by Kiran Desai
“Except us. EXCEPT US. The Nepalis of India. At that time, in April of 1947, the Communist Party of India demanded a Gorkhasthan, but the request was ignored…. We are laborers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads, soldiers. And are we allowed to become doctors and government workers, owners of the tea plantations? No! We are kept at the level of servants. We fought on behalf of the British for two hundred years. We fought in World War One. We went to East Africa, to Egypt, to the Persian Gulf. We were moved from here to there as it suited them. We fought in World War Two. In Europe, Syria, Persia, Malaya, and Burma. Where would they be without the courage of our people? We are still fighting for them. When the regiments were divided at independence, some to go to England, some to stay, those of us who remained here fought in the same way for India. We are soldiers, loyal, brave. India or England, they never had cause to doubt our loyalty. In the wars with Pakistan we fought our former comrades on the other side of the border. How our spirit cried. But we are Gorkhas. We are soldiers. Our character has never been in doubt. And have we been rewarded?? Have we been given compensation?? Are we given respect??
“No! They spit on us.”
Gyan recalled his last job interview well over a year ago, when he had traveled all the way to Calcutta by overnight bus to an office buried in the heart of a concrete block lit with the shudder of a fluorescent tube that had never resolved into steady light.
Everyone looked hopeless, the men in the room and the interviewer who had finally turned the shuddering light off—”Voltage low”—and conducted the interview in darkness. “Very good, we will let you know if you are successful.” Gyan, feeling his way out through the maze and stepping into the unforgiving summer light, knew he would never be hired.
“Here we are eighty percent of the population, ninety tea gardens in the district, but is even one Nepali-owned?” asked the man.
“No.”
“Can our children learn our language in school?”
“No.”
“Can we compete for jobs when they have already been promised to others?”
“No.”
“In our own country, the country we fight for, we are treated like slaves. Every day the lorries leave bearing away our forests, sold by foreigners to fill the pockets of foreigners. Every day our stones are carried from the riverbed of the Teesta to build their houses and cities. We are laborers working barefoot in all weather, thin as sticks, as they sit fat in managers’ houses with their fat wives, with their fat bank accounts and their fat children going abroad. Even their chairs are fat. We must fight, brothers and sisters, to manage our own affairs. We must unite under the banner of the GNLF, Gorkha National Liberation Front. We will build hospitals and schools. We will provide jobs for our sons. We will give dignity to our daughters carrying heavy loads, breaking stone on the roads. We will defend our own homeland. This is where we were born, where our parents were born, where our grandparents were born. We will run our own affairs in our own language. If necessary, we will wash our bloody kukris in the mother waters of the Teesta. Jai Gorkha.” The speech giver waved his kukri and then pierced his thumb, raised the gory sight for all to see.
“Jai Gorkha! Jai Gorkha! Jai Gorkha!” the crowd screamed, their own blood thrumming, pulsing, surging forth at the sight of the speech giver’s hand. Thirty supporters stepped forward and also drew blood from their thumbs with their kukris to write a poster demanding Gorkhaland, in blood.
“Brave Gorkha soldiers protecting India—hear the call,” said the leaflets flooding the hillsides. “Please quit the army at once. For when you will be retired then you may be treated as a foreigner.”
The GNLF would offer jobs to its own, and a 40,000 strong Gorkha army, universities, and hospitals.
______
Later, Chhang, Bhang, Owl, Donkey, and many others sat in the cramped shack of Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen on Ringkingpong Road. A small handwritten sign painted on the side said “Broiler Chicken.” A carom game board was balanced on an oil barrel outside and two creaky tattered soldiers, on bowlegs, originally of the Eighth Gurkha Rifles, played as the clouds shifted and billowed through their knees. The mountains sliced sharply and tumbled down at either side to bamboo thickets gray with distilled vapor.
The air grew colder and the evening progressed. Gyan, who had been gathered up accidentally in the procession, who had shouted half facetiously, half in earnest, who had half played, half lived a part, found the fervor had affected him. His sarcasm and his embarrassment were gone. Fired by alcohol, he finally submitted to the compelling pull of history and found his pulse leaping to something that felt entirely authentic.
He told the story of his great grandfather, his great uncles, “And do you think they got the same pension as the English of equal rank? They fought to death, but did they earn the same salary?”
