by Kiran Desai
They knew the insult was coming—
Utterly butterly delicious…. All India Cheese Champ—
“AMULÜ”
“WATERPROOFING!!” cried Father Booty.
As always they pondered their options and picked Chinese.
“It’s not like real Chinese food, of course,” Lola reminded everyone that Joydeep, her now dead husband, had once visited China and reported that Chinese food in China was quite another matter. A much worse matter, in fact. He described the hundred-day-old egg (and sometimes he said it was a two-hundred-day) buried and dug up as a delicacy, and everyone groaned with horrified delight. He had been a great success at cocktail parties upon his return. “Don’t much care for their looks, either,” he said, “chapta features. Much better, Indian women, Indian antiquities, Indian music, Indian Chinese—”
And in all India, nothing better than Calcutta Chinese! Remember Ta Fa Shun? Where ladies out shopping met for hot-and-acrid soup and accompanied it with hot-and-acrid gossip—
“So what should we have?” asked Uncle Potty who had finished all the bread sticks now.
“Chicken or pork?”
“Chee Chee. Don’t trust the pork, full of tapeworms. Who knows what pig it comes from?”
“Chili chicken, then?”
From outside came the noise of the parading boys going by again.
“God, what a racket. All this do-or-die stuff.”
The chili chicken arrived and, after depositing it on their table, the waiter wiped his nose on the curtain. “Just take a look at that,” said Lola. “No wonder we Indians never progress.” They began to eat. “But food here is good.” Chomping.
______
As they were exiting the restaurant, the same procession that had disturbed them while they were eating and while they were at the library came back up the road after having traversed all of Darjeeling.
“Gorkhaland for Gorkhas.”
“Gorkhaland for Gorkhas.”
They stood back to let them pass and who should almost stamp on Sai’s toes?—
Gyan!!!
In his tomato red sweater, yelling lustily in a way she couldn’t recognize.
What would he be doing in Darjeeling?! Why would he be at a GNLF rally rallying on behalf of independence for Nepali-Indians?
She opened her mouth to shout to him, but at that moment he caught sight of her, too, and the dismay on his face was followed by a slight ferocious gesture of his head and a cold narrow look in his eye that was a warning not to approach. She shut her mouth like a fish, and astonishment flooded over her gills.
By that time he had passed on.
“Isn’t that your mathematics tutor?” asked Noni.
“I don’t think so,” she said, scrabbling for dignity, scrabbling for sense. “Looked just like him, I thought it was him myself, but it wasn’t….”
______
On their steep way back down to the Teesta, they noticed Sai had turned green.
“Are you all right?” asked Father Booty.
“Travel sick.”
“Look at the horizon, that always helps.”
She fixed her eyes on the highest ridge of the Himalayas, on the un-moving stillness. But this didn’t make any difference. There was a whirl in Sai’s brain and she couldn’t register what her eyes saw. Finally, a mordant bile rose up her throat, frizzling her system, burning her mouth, corroding her teeth—she could feel them turn to chalk as they were attacked by a resurgence of the chili chicken.
“Stop the car, stop the car,” said Lola. “Let her out.”
Sai began to retch into the grass, vomiting up a sort of mulligatawny, giving them another unfortunate look at their lunch now so much the worse for wear. Noni poured her a cup of icy water from the space-age silver capsule of the thermos flask, and Sai rested on a rock in the sunshine by the beautiful transparent Teesta. “Take some deep breaths, dear, that food was very greasy, they’ve really gone downhill—dirty kitchen—oh, just the sight of that waiter should have been enough to warn us.”
At the other end of the bridge the checkpoint guards were inspecting some vehicles going through. Careful in this time of trouble, they had opened the bundles and cases of everyone in a bus and turned their belongings inside out. The passengers waited impassively inside; poor people, their faces squashed against the windows, hundreds of pairs of eyes half dead, like animals on their way to death; as if the journey had been so exhausting, their spirits had already been extinguished. The bus had vomit-strewn sides, great banners of brown flared back by the wind. Several other vehicles waited in line after the bus for the same treatment, barred from going on by a metal pole across the road.
