by Kiran Desai
Of course, he didn’t go over his memories of the village school, of the schoolmaster who failed the children unless paid off by the parents. He didn’t think of the roof that flew off each monsoon season or of the fact that not only his mother, but now also his grandmother, were dead. He didn’t think of any of the things that had made him leave in the first place.
Forty-two
Despite her sweet succumb to bribery, the minute Gyan left the house, his little sister who had witnessed the fight between her brother and Sai switched allegiance to an unbearable urge to gossip, and when he returned, he found the whole household was aware of what had happened, expanded to theatrical dimensions. The talk of guns had the astonishing effect of waking his grandmother up out of a stupor (in fact, the savor of battles renewed was giving new life to the aged all over the hillside), and she crept over slowly with a rolled-up newspaper. Gyan saw her coming and wondered what she was doing. Then she reached him and smacked him hard on the head. “Take control of yourself. Running around like a fool, paying no attention to your studies! Where is this going to get you? In jail, that’s where.” She smacked him on his bottom as he tried to rush past. “Keep out of trouble, you understand,” whacking again for good measure, “Like a baby you will be crying.”
“He may not have done anything,” began his mother.
“Why would that girl come all the way then? For no reason? Stay away from those people,” his grandmother growled, turning to Gyan. “What trouble you’ll get yourself into… and we’re a poor family… we will be at their mercy…. Gone crazy with your father away and your mother too weak to control you,” she glowered at her daughter-in-law, glad of an excuse to do so. Locked Gyan up with a lock and key.
That day, when his friends came for him, at the sound of a jeep, his grandmother crawled outdoors, peering about with her rheumy eyes.
“At least tell them I’m not well. You’ll ruin my reputation,” Gyan screamed, his adolescent self coming to the forefront.
“He’s sick,” said the grandmother. “Very sick. Can’t see you anymore.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He can’t stop going to the bathroom doing tatti” she said. He groaned inside. “Must have eaten something overripe. He is like a tap turned on.”
“Every family has to send a man to represent the household in our marches.”
They were referring to the march the next day, a big one starting at the Mela Ground.
“The Indo-Nepal treaty is being burned tomorrow.”
“If you want him doing tatti all over your march…”
They drove away and visited houses all over the hillside to remind everyone of the edict that each home must have a representative demonstrating the next day, although there were many who claimed digestive problems and heart conditions, sprained ankles, back pain… and tried to be excused with medical certificates: “Mr. Chatterjee must avoid exposure to anxiety and nervousness as he is a high-BP patient.”
But they were not excused: “Then send someone else. Surely not everyone in the family is ill?”
______
An enormous decision removed, Gyan, after the initial protest, felt sweet peace settle on him, and though he pretended frustration, he was very relieved by this reprieve into childhood. He was young, no permanant harm had been done. Let the world carry on outside for a bit, and then when it was safe, he’d visit Sai and cajole her into being friends again. He wasn’t a bad person. He didn’t want to fight. The trouble was that he’d tried to be part of the larger questions, tried to become part of politics and history. Happiness had a smaller location, though this wasn’t something to flaunt, of course; very few would stand up and announce, “Actually I’m a coward,” but his timidity might be disguised, well, in a perfectly ordinary existence situated between meek contours. Saved from one humiliation by being horrible to Sai, he could now be serendipitously saved from another by claiming respect for his grandmother. Cowardice needed its facade, its reasoning, like anything else if it was to be his life’s principle. Contentment was no easy matter. One had to situate it cannily, camouflage it, pretend it was something else.
He had a lot of time to think, and as the hours went by, he unearthed the grout from his belly button, the wax from his ears with a blunt lead pencil, listened to the radio and tested the cleanliness of the orifices against the music, tilting right, left: “Chaandni raate, pyaar ki baate….” Then, sad to report, he picked some snot balls from his nose and fed them to a giant tiger-striped spider sitting in its web between the table and the wall. It pounced, couldn’t believe its luck, and began slowly to eat. Gyan lay on his back and did languorous bicycling exercises with his legs.
Pleasures existed in the world—intense, tiny pleasures that nevertheless created a feeling of space on all sides.
But then, the guilt came back strong: how could he have told the boys about the guns? How? How could he have put Sai in such danger? His skin began to crawl and burn. He couldn’t lie on the bed any longer. He got up and paced up and down. Could he ever be happy and innocent after what he had done?
