by Kiran Desai
A mongoose loped like water over the grass, matching the color of the evening, only its movement betraying it.
Anger strained against Sai’s heart. This was Gyan’s doing, she thought. This is what he had done and what people like him were doing in the name of decency and education, in the name of hospitals for Nepalis and management positions. In the end, Father Booty, lovable Father Booty who, frankly, had done much more for development in the hills than any of the locals, and without screaming or waving kukris, Father Booty was to be sacrificed.
In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, noses, enveloping their faces. The black climed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kanchenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink…. each of them separately remembered how many evenings they’d spent like this… how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. “Nothing so sweet, dear friends—” Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank.
There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour….
But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one….
Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was gone now, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.
Her mind returned to the day of the gun robbery at Cho Oyu—the start of everything going wrong.
Thirty-five
How foolishly those rifles had been left mounted on the wall, retired artifacts relegated to history, seen too often to notice or think about. Gyan was the last one to take them down and examine them—boys liked things like that. Even the Dalai Lama, Sai had read, had a collection of war games and toy soldiers. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might be resurrected into use. Would there be crimes committed that would, when dot was linked to dot, be traced to their doorstep?
______
“My grandfather used to go hunting,” Sai had told Gyan, trying to impress him, but why had she been proud? Of something that should be shaming?
The cook had told her the stories:
“A great shikari he was, Saibaby. He was very handsome, and he looked very brave and stylish on his horse. The villagers would call him if there was ever a man-eater around.”
“Was there often one?” Goose pimples.
“Oh, all the time. Rrrr-rrrr, you would hear them, and the sound was of wood being sawed. I can remember waking up and listening. In the morning you could see pug marks by the river, sometimes even around the tents.”
The cook couldn’t help but enjoy himself, and the more he repeated his stories, the more they became truer than the truth.
______
The police had come to investigate the crime and, in the cook’s quarter, sent Biju’s letters flying….
“They had to do it,” said the cook. “This is a serious matter.”
The seriousness was proved when, one morning not long after Father Booty heard the news of his exile, the subdivisional officer arrived at Cho Oyu. The judge and Sai were on the lawn and he had to search to locate them within the camouflage of their own shadows and the shadows of leaves.
“The perpetrators are still absconding,” said the SDO surrounded by three policemen with guns and lathis, “but please don’t worry, sir. We will nip this in the bud. Crack down on antisocial elements.
“You know, my father was also a great shikari,” he continued over tea. “If only he had been less adept, I told him, you would have left something for us as well! Isn’t it so? Ha ha,” he laughed, but his laugh would have registered bright pink on the litmus test. “Justice Sahib, you shikaris were too good, lions and leopards…. Now if you go into the forest and if you see a chicken that has escaped from somewhere, you are lucky, no?”
Silence. Had he gone too far?
“But no need to worry, we will catch the criminals. They are using the problems of Bhutan, Assam as an excuse to make trouble here. This country of ours is always being torn apart and it’s sad for people like us, brought up with national feeling, and worst for you, sir, who struggled for our freedom…. These antinationals have no respect for anything or anyone, not even for themselves…. The whole economy is under threat.”
“Do you know,” he turned to Sai, “what are the three Ts of the Darjeeling district? Can you tell me?” She shook her head. Disappointed in her, triumphant in himself, he intoned:
“Tea!
“Timber!
“Tourism!”
As he left, he stopped at a flowering creeper. “Beautiful blossom, Justice Sahib. If you see such a sight, you will know there is a God.” The passionflower was a glorious bizarre thing, each bloom lasting just a day, purple and white striped tentacles, half sea anemone, half flower—all by itself, it proffered enough reason for faith.
“I have become a keen gardener,” said the SDO, “since I arrived in Kalimpong. I look after my plants exactly as if they were babies. Well, let me know if you have any more trouble. I think you won’t, but no doubt this is a very touchy situation.” He did up his shawl like a nationalist—Flap! Wrap! Things to do! No time to waste! Nation calls! And he got back into his jeep. The driver backed out of the gate, roared away.
“Let’s see what he does,” said the cook.
“They never find anyone,” said the judge.
Sai didn’t speak because she couldn’t stop returning to the thought of Gyan avoiding her.
______
Some days later the police picked up a miserable drunk for the crime. The drunk was a customary sight lying oblivious to the world in a ditch by the side of the market road. Some passerby or the other would haul him up, smack his cheeks, and send him lurching home, crisscrossed with patterns of grasses, stars in his eyes.
Now, instead, the drunk was transported to the police station, where he sat on the floor, his hands and feet trussed. The policemen stood about looking bored. All of a sudden, though, triggered by something unapparent, they recovered from their malaise, jumped up, and began beating the man.