The afternoon sun lay thick and golden on the trees, and with the light so bright, the shadows in the foliage, by the car, and between the blades of grass and the rocks were black as night. It was hot here in the valley, but the river, when Sai dipped her hand in, was icy enough to numb her veins.
“Take your time, Sai, long wait anyway, the cars are backed up.”
Father Booty got out himself, walked up and down, stretching his limbs, glad of the rest to his aching behind, when he spotted a remarkable butterfly.
The Teesta valley was renowned for its butterflies, and specialists came from around the world to paint and record them. Rare and spectacular creatures depicted in the library volume Marvelous Butterflies of the North-Eastern Himalayas were flying about before their eyes. One summer, when she was twelve, Sai had made up names for them—”Japanese mask butterfly, butterfly of the far mountain, Icarus falling from the sun butterfly, butterfly that a flute set free, kite festival butterfly”—and written them into a book labeled “My Butterfly Collection” and accompanied the names with illustrations.
“Astonishing.” said Father Booty. “Just look at this one here.” Peacock blue and long emerald streamer tails. “Oh goodness, and that one”—black with white spots and a pink flame at its heart…. “Oh my camera… Potty, can you just rummage in the glove compartment?”
Uncle Potty was reading Asterix: Ave Gaul! By Toutatis!!!!#@***!!, but he roused himself and handed the little Leica through the window.
As the butterfly fluttered beguilingly on a cable of the bridge, Father Booty snapped the photograph. “Oh dear, I think I shook, the picture might be blurry.”
He was about to try again when the guards began to shout and one of them came racing up. “Photography strictly prohibited on the bridge.” Didn’t he know?
Oh dear, he did, he did, a mistake, he had forgotten in his excitement. “So sorry, officer.” He knew, he knew. It was a very important bridge, this, India’s contact with the north, with the border at which they might have to fight the Chinese again someday, and now, of course, there was the Gorkha insurgency as well.
It didn’t help that he was a foreigner.
They took his camera and began to search the jeep.
A disturbing smell.
“What is that smell?”
“Cheese.”
“Kya cheez?” said a fellow from Meerut.
They had never heard of cheese. They looked unconvinced. It smelled far too suspicious and one of them reported that he thought it smelled of bomb-making materials. “Gas maar raha hai,” said the Meerut boy.
“What did he say?” asked Father Booty.
“Something is whacking gas. Something is firing gas.”
“Throw it out,” they told Father Booty. “It’s gone bad.”
“No it hasn’t.”
“Yes, it has, the whole vehicle is smelling.”
The checkpoint guards now began to examine the pile of books, regarding them with the same wrinkled noses as the unclaimed cheese that had been destined for Glenary’s.
“What is this?” They hoped for literature of an antinational and inflammatory nature.
“Trollope,” Lola said brightly, excited and aroused by the turn of events. “I always said,” she turned to the others in a frivolous fashion, “that I would save Tr
ollope for my dotage; I knew it would be a perfect slow indulgence when I had nothing much to do and, well, here I am. Old-fashioned books is what I like. Not the new kind of thing, no beginning, no middle, no end, just a thread of… free-floating plasma…
“English writer,” she told the guard.
He flipped through: The Last Chronicle of Barset: The Archdeacon goes to Framley, Mrs. Dobbs Broughton Piles her Fagots.
“Did you know,” Lola asked the others, “that he also invented the post box?”
“Why are you reading it?”
“To take my mind off all of this.” She gestured vaguely and rudely at the scene in general and the guard himself. Who had his pride. Knew he was something. Knew his mother knew he was something. Not even an hour ago she had fed her belief and her son with puri aloo accompanied by a lemony-limy-luscious Limca, the fizz from which had made a mini excitement about his nose.
Angry at Lola’s insolence, his face still awake from the soda spray, he gave orders for the book to be placed in the police jeep.
“You can’t take it,” she said, “it’s a library book, you foolish little man. I’ll get into trouble at the Gymkhana. You’re not going to pay them to replace it.”
