of Sai.
Nine
“Oh my God,” shrieked Lola, when she heard the judge’s guns had been stolen from Cho Oyu. She was very much grayer now, but her personality was stronger than ever. “What if those hooligans come to Mon Ami? They’re bound to come. But we have nothing. Not that that will deter them. They’ll kill for fifty rupees.”
“But you have a watchman,” said Sai, absentminded, still trailing the thought of how Gyan hadn’t arrived the day of the robbery. His affection was surely on the wane….
“Budhoo? But he’s Nepali. Who can trust him now? It’s always the watchman in a case of robbery. They pass on the information and share the spoils…. Remember Mrs. Thondup? She used to have that Nepali fellow, returned from Calcutta one year to find the house wiped clean. Wiped clean. Cups plates beds chairs wiring light fixtures, every single thing—even the chains and floats in the toilets. One of the men had tried to steal the cables along the road and they found him electrocuted. Every bamboo had been cut and sold, every lime was off the tree. Holes had been bored into their water pipes so every hut on the hillside was drawing water from their supply—and no sign of the watchman, of course. Quick across the border, he’d disappeared back into Nepal. My God, Noni,” she said, “we had better tell that Budhoo to go.”
“Calm down. How can we?” said Noni. “He has given us no reason.”
In fact, Budhoo had been a comforting presence for the two sisters who’d reached old age together at Mon Ami, its vegetable patch containing, as far as they knew, the country’s only broccoli grown from seeds procured in England; its orchard providing enough fruit for stewed pears every day of pear season and enough leftover to experiment with wine making in the bathtub. Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spencer panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favored with views of Kanchenjunga collared by cloud. At the entrance to the house hung a thangkha of a demon—with hungry fangs and skull necklaces, brandishing an angry penis—to dissuade the missionaries. In the drawing room was a trove of knickknacks. Tibetan choksee tables painted in jade and flame colors piled with books, including a volume of paintings by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian aristocrat who painted the Himalayas with such grave presence it made you shiver just to imagine all that grainy distilled cold, the lone traveler atop a yak, going—where? The immense vistas indicated an abstract destination. Also, Salim Ali’s guide to birds and all of Jane Austen. There was Wedgwood in the dining room cabinet and a jam jar on the sideboard, saved for its prettiness. “By appointment to Her Majesty the queen jam and marmalade manufacturers,” it read in gold under a coat of arms, supported by a crowned lion and a unicorn.
______
Then there was the cat, Mustafa, a sooty hirsute fellow demonstrating a perfection of containment no amount of love or science could penetrate. He was, at this moment, starting up like a lorry on Sai’s lap, but his eyes looked blankly right into hers, warning her against mistaking this for intimacy.
To guard all this and their dignity, the sisters had hired Budhoo, a retired army man who had seen action against guerilla factions in Assam and had a big gun and an equally fierce mustache. He came each night at nine, ringing his bell as he rode up on his bicycle and lifting his bottom off the seat as he went over the bump in the garden.
“Budhoo?” the sisters would call from inside, sitting up in their beds, wrapped in Kulu shawls, sipping Sikkimese brandy, BBC news sputtering on the radio, falling over them in sparky explosions.
“Budhoo?”
“Huzoor!”
They would return to the BBC then, and later, sometimes, to their small black-and-white television, when Doordarshan provided the treat of To the Manor Born or Yes, Minister, featuring gentlemen with faces like moist, contented hams. With Budhoo on the roof fiddling with the aerial, the sisters shouted to him out of the window, “Right, left, no, back,” as he swayed, poor fellow, amid the tree branches and moths, the outfall of messy Kalimpong weather.
At intervals through the night Budhoo also marched about Mon Ami, banging a stick and blowing a whistle so Lola and Noni could hear him and feel safe until the mountains once again shimmered in pure 24k and they woke to the powdery mist burning off in the sun.