All the other anger in the canteen greeted his, clapped his anger on the back. It suddenly became clear why he had no money and no real job had come his way, why he couldn’t fly to college in America, why he was ashamed to let anyone see his home. He thought of how he had kept Sai away the day she had suggested visiting his family. Most of all, he realized why his father’s meekness infuriated him, and why he found himself unable to speak of him, he who had so modest an idea of happiness that even the daily irritant of fifty-two screaming boys in his plantation schoolroom, even the distance of his own family, the loneliness of his work, didn’t upset him. Gyan wanted to shake him, but what satisfaction could be received from shaking a sock? To accost such a person—it just came back to frustrate you twice over….
For a moment all the different pretences he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him—all these things joined together to form a single truth.
The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.
And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor.
It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk—
It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.
He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement take the harshest route possible.
Twenty-seven
Moody and restless, Gyan arrived at Cho Oyu the next day, upset at having to undertake that long walk in the cold for the small amount of money the judge paid him. It maddened him that people lived here in this enormous house and property, taking hot baths, sleeping alone in spacious rooms, and he suddenly remembered the cutlets and boiled peas dinner with Sai and the judge, the judge’s “Common sense seems to have evaded you, young man.”
“How late you are,” said Sai when she saw him, and he was angry in a different way from the night before when, indignant in war paint, he had stuck his bottom out one way and his chest the other way and discovered a self-righteous posturing, a new way of talking. This was a petty anger that pulled him back, curtailed his spirit, made him feel peevish. The annoyance was different from any he’d felt with Sai before.
______
To cheer him up, Sai told him of the Christmas party—
You know, three times we tried to light the soup ladle full of brandy and pour it over the pudding—
Gyan ignored her, opened up the physics book. Oh, if only she would shut up—that bright silliness he had not noticed in her before—he was too irritated to stand it.
She turned reluctantly to its pages; it was a long time since they had properly looked at physics.
“If
two objects, one weighing… and the other weighing… are dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa, at which time and at what speed will they fall to the ground?”
“You’re in an unpleasant mood,” she said and yawned with luxury to indicate other, better, options.
He pretended he hadn’t heard her.
Then he yawned, too, despite himself.
She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward.
Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.
She did—
He did.
“Bored by physics?” she asked, encouraged by the apparent reconciliation.
“No. Not at all.”
“Why are you yawning then?”
“BECAUSE I’M BORED TO DEATH BY YOU, THAT’S WHY.”
Stunned silence.
“I am not interested in Christmas!” he shouted. “Why do you celebrate Christmas? You’re Hindus and you don’t celebrate Id or Guru Nanak’s birthday or even Durga Puja or Dussehra or Tibetan New Year.”
She considered it: Why? She always had. Not because of the convent, her hatred of it was so deep, but….
“You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It’s because of people like you we never get anywhere.”
Stung by his unexpected venom, “No,” she said, “that’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“If I want to celebrate Christmas, I will, and if I don’t want to celebrate Diwali then I won’t. Nothing wrong in a bit of fun and Christmas is an Indian holiday as much as any other.”
This tagged on to make him feel antisecular and anti-Gandhian.
“Do what you will,” he shrugged, “it’s nothing to me—it only shows to the whole world that you are a FOOL.”
He uttered the words deliberately, eager to see that hurt cross her face.
“Well, why don’t you go home then, if I’m such a fool? What is the point of teaching me?”
“All right, I will. You’re right. What is the point of teaching you? It’s clear all you want to do is copy. Can’t think for yourself. Copycat, copycat. Don’t you know, these people you copy like a copycat, THEY DON’T WANT YOU!!!!”
“I’m not copying anyone!”
“You think you are the original person celebrating Christmas? Come on, don’t tell me you’re as stupid as that?”
“Well, if you’re so clever,” she said, “how come you can’t even find a proper job? Fail, fail, fail. Every single interview.”
“Because of people like you!”
“Oh, because of me… and you’re telling me that I am stupid? Who’s stupid? Go put it before a judge and we’ll see who he says is the stupid one.”
She picked up her glass and the water in it sloshed over before it reached her lips, she was trembling so.
Twenty-eight
The judge was thinking of his hate.
______
When he returned from England, he had been greeted by the same geriatric brass band that had seen him off on his journey, but it was invisible this time because of the billows of smoke and dust raised by the fireworks that had been thrown on the railway track, exploding as the train drew into the station. Whistles and whoops went up from the two thousand people who had gathered to witness this historic event, the first son of the community to join the ICS. He was smothered with garlands; flower petals settled on the brim of his hat. And there, standing in a knife’s width of shade at the end of the station, was someone else who looked vaguely familiar; not a sister, not a cousin; it was Nimi, his wife, who had been returned from her father’s house, where she’d spent the intervening time. Except for exchanges with landladies and “How do you do?” in shops, he hadn’t spoken to a woman in years.