______
So as Sai lay martyred in her room, and as Gyan first considered the joy of turning the wheels of a simple life and then sickened at the harm he had done to others, they missed the important protest, a defining moment of the conflict, when the Indo-Nepal treaty of 1950 was to be burned and the past consigned to the flames and destroyed.
“Someone will have to go…,” the cook said to the judge after the boys had come to Cho Oyu to make their demand of attendance at the march.
“Well, you had better go, then,” said the judge.
Forty-three
27th July of 1986.
At night it rained and the cook prayed he wouldn’t have to go, but by morning it had stopped and a bit of blue appeared, looking so fake and childish after the moody shades of monsoon, he felt it hollow his heart and lay in bed as long as he could, hoping it would get covered up. Then when he couldn’t delay things any longer, he got up, put on his slippers, and went to the outhouse.
He met his friend the MetalBox watchman, and they walked together to the Mela Ground, through the entrance gate that was mounted with a statue of Gandhi to commemorate Indian Independence. Underneath, it read in Hindi, “Unity Love Service.” Several thousand people were arriving, not only from Kalimpong, but from villages and towns all around, from Mirik, Pasumbang, Soureni Valley, Aloobari, Labong Valley, Kurseong and Peshok, Mungpootista Highway, and many other places besides. When they had all collected, they would march to the police station where they would set the documents on fire.
“The organizational skills of the GNLF are good,” the cook said; he couldn’t help but appreciate them, for this kind of order was a rare sight in Kalimpong.
They stood and waited as hours passed. Finally, when the sun was hot overhead and cast no shadow, a man blew a whistle and instructed them to move forward.
Waving kukris, the sickle blades high and flashing in the light, “Jai Gorkha,” the men shouted. “Jai Gorkhaland! Gorkhaland for Gorkhas!”
“We should be finished in an hour,” said the MetalBox watchman hopefully.
______
All was going according to plan, and they began to anticipate their lunch, since they were already hungry; but then, all of sudden when they reached the junction, an unexpected incident occurred. A volley of rocks and stones came pelting down from behind the post office, where the cook had waited for his letters from Biju and which, he noticed sadly, was barred and shut.
The stones hit the rooftops, BANG BANG BANG BANG; then they came flying with greater momentum, bounced down, and injured some of the people, who went reeling back.
Bruises. Blood.
It would never be uncovered who the culprits were, whose sinister plan this was—
Those hired by the police, said the marchers, so that the marchers might be goaded into returning the insult, throwing rocks back, thus giving the police an excuse to react.
However, all parties agreed that, in anger at this attack, the crowd began to throw the stones at the jawans all outfitted in their riot shields and batons. The missiles hit the police station roof, shattered the windows.
The police picked up the rocks and returned them. Who were they to be spiritually superior to the crowd?
And then, BAM BABAM, the air was full of stones and bottles and brickbats and screaming. The crowd began to collect rocks, raided a building site for more; the police began to chase the crowd; the stones came down; everyone was being hit, people, police; they jumped on one another, beating with sticks, bashing with rocks; began to slash with their sickles—a hand, a face, a nose, an ear.
A rumor spread that there were men among the protesters with guns…. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps it wasn’t.
But the more adamant the protesters were, the more they fought back, the more they refused to scatter, the more certain the police were that they were armed. Defiance like this could surely not exist unless supported by weapons. So, they suspected.
In the end, the police couldn’t bear the suspense of their suspicion and opened fire.
The marchers immediately to the front scattered, ran right and left—
Those who followed behind from beyond the Kanchan Cinema, pushed by the pushing of those still farther behind, were gunned down.
In a fast-forward blur, thirteen local boys were dead.
This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate. The space between life and death, in the end, too small to measure.
At this point, some of those running away turned back and relaunched themselves at the police, screaming vengeance. They pulled the guns from their hands, and the police, finding themselves suddenly, drastically, outnumbered, began to plead and whimper. One jawan was knifed to death, the arms of another were chopped off, a third was stabbed, and the heads of policemen came up on stakes before the station across from the bench under the plum tree, where the townspeople had rested themselves in more peaceful times and the cook sometimes read his letters. A beheaded body ran briefly down the street, blood fountaining from the neck, and they all saw the truth about living creatures—that after death, in final humiliation, the body defecates on itself.