“And this?” The guard examined another book.
Noni had picked a sad account of police brutality during the Naxalite movement by Mahashveta Devi, translated by Spivak who, she had recently read with interest in the Indian Express, was made cutting edge by a sari and combat boots wardrobe. She had also selected a book by Amit Chaudhuri that contained a description of electricity failure in Calcutta that caused people across India to soften with communal nostalgia for power shortage. She had read it before but returned every now and then to half drink, half drown in those beautiful images. Father Booty had a treatise on Buddhist esotericism, written by a scholar from one of the legendary monastic universities of Lhasa, and Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs. And Sai had Wuthering Heights in her bag.
“We have to take these to the station for inspection.”
“Why? Please sir,” said Noni, trying to persuade him, “we’ve especially gone…. What will we read…. Stuck at home…. All those hours of curfew….”
“But officer, you only have to look at us to know we’re hardly the people to waste your time on,” said Father Booty. “So many goondas around….”
But they had no sympathy for bookworms, and Lola began to shout, “Thieves, that’s what you police are. Everybody knows it. Hand in hand with goondas. I will go to the army major, I will go to the SDO. What kind of situation is this, bullying the population, you little men throwing your weight around. I’m not going to bribe you, if that’s what you’re hoping—forget about it. Let us go,” she said grandly to the others.
“Chalo yaar,” said Uncle Potty and glanced at his bottles to indicate they might have one or two IF…
But the man said, “Serious trouble. Even five bottles will not be enough.” And it became obvious what Kalimpong was in for.
“Calm down, madam,” the policeman said to Lola, offending her still more. “If there is nothing in your books, we will return them.”
The red-hot library books were taken carefully away. Father Booty’s camera, too, was confiscated and delivered to their supervisor’s desk; his case they would review separately.
______
Sai didn’t notice much, for she was still thinking about Gyan ignoring her, and she didn’t care the books were gone.
Why was he there? Why hadn’t he wanted to acknowledge her? He had said: “I can’t resist you… I have to keep coming back….”
At home the cook was waiting, but she went to bed without her dinner, and this greatly offended the cook, who took it to mean that she had eaten fancily in a restaurant and now despised the offerings at home.
Sensitive to his jealousy, she usually came home and complained, “The spices were not ground properly—I almost broke my tooth on a peppercorn, and the meat was so tough, I had to swallow it without chewing, all in a big lump with glasses of water.” He would laugh and laugh. “Ha ha, yes, nobody takes the time to clean and tenderize the meat properly anymore, to grind the spices, roast them….” Then, growing suddenly serious, he would exclaim, holding up a finger to make his point like a politician: “And for this they charge a lot of money!” Nodding hard, wise to the horrors of the world. Now, in a spoiled mood, he banged the dishes.
“What is going on!” shouted the judge. A statement, not a question, that was to be responded to by silence.
“Nothing,” he said, beyond caring, “what can be going on? Babyji went to sleep. She ate at the hotel.”
Thirty-four
A week after the library trip, the books were returned, having been declared harmless, but the authorities didn’t take a similar view of the photograph of the butterfly, which showed, beyond its beguiling wings of black, white and pink, the sentry post at the bridge, and the bridge itself, spanning the Teesta. In fact, it was focused, they noted, not on the butterfly, but on the bridge.
“I was in a hurry,” said Father Booty, “I forgot to focus properly and then just as I was going to try again, I was nabbed.”
But the police didn’t listen and that evening they visited him at home, turned everything upside down; took away his alarm clock, his radio, some extra batteries, a package of nails he had bought to finish work on his cowshed, and a bottle of illegal Black Cat rum from Sikkim. They took all that away.
“Where are your papers?”
Father Booty was now found to be residing in India illegally. Oh dear, he had not expected contact with the authorities; he had allowed his residence permit to lapse in the back of a moldy drawer for to renew the permit was such bureaucratic hell, and never again did he plan to leave or to reenter India…. He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything but an Indian foreigner….
He had two weeks to leave Kalimpong.
“But I have lived here forty-five years.”