______
But they had trusted Budhoo for no reason whatsoever. He might murder them in their nighties—
“But if we dismiss him,” said Noni, “then he’ll be angry and twice as likely to do something.”
“I tell you, these Neps can’t be trusted. And they don’t just rob. They think absolutely nothing of murdering, as well.”
______
“Well,” sighed Lola, “it was bound to happen, really. Been brewing a long time. When has this been a peaceful area? When we moved to Mon Ami, the whole of Kalimpong was upside down, remember? Nobody knew who was a spy and who wasn’t. Beijing had just named Kalimpong a hotbed of anti-Chinese activity….”
Monks had streamed through the forests, garnet lines of fire pouring down the mountains, as they escaped from Tibet along the salt and wool trade routes. Aristocrats had arrived, too, Lhasa beauties dancing waltzes at the Gymkhana Ball, amazing the locals with their cosmopolitan style.
But for a long while there had been severe food shortages, as there always were when political trouble arrived on the hillside.
______
“We had better run to the market, Noni. It will empty out. And our library books! We must change them.”
“I won’t last the month,” said Lola. “Almost through,” she thumped A Bend in the River, “ uphill task—”
“Superb writer,” said Noni. “First-class. One of the best books I’ve ever read.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lola said, “I think he’s strange. Stuck in the past…. He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he’s never freed himself from it. Quite a different thing now. In fact,” she said, “chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the number one take-out dinner in Britain. It was just reported in the Indian Express.
“Tikka masala,” she repeated. “Can you believe it?” She imagined the English countryside, castles, hedgerows, hedgehogs, etc., and tikka masala whizzing by on buses, bicycles, Rolls-Royces. Then she imagined a scene in To the Manor Born: “Oh Audrey. How perfectly lovely! Chicken tikka masala! Yes, and I got us some basmati as well. I do think it’s the best rice, don’t you?”
“Well, I don’t like to agree with you, but maybe you have a point,” Noni conceded. “After all, why isn’t he writing of where he lives now? Why isn’t he taking up, say, race riots in Manchester?”
“Also the new England, Noni. A completely cosmopolitan society. Pixie, for example, doesn’t have a chip on her shoulder.”
______
Pixie, Lola’s daughter, was a BBC reporter, and now and then Lola visited her and came back making everyone sick, refusing to shut up: “Super play, and oh, the strawberries and cream…. And ah, the strawberries and cream….”
______
“My! What strawberries and cream, my dear, and out in the most lovely garden,” Noni mimicked her sister. “As if you can’t get strawberries and cream in Kalimpong!”she said, then. “And you can eat without having to mince your words and behave like a pig on high heels.”
“Dreadful legs those English girls have,” said Uncle Potty, who had been present at the altercation. “Big pasty things. Good thing they’ve started wearing pants now.”
But Lola was too dizzy to listen. Her suitcases were stuffed with Marmite, Oxo bouillon cubes, Knorr soup packets, After Eights, daffodil bulbs, and renewed supplies of Boots cucumber lotion and Marks and Spencer underwear—the essence, quintessence, of Englishness as she understood it. Surely the queen donned this superior hosiery:
She was solid.
It was solid.
She was plain
It was plain.
She was strong.
It was strong.
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She was no-nonsense.
It was no-nonsense.
They prevailed.
It was Pixie who inspired the nightly ritual of listening to the radio.
“Budhoo?”
“Huzoor.”
“Good evening… this is Piyali Bannerji with the BBC news.”
All over India, people hearing the Indian name announced in pucca British accent laughed and laughed so hard their stomachs hurt.
Disease. War. Famine. Noni exclaimed and was outraged, but Lola purred with pride and heard nothing but the sanitized elegance of her daughter’s voice, triumphant over any horrors the world might thrust upon others. “Better leave sooner rather than later,” she had advised Pixie long ago, “India is a sinking ship. Don’t want to be pushy, darling, sweetie, thinking of your happiness only, but the doors won’t stay open forever….”