The more he screamed the harder they beat him; they reduced him to a pulp, bashed his head until blood streamed down his face, knocked out his teeth, kicked him until his ribs broke—
You could hear him up and down the hillside begging and screaming. The police watched with disgust. He was claiming his innocence: “I didn’t steal guns from anybody, I didn’t go to anyone’s house, nothing, nothing, some mistake….”
His were the first screams and they heralded the end of normal life on the hillside.
“I didn’t do anything, but I am sorry.” For hours they continued, the desperate shrieks tearing up the air, “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry….”
But the police were just practising their torture techniques, getting ready for what was coming. When the man crawled out on his knees, his eyes had been extinguished. They would heal into horizonless, flat blanks that would forever cause others to recoil in fear and disgust.
The only grace was that he wouldn’t see them recoiling and would disappear entirely inside the alcohol that had always given him solace.
Thirty-six
It was Mr. Iype the newsagent who said offhandedly, waving a copy of India Abroad: “You’re from Darjeeling side, no? Lot of trouble over there….”
“Why?”
“Nepalis making tr
ouble… very troublesome people….”
“Strikes?”
“Much worse, bhai, not only strikes, the whole hillside is shut down.”
“It is?”
“For many months this has been going on. Haven’t you heard?”
“No. I haven’t had any letters for a long time.”
“Why do you think?”
Biju had blamed usual disruptions—bad weather, incompetance—for the break in his father’s correspondence.
“They should kick the bastards back to Nepal,” continued Mr. Iype. “Bangladeshis to Bangladesh, Afghans to Afghanistan, all Muslims to Pakistan, Tibetans, Bhutanese, why are they sitting in our country?”
“Why are we sitting here?”
“This country is different,” he said without shame. “Without us what would they do?”
Biju went back to work.
Through the day, with gradually building momentum, he became convinced his father was dead. The judge wouldn’t know how to find him if he would try to find him at all. His unease began to tighten.
______
By the next day he couldn’t stand it anymore; he slipped out of the kitchen and purchased a twenty-five-dollar number from a bum who had a talent for learning numbers by lingering outside phone booths, overhearing people spell out their calling codes and recording them in his head. He had loitered behind one unsuspecting Mr. Onopolous making a phone call and charging it to his platinum—
“But be quick,” he told Biju, “I’m not sure about this number, a couple of people have already used it….”
The receiver was still moist and warm from the last intimacy it had conducted, and it breathed back at Biju, a dense tubercular crepitation. As there was no phone at Cho Oyu, Biju rang the number for the MetalBox guesthouse on Ringkingpong Road.
“Can you get my father? I will call again in two hours.”
______
So, one evening, some weeks before the phone lines were cut, before the roads and bridges were bombed, and they descended into total madness, the MetalBox watchman came rattling the gate at Cho Oyu. The cook had a broth going with bones and green onions—
“La! Phone! La! Telephone! Telephone call from your son. La! From America. He will phone again in one hour. Come quick!”
The cook went immediately, leaving the rattling skeleton bones topped by dancing scrappy green, for Sai to watch—”Babyji!”
“Where are you going?” asked Sai, who had been pulling burrs from Mutt’s pantaloons while thinking of Gyan’s absence—
But the cook didn’t reply. He was already out of the gate and running.
______
The phone sat squat in the drawing room of the guesthouse encircled by a lock and chain so the thieving servants might only receive phone calls and not make them. When it rang again, the watchman leapt at it, saying, “Phone, la! Phone! La mail” and his whole family came running from their hut outside. Every time the phone rang, they ran with committed loyalty. Upkeepers of modern novelties, they would not, would not, let it fall to ordinariness.
“HELLO?”
“HELLO? HELLO?”
They gathered about the cook, giggling in delicious anticipation.
“HELLO?”
“HELLO? PITAJI??”
“BIJU?” By natural logic he raised his voice to cover the distance between them, sending his voice all the way to America.
“Biju, Biju,” the watchman’s family chorused, “it’s Biju,” they said to one another. “Oh, it’s your son,” they told the cook. “It’s his son,” they told one another. They watched for his expressions to change, for hints as to what was being said at the other end, wishing to insinuate themselves deeply into the conversation, to become it, in fact.
“HELLO HELLO????”
“???? HAH? I CAN’T HEAR. YOUR VOICE IS VERY FAR.”
“I CAN’T HEAR. CAN YOU HEAR?”
“He can’t hear.”
“WHAT?”
“Still can’t hear?” they asked the cook.
The atmosphere of Kalimpong reached Biju all the way in New York; it swelled densely on the line and he could feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green-black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gestures of ferns; he could hear the croak trrrr whonk, wee wee butt ock butt ock of frogs in the spinach, the rising note welding imperceptibly with the evening….
“HELLO? HELLO?”
“Noise, noise,” said the watchman’s family, “Cant 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—”EVERYTHING 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.
“HELL
O? 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-Shit Cock Dick Pussy Love War, 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.