“That is of no consequence. It was your privilege to be residing here, but we cannot tolerate abuse of privilege.”
Then the messenger grew kinder, remembering that his own son was being taught by Jesuits, and he hoped to send the boy to England or America. Or even Switzerland would be all right….
“Sorry, Father,” he said, “but these days…. I myself will lose my job. Another time I could slip you through, maybe, but just now… please go at once to the Snow Lion Travel Agency and book your ticket. We will provide free passage on a government jeep to Siliguri. Think of it as a holiday, Father, and keep in touch. When this is finished, apply for the proper papers and return. No problem.” How easy it was to say these words. He grew happier at being able to be so civilized and nice.
Return. No problem. Take rest. Have a holiday.
Father Booty went running to everyone he knew who might help him, the police chief and the SDO who made regular trips to the dairy for sweet curd, Major Aloo in the cantonment who enjoyed the chocolate cigars he made, the forest department officials who had given him oyster mushroom spawn so he might have mushrooms in his garden during fungus season. One year when the bamboo clump on his property bloomed and bees from the whole district descended whrooming upon the white flowers, the forest department had bought the seeds from him, because they were valuable—bamboo flowered only once in a hundred years. When the clump died after this extravagant effort, they gave him new bamboo to plant, young spears with their tips like braids.
But now, all those who in peaceful times had enjoyed his company and chatted about such things as curd, mushrooms, and bamboo were too busy or too scared to help.
“We cannot allow a threat to our national security.”
“What about my home? What about my dairy, the cows?”
But they were as illegal as he was.
“Foreign nationals can’t own property and you know that, Father. What business do you have owning all of this?”
The dairy was actually in the name of Unc
le Potty, because long ago, when this tetchy little problem had come up, he had signed the papers on behalf of his friend….
But empty property was a great risk, for Kalimpong had long ago been demarcated an “area of high sensitivity,” and according to the laws, the army was entitled to appropriate any unoccupied land. They paid rock-bottom rent, slapped concrete about, and filled the homes they took over with a string of temporary people who didn’t care and wrecked the place. That was the usual story.
Father Booty felt his heart fail at the thought of his cows being turned out in favor of army tanks; looked about at his craggy bit of mountainside—violet bamboo orchids and pale ginger lilies spicing the air; a glimpse of the Teesta far below that was no color at all right now, just a dark light shining on its way to join the Brahmaputra. Such wilderness could not incite a gentle love—he loved it fiercely, intensely.
But two days later, Father Booty received another visitor, a Nepali doctor who wished to open a private nursing home and without being invited to do so, walked through the gate to gaze at the same view Father Booty had looked out on and caressed it with his eyes. He examined the solidly constructed house that Father Booty had named Sukhtara. Star of Happiness. He knocked his knuckles against the cowsheds with the approval of ownership. Twenty-five rich patients in a row…. And then he made an offer to buy the Swiss dairy for practically nothing.
“That isn’t even the cost of the shed, let alone the main house.”
“You will not get any other offers.”
“Why not?”
“I have arranged it and you have no choice. You are lucky to get what I am giving you. You are residing in this country unlawfully and you must sell or lose everything.”
______
“I will look after the cows, Booty,” said his friend Uncle Potty. “No worries. And when the trouble is over, you return and take up where you left off.”
They sat together, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, and Sai. In the background, a tape of Abida Parveen was playing. “Allah hoo, Allah hoo Allah hoo.…” God was just wilderness and space, said the husky voice, careless with the loss of love. It took you to the edge of all you could bear and then—it let go, let go…. “Mujhe jaaaane do.…” All one should desire was freedom. But Father Booty wasn’t comforted by Uncle Potty’s assurance, for it had to be admitted that his friend was an alcoholic and undependable. In a drunken state he would allow anything to happen, he might sign on any line, but it was Father Booty’s own fault: why hadn’t he applied for an Indian passport? Because it was just as silly as NOT applying for an American or a Swiss? He felt a lack in himself, despised his conformity to the ideas of the world even as he disagreed with them.