She came toward him with a garland. They didn’t look at each other as she lifted it over his head. Up went his eyes, down went hers. He was twenty-five, she was nineteen.
“So shy, so shy”—the delighted crowd was sure of having witnessed the terror of love. (What amazing hope the audience has—always refusing to believe the nonexistence of romance.)
What would he do with her?
He had forgotten he had a wife.
Well, he knew, of course, but she had drifted away like everything in his past, a series of facts that no longer had relevance. This one, though, it would follow him as wives in those days followed their husbands.
______
All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart—how lovely she must have appeared to him…. He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. She rummaged in the toilet case Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge and found a jar of green salve, a hairbrush and comb set in silver, a pom-pom with a loop of silk in a round container of powder—and, coming at her exquisitely, her first whiff of lavender. The crisp light scents that rose from his new possessions were all of a foreign place. Piphit smelled of dust and once in a while there was the startling fragrance of rain. Piphit’s perfumes were intoxicants, rich and dizzying. She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.
“Shorts!” said a young uncle.
“Underwear,” the ladies insisted.
Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?
She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed.
______
The afternoons in Piphit lasted so long, the Patels were resting, trying to efface the fear that time would never move again, all except for Jemubhai who had grown unused to such surrender.
He sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner—a foreigner—every bit of him screamed. Only his digestion dissented and told him he was home: squatting painfully in that cramped outhouse, his gentleman’s knees creaking, swearing “Bloody hell,” he felt his digestion work as super efficient as—as Western transportation.
Idly deciding to check on his belongings, he uncovered the loss.
“Where is my powder puff?” shouted Jemubhai at the Patel ladies spread-eagled on mats in the veranda shade.
“What?” they asked, raising their heads, shielding their eyes against the detonating light.
“Someone has been through my belongings.”
Actually, by then, almost everyone in the house had been through his belongings and they failed to see why this was a problem. His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable; why did he mind and how did this coincide with stealing?
“But what is missing?”
“My puff.”
“What is that?”
He tried to explain.
“But what on earth is it for, baba?” They looked at him bemused.
“Pink and white what? That you put on your skin? Why?”
“Pink?”
His mother began to worry. “Is anything wrong with your skin?” she asked, concerned.
But, “Ha ha,” laughed a sister who was listening carefully, “we sent you abroad to become a gentleman, and instead you have become a lady!”
The excitement spread, and from farther houses in the Patel clan, relatives began to arrive. The kakas kakis masas masis phuas phois. Children horrible all together, a clump that could not be separated child into child, for they resembled a composite monster with multiple arms and legs that came cartwheeling in, raising the dust, screaming; hundreds of hands were held over the monster’s hundreds of giggling mouths. Who had stolen what?
“His powder puff is missing,” said Jemubhai’s father, who seemed t
o think this thing must be crucial to his son’s work.
They all said powder puff in English, for, naturally, there was no Gujarati word for this invention. Their very accents rankled the judge. “Pauvdar Paaf,” sounding like some Parsi dish.
They pulled out all the items in the cupboard, turned them upside down, exclaiming over and examining each one, his suits, his underwear, his opera glasses, through which he had viewed the tutus of ballerinas dancing a delicate sideways scuttle in Giselle, unfolding in pastry patterns and cake decorations.
But no, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the kitchen either, or in the veranda. It wasn’t anywhere.
His mother questioned the naughtiest cousins.
“Did you see it?”
“What?”
“The paudar paaf.”
“What is a paudur poff? Paudaar paaf?”
“To protect the skin.”
“To protect the skin from what?”
And the entire embarrassment of explaining had to be gone through again.
“Pink and white? What for?”
______
“What the hell do all of you know?” said Jemubhai. Thieving, ignorant people.
He had thought they would have the good taste to be impressed and even a little awed by what he had become, but instead they were laughing.
“You must know something,” the judge finally accused Nimi.
“I haven’t seen it. Why should I pay it any attention?” she said. Her heart pounded beneath her two lavender-powdered pink and white breasts, beneath her husband’s England-returned puff.
He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty, dismissed it. Once it had been a terrifying beckoning thing that had made his heart turn to water, but now it seemed beside the point. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one.
