by Kiran Desai
“Side of road, my land.” Lola, dressed in the widow’s sari she had worn to the electric crematorium when Joydeep died, mumbled weakly in broken English, as if to pretend it was English she couldn’t speak properly rather than illuminate the fact that it was Nepali she had never learned.
Pradhan’s home was in a part of Kalimpong she had never visited before. On the outside walls, lengths of bamboo split in half had been filled with earth and planted with succulents. Porcupine and bearded cacti grew in Dalda tins and plastic bags lining the steps to the small rectangular house with a tin roof. The room was full of staring men, some standing, some seated on folding chairs, all crowded in as if at a doctor’s waiting room. She could feel their intense desire to rid themselves of her as of an affliction. Another man with a favor had preceded Lola, a Marwari shopkeeper trying to bring a shipment of prayer lamps past the roadblocks. Strangely, Marwaris controlled the business of selling Tibetan objects of worship—lamps and bells, thunderbolts, the monks’ plum robes and turmeric undershirts, buttons of brass each embossed with a lotus flower.
When the man was ushered in front of Pradhan, he began such a bending, bowing, writhing, that he would not even raise his eyes. He spewed flowery honorifics: “Respected Sir and Huzoor and Your Gracious Presence and Your Wish my Pleasure, Please Grant, Your Blessing Requested, Your Honorable Self, Your Beneficence, May the Blessings of God Rain upon You and Yours, Might Your Respected Gracious Self Prosper and Might You Grant Prosperity to Respectful Supplicants….” He made an overabundant flower garden of speech, but to no avail, and finally, he backed out still scattering roses and pleas, prayers and blessings….
Pradhan dismissed him: “No exceptions.”
Then it had been Lola’s turn.
“Sir, property is being encroached on.”
“Name of property?”
“Mon Ami.”
“What kind of name?”
“French name.”
“I didn’t know we live in France. Do we? Tell me, why don’t I speak in French, then?”
He tried to send her away immediately, waving away the surveyor’s plan and the property documents showing the measurements of the plot that she tried to unroll before him.
“My men must be accommodated,” Pradhan stated.
“But our land….”
“Along all roads, to a certain depth, it’s government land, and that’s the land we are taking.”
The huts that had sprung up overnight were being populated by women, men, children, pigs, goats, dogs, chickens, cats, and cows. In a year, Lola could foresee, they would no longer be made of mud and bamboo but concrete and tiles.
“But it’s our land….”
“Do you use it?”
“For vegetables.”
“You can grow them elsewhere. Put them on the side of your house.”
“Have cut into the hill, land weak, landslide may occur,” she muttered. “Very dangerous for your men. Landslides on road….” She was trembling like a whisker from terror, although she insisted to herself that it was from rage.
“Landslide? They aren’t building big houses like yours, Aunty, just little huts of bamboo. In fact, it’s your house that might cause a landslide. Too heavy, no? Too big? Walls many feet wide? Stone, concrete? You are a rich woman? House-garden-servants!”
Here he began to smile.
“In fact,” he said, “as you can see,” he gestured out, “I am the raja of Kalimpong. A raja must have many queens.” He jerked his head back to the sounds of the kitchen that came through the curtained door. “I have four, but would you,” he looked Lola up and down, tipped his chair back, head at a comical angle, a coy naughty expression catching his face, “dear Aunty, would you like to be the fifth?”
The men in the room laughed so hard, “Ha Ha Ha.” He had their loyalty. He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation Lola, for one of the few times in her life, was the butt of the joke, detested, ridiculous, in the wrong part of town.
“And you know, you won’t be bearing me any sons at your age so I will expect a big dowry. And you’re not much to look at, nothing up”—he patted the front of his khaki shirt—”nothing down”—he patted his behind, which he twisted out of the chair—
“In fact, I have more of both!”
She could hear them laughing as she left.
How did her feet manage to walk? She would thank them all her life.
“Ah, fool,” she heard someone say as she made her way down the steps.
The women were laughing at her from the kitchen window. “Look at her expression,” one of them said.
They were beautiful girls with hair in silky loops and nose rings in sweet wrinkling noses….
______
Mon Ami seemed like a supernatural dove of blue-white peace with a wreath of roses in its beak, Lola thought as she passed under the trellis over the gate.
“What happened, what did he say? Did you see him?” Noni asked.
But Lola couldn’t manage to talk to Noni, who had been waiting for her sister to return.
But Lola went into the bathroom and sat trembling on the closed lid of the toilet.
“Joydeep,” she screamed silently to her husband, dead so long ago, “look at what you’ve done, you bloody fool!!!”
Her lips stretched out and her mouth was enormous with the extent of her shame.
“Look at what you’ve left me to! Do you know how I have suffered, do you have any idea??? Where are you?! You and your piddling little life, and look what I have to deal with, just look. I don’t even have my decency.”
She held on to her ridiculed old woman’s breasts and shook them. How could she and her sister leave now? If they left, the army would move in. Or squatters claiming squatters’ rights would instigate a court case. They would lose the home that the two of them, Joydeep and Lola, had bought with such false ideas of retirement, sweet peas and mist, cat and books.