Ten
Biju had started his second year in America at Pinocchio’s Italian Restaurant, stirring vats of spluttering Bolognese, as over a speaker an opera singer sang of love and murder, revenge and heartbreak.
“He smells,” said the owner’s wife. “I think I’m allergic to his hair oil.” She had hoped for men from the poorer parts of Europe—Bulgarians perhaps, or Czechoslovakians. At least they might have something in common with them like religion and skin color, grandfathers who ate cured sausages and looked like them, too, but they weren’t coming in numbers great enough or they weren’t coming desperate enough, she wasn’t sure….
The owner bought soap and toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo plus conditioner, Q-tips, nail clippers, and most important of all, deodorant, and told Biju he’d picked up some things he might need.
They stood there embarrassed by the intimacy of the products that lay between them.
He tried another tactic: “What do they think of the pope in India?”
By showing his respect for Biju’s mind he would raise Biju’s self-respect, for the boy was clearly lacking in that department.
“You’ve tried,” his wife said, comforting him a few days later when they couldn’t detect any difference in Biju. “You even bought the soap,” she said.
______
Biju approached Tom & Tomoko’s—”No jobs.”
McSweeney’s Pub—”Not hiring.”
Freddy’s Wok—”Can you ride a bicycle?”
Yes, he could.
______
Szechuan wings and French fries, just $3.00. Fried rice $1.35 and $1.00 for pan-fried dumplings fat and tight as babies—slice them open and flood your plate with a run of luscious oil. In this country poor people eat like kings! General Tso’s chicken, emperor’s pork, and Biju on a bicycle with the delivery bag on his handlebars, a tremulous figure between heaving buses, regurgitating taxis—what growls, what sounds of flatulence came from this traffic. Biju pounded at the pedals, heckled by taxi drivers direct from Punjab—a man is not a caged thing, a man is wild wild and he must drive as such, in a bucking yodeling taxi. They harassed Biju with such blows from their horns as could split the world into whey and solids:paaaaaaWWW!
One evening, Biju was sent to deliver hot-and-sour soups and egg foo yong to three Indian girls, students, new additions to the neighborhood in an apartment just opened under reviewed city laws to raised rents. Banners reading “Antigentrification Day” had been hauled up over the street by the longtime residents for a festival earlier in the afternoon when they had played music, grilled hot dogs in the street, and sold all their gritty junk. One day the Indian girls hoped to be gentry, but right now, despite being unwelcome in the neighborhood, they were in the student stage of vehemently siding with the poor people who wished them gone.
The girl who answered the buzzer smiled, shiny teeth, shiny eyes through shiny glasses. She took the bag and went to collect the money. It was suffused with Indian femininity in there, abundant amounts of sweet newly washed hair, gold strung Kolhapuri slippers lying about. Heavyweight accounting books sat on the table along with a chunky Ganesh brought all the way from home despite its weight, for interior decoration plus luck in money and exams.
“Well,” one of them continued with the conversation Biju had interrupted, discussing a fourth Indian girl not present, “why doesn’t she just go for an Indian boy then, who’ll understand all that temper tantrum stuff?”
“She won’t look at an Indian boy, she doesn’t want a nice Indian boy who’s grown up chatting with his aunties in the kitchen.”
“What does she want then?”
“She wants the Marlboro man with a Ph.D.”
They had a self-righteousness common to many Indian women of the English-speaking upper-educated, went out to mimosa brunches, ate their Dadi’s roti with adept fingers, donned a sari or smacked on elastic shorts for aerobics, could say “Namaste, Kusum Auntie, aayiye, baethiye, khayiye!” as easily as “Shit!” They took to short hair quickly, were eager for Western-style romance, and happy for a traditional ceremony with lots of jewelry: green set (meaning emerald), red set (meaning ruby), white set (meaning diamond). They considered themselves uniquely positioned to lecture everyone on a variety of topics: accounting professors on accounting, Vermonters on the fall foliage, Indians on America, Americans on India, Indians on India, Americans on America. They were poised; they were impressive; in the United States, where luckily it was still assumed that Indian women were downtrodden, they were lauded as extraordinary—which had the unfortunate result of making them even more of what they already were.
Fortune cookies, they checked, chili sauce, soy sauce, duck sauce, chopsticks, napkins, plastic spoons knives forks.
“Dhanyawad. Shukria. Thank you. Extra tip. You should buy topi-muffler-gloves to be ready for the winter.”
The shiny-eyed girl said it many ways so that the meaning might be conveyed from every angle—that he might comprehend their friendliness completely in this meeting between Indians abroad of different classes and languages, rich and poor, north and south, top caste bottom caste.
Standing at that threshold, Biju felt a mixture of emotions: hunger, respect, loathing. He mounted the bicycle he had rested against the railings and was about to go on, but something made him stop and draw back. It was a ground-floor apartment with black security bars, and he put two fingers to his lips and whistled into the window at the girls dunking their spoons into the plastic containers where the brown liquid and foggy bits of egg looked horrible against the plastic, twe tweeeeee twhoo, and before he saw their response, he pedaled as fast as he could into the scowling howling traffic down Broadway, and as he pedaled, he sang loudly, “O, yeh ladki Zara si deewani lagti hai….”
Old songs, best songs.
______
But then, in a week, five people called up Freddy’s Wok to complain that the food was cold. It had turned to winter.
The shadows drew in close, the night chomped more than its share of hours. Biju smelled the first of the snow and found it had the same pricking, difficult smell that existed inside the freezer; he felt the Ther mocol scrunch of it underfoot. On the Hudson, the ice cracked loudly into pieces, and within the contours of this gray, broken river it seemed as if the city’s inhabitants were being provided with a glimpse of something far and forlorn that they might use to consider their own loneliness.
Biju put a padding of newspapers down his shirt—leftover copies from kind Mr. Iype the newsagent—and sometimes he took the scallion pancakes and inserted them below the paper, inspired by the memory of an uncle who used to go out to the fields in winter with his lunchtime parathas down his vest. But even this did not seem to help, and once, on his bicycle, he began to weep from the cold, and the weeping unpicked a deeper vein of grief—such a terrible groan issued from between the whimpers that he was shocked his sadness was so profound.
______
When he returned home to the basement of a building at the bottom of Harlem, he fell straight into sleep.
The building belonged to an invisible management company that listed its address as
One and a Quarter Street and owned tenements all over the neighborhood, the superintendent supplementing his income by illegally renting out basement quarters by the week, by the month, and even by the day, to fellow illegals. He spoke about as much English as Biju did, so between Spanish, Hindi, and wild mime, Jacinto’s gold tooth flashing in the late evening sun, they had settled the terms of rental. Biju joined a shifting population of men camping out near the fuse box, behind the boiler, in the cubby holes, and in odd-shaped corners that once were pantries, maids’ rooms, laundry rooms, and storage rooms at the bottom of what had been a single-family home, the entrance still adorned with a scrap of colored mosaic in the shape of a star. The men shared a yellow toilet; the sink was a tin laundry trough. There was one fuse box for the whole building, and if anyone turned on too many appliances or lights, PHUT, the entire electricity went, and the residents screamed to nobody, since there was nobody, of course, to hear them.
Biju had been nervous there from his very first day. “Howdy,” a man on the steps of his new abode had said, holding out his hand and nodding, “my name’s Joey, and I just had me some WHEES-KAY!” Power and hiss. This was the local homeless man at the edge of his hunting and gathering territory, which he sometimes marked by peeing a bright arc right across the road. He wintered here on a subway grate in a giant plastic-bag igloo that sagged, then blew taut with stale air each time a train passed. Biju had taken the sticky hand offered, the man had held tight, and Biju had broken free and run, a cackle of laughter following him.