______
The silence rang in the pipes, reached an unbearable pitch, subsided, rose. She wrenched the tap open—not a drop fell—then she twisted the tap viciously shut as if wringing its neck.
Bastard! Never a chink in his certainty, his poise. Never the brains to buy a house in Calcutta—no. No. Not that Joydeep, with his romantic notions of countryside living; with his Wellington boots, binoculars, and bird-watching book; with his Yeats, his Rilke (in German), his Mandelstam (in Russian); in the purply mountains of Kalimpong with his bloody Talisker and his Burberry socks (memento from Scottish holiday of golf + smoked salmon + distillery). Joydeep with his old-fashioned gentleman’s charm. He had always walked as if the world were firm beneath his feet and he never suffered a doubt. He was a cartoon. “You were a fool,” she screamed at him.
But then,
in a moment,
quite suddenly,
she went weak.
“Your eyes are lovely, dark and deep.”
He used to kiss those glistening orbs when he departed to work on his files.
“But I have promises to keep,”
First one eye then the other—
“And miles to go before I sleep—”
“And miles to go before you sleep?”
She would make a duet—
“And miles to go before I sleep.”
He would echo.
To the end, and even beyond, he could resurrect the wit that had fired her love when they were not much more than children, after all. “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” he had sung to her at their wedding reception, and then they had honeymooned in Europe.
______
Noni at the door: “Are you all right?”
Loudly, Lola said: “No, I’m not all right. Why don’t you go away?”
“Why don’t you open the door?”
“Go away I tell you, go join the boys in the street whom you are always defending.”
“Lola, open the door.”
“No.”
“Bugger off,” said Lola.
“Lola?” said Noni. “I made you a rum and nimboo.”
“ Bug off,” Lola said.
“Well, sister, in any such situation atrocities are committed under cover of a legitimate cause—”
“Bosh.”
“But if we forget there is some truth to what they are saying the problems will keep coming. Gorkhas have been used—”
“Cock and bull,” she said crudely. “These people aren’t good people. Gorkhas are mercenaries, that’s what they are. Pay them and they are loyal to whatever. There’s no principle involved, Noni. And what is this with the GOrkha? It was always GUrkha. AND then there aren’t even many Gurkhas here—some of course, and some newly retired ones coming in from Hong Kong, but otherwise they are only sherpas, coolies—”
“Anglicized spelling. They’re just changing it to—”
“My left toe! Why are they writing in English if they want to have Nepali taught in schools? These people are just louts, and that’s the truth, Noni, you know it, we all know it.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Then go and join them like I said. Leave your house, leave your books and your Ovaltine and your long Johns. HA! I’d like to see you, you liar and fake.”
“I will.”
“ Go on, then. And after you are done with that, go end up in hell!”
“Hell?” Noni said, rattling the door on the other side of the bathroom door. “Why hell?”
“Because you’ll be committing CRIME, that’s why!” screeched Lola.
______
Noni returned to sit on the dragon cushions on the sofa. Oh, they had been wrong. The real place had evaded them. The two of them had been fools feeling they were doing something exciting just by occupying this picturesque cottage, by seducing themselves with those old travel books in the library, searching for a certain angled light with which to romance themselves, to locate what had been conjured only as a tale to tell before the Royal Geographic Society, when the author returned to give a talk accompanied by sherry and a scrolled certificate of honor spritzed with gold for an exploration of the far Himalayan kingdoms—but far from what? Exotic to whom? It was the center for the sisters, but they had never treated it as such.
Parallel lives were being led by those—Budhoo, Kesang—for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green. They maintained their camping supplies, their flashlights, mosquito netting, raincoats, hot water bottles, brandy, radio, first-aid kit, Swiss army knife, book on poisonous snakes. These objects were talismans imbued with the task of transforming reality into something otherwise, supplies manufactured by a world that equated them with courage. But, really, they were equivalent to cowardice.
Noni tried to rouse herself. Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.
Thirty-nine
In the end what Sai and Gyan had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn’t forget that.
She remembered the ferocious look he had given her in Darjeeling, warning her to stay away.
One last time after refusing to acknowledge her, Gyan had come to Cho Oyu. He had sat at the table as if in chains.
A few months ago the ardent pursuit and now he behaved as if she had chased and trapped him, tail between his legs, into a cage!
What kind of man was this? she thought. She could not believe she had loved something so despicable. Her kiss had not turned him into a prince; he had morphed into a bloody frog.
“What kind of man are you?” she asked. “Is this any way to behave?”
“I’m confused,” he said finally, reluctantly. “I’m only human and sometimes I’m weak. Sorry.”
That “Sorry” unleashed a demoness of rage: “At whose expense are you weak and human! You’ll never get anywhere in life, my friend,” shouted Sai, “if this is what you think makes an excuse. A murderer could say the same and you think he would be let off the hook to hop in the spring?”
The usual thing happened, exactly what always happened in their fighting. He began to feel irritated, for, really, who was she to lecture him? “Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army.” He was a martyr, a man; a man, in fact, of ambition, principle.
“I don’t have to listen to this,” he said jumping up and storming off abruptly just as she was in powerful flow.
And Sai had cried, for it was the unjust truth.
______
Marooned during curfew, sick about Gyan, and sick with the desire to be desired, she still hoped for his return. She was bereft of her former skill at solitude.
She waited, read Wuthering Heights twice over, each time the potency of the writing imparting a wild animal feeling to her gut—and twice she read the last pages—still Gyan didn’t come.
______
A stick insect as big as a small branch climbed the steps.
A beetle with an impolitic red behind.
A dead scorpion being dismantled by ants—first its Popeye arm went by, carried by a line of ant coolies, then the sting and, separately, the eye.
But no Gyan.
She went to visit Uncle Potty. “Ahoy there,” he shouted to her from his veranda like a ship’s deck.
But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away.
Seeing her subtracted, Uncle Potty was scared and sang:
You’re the tops
You’re Nap-O-lean Brandy,
You’re the tops
You’re Ma-HAT-ma Gandy!
But her laugh was only another confectionary concocted for his sake, a pretense that their friendship was what it had been.
He had anticipated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art; the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than any simple bovine happiness. Years ago, as a student at Oxford, Uncle Potty had considered himself a lover of love. He looked up the word in the card catalog and brought back armfuls of books; he smoked cheroots, drank port and Madeira, read everything he could from psychology to science to pornography to poetry, Egyptian love letters, ninth century Tamilian erotica…. There was the joy of the chase and the joy of the fleeing, and when he set off on practical research trips, he had found pure love in the most sordid of spots, the wrong sides of town where the police didn’t venture; medieval, tunneling streets so narrow you had to pass crabwise past the drug dealers and the whores; where, at night, men he never saw ladled their tongues into his mouth. There had been Louis and André, Guillermo, Rassoul, Johan and Yoshi, and “Humberto Santamaria,” he had once shouted atop a mountain in the Lake District for an elegant amour. Some loved him while he didn’t love them; others he loved madly, deeply, and they, they didn’t love him at all. But Sai was up too close to appreciate his perspective.
Uncle Potty scratched his feet so the dead skin flew: “Once you start scratching, my dear, you cannot stop….”
______
When Sai next went to Mon Ami, they laughed and guessed, glad for a bit of fun in the midst of trouble: “Who is the lucky boy? Tall and fair and handsome?”
“And rich?” Noni said. “Let’s hope he’s rich?”
______
Fortunately, though, a single bit of luck fell on Sai and shrouded this fall of her dignity. Her rescuer was the common domestic cold. Heroically, it caught her common domestic grief in the nick of time, muddled the origin of her streaming eyes and sore throat, shuffled the sympt
oms of virus and disgraceful fall from the tightrope of splendrous love. Shielded thus from simple diagnosis, she enveloped her face in the copious folds of a man’s handkerchief. “A cold!” Whonk whonk. One part common cold to nine parts common grief. Lola and Noni prepared toddies of honey, lemon, rum, hot water.
“Sai, you look terrible, terrible.”
Her eyes were red and raw, spilling over. Pressure weighed downward like a gestapo boot on her brain.
Back in Cho Oyu, the cook rummaged in the medicine drawer for the Coldrin and the Vicks Vaporub. He found a silk scarf for her throat, and Sai hung in the hot and cold excitement of Vicks, buffeted by arctic winds of eucalyptus, still feeling the perpetual gnawing urgency and intensity of waiting, of hope living on without sustenance. It must feed on itself. It would drive her mad.
Was her affection for Gyan just a habit? How on earth could she think of someone so much?
The more she did, the more she did, the more she did.
Summoning her strength, she spoke directly to her heart. “Oh why must you behave so badly?”
But it wouldn’t soften its stance.
There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to—everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life.
The giant squid, the last dodo.
One morning, her cold on the wane, she realized her excuse would no longer hold. As curfew was lifted, in order to salvage her dignity, Sai started out on the undignified mission of searching for Gyan.
Forty
He wasn’t anywhere in the market, not in the music and video shop where Rinzy and Tin Tin Dorji rented out exhausted tapes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies.
“No, haven’t seen him,” said Dawa Bhutia sticking his head out from the steam of cabbage cooking in the Chin Li Restaurant kitchen.
“Isn’t in yet,” said Tashi at the Snow Lion, who had closed down the travel side of the business, what with the lack of tourists, and set up a pool table. The posters still hung on the walls: “Experience the grandeur of the Raj; come to Sikkim, land of over two hundred monasteries.” Locked at the back, he still had the treasures he took out to sell to the wealthier traveler: a rare thangkha of lamas sailing on magical sea beasts to spread the dharma to China; a nobleman’s earring; a jade cup smuggled from a Tibetan monastery, so transparent the light shone through making a green and black stormy cloudscape. “Tragic what is happening in Tibet,” the tourists would say, but their faces showed only glee in the booty. “Only twenty-five dollars!”