The police ran backward like a film in reverse to get into the station but found that several of their colleagues, there before them, had locked the door and lay terrified on the floor, wouldn’t let the others in, no matter how they hammered and pleaded. Chased by the mob, the police who were barred from shelter by their own men, ran into private homes.
Lola and Noni, who had again hosted the GNLF boys the night before, found three policemen hammering on the back door of Mon Ami. They sat whimpering in the drawing room as the ladies drew the curtains around them.
“Pathetic,” Lola told them. “You are the police?!” Because now they were at her mercy and she wasn’t at theirs. “Didn’t help us all this time, and now see, need our help!”
“Ma,” they called her, “Ma, please don’t kick us out, we will do anything for you. We are as your sons.”
“Hah! Now you’re calling me Ma! Very fine and funny. This isn’t how you were behaving a week ago….”
In the bazaar they continued rioting. Jeeps were pushed into the ravine, buses were set on fire, the light from their burning reflected garishly on the settling mist of evening, and the fire spread to the jungles of bamboo. The air inside the hollow stems expanded and they burst and burned with the sound of renewed, magnified gunshot.
______
Everyone was running, the unwilling participants, the perpetrators, and the bashed-up police. They scattered into the side paths towards Bong Busti and to Teesta Bazaar. The cook ran alone because he’d lost the Metal-Box watchman, who had been torn away in another direction. He ran as fast as his lungs and legs would let him, his heart pounding painfully in his chest, ears, and throat, each breath poisonous. He managed to get some distance up the steep shortcut to Ringkingpong Road, and there he felt his legs collapse under him, they were trembling so hard. He sat above the bazaar among staffs of bamboo bearing white prayer flags, the script faded like the markings on a shell that’s been washed by the ocean a long time. The Victorian tower of the Criminal Investigation Division was behind him and the dark bulk of Galingka, Tashiding, and Morgan House, dating to the British, but all company guesthouses now. A gardener squatted on the lawn of Morgan House still planted with the plants Mrs. Morgan had bought from England. He seemed unaware of what was going on; stared out without curiosity or ambition, without worry, developing a quality devoid of qualities to get him through this life.
The cook could see the fires burning below him and the men scattering. As they crossed the heat vapor of the flames, they seemed to ripple and blow like mirages. Above was Kanchenjunga, solid, extraordinary, a sight that for centuries had delivered men their freedom and thinned clogged human hearts to joy. But of course the cook couldn’t feel this now and he didn’t know if the sight of the mountain could ever be the same to him. Clawing at his heart as if it were a door was his panic—a scrabbling rodent creature.
How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and a small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together.
Now he did and crying, continued crawling his way back to Cho Oyu, hiding in the bushes as he was passed by army tanks rolling down from the cantonment area into the town. Instead of foreign enemies, instead of the Chinese they had been preparing for, building their hatred against, they must fight their own people….
This place, this market where he had bargained contentedly over potatoes, and insulted, yes insulted, the fruit wallah with happy impunity, enjoyed the rude words about decayed produce that flew from his lips; this place where he had with utter safety genuinely lost his temper with the deaf tailors, the inept plumber, the tardy baker with the cream horns; this place where he had resided secure in the knowledge that this was basically a civilized place where there was room for them all; where he had existed in what seemed a sweetness of crabbiness—was showing him now that he had been wrong. He wasn’t wanted in Kalimpong and he didn’t belong.
At this moment, a fear overtook him that he might never see his son again—
The letters that had come all these years were only his own hope writing to him. Biju was just a habit of thought. He didn’t exist. Could he?
Forty-four
The incidents of horror grew, through the changing of the seasons, through winter and a flowery spring, summer, then rain and winter again. Roads were closed, there was curfew every night, and Kalimpong was trapped in its own madness. You couldn’t leave the hillsides; nobody even left their houses if they could help it but stayed locked in and barricaded.
If you were a Nepali reluctant to join in, it was bad. The Metal-Box watchman had been beaten, forced to repeat “Jai Gorkha,” and dragged to Mahakala Temple to swear an oath of loyalty to the cause.
If you weren’t Nepali it was worse.
If you were Bengali, people who had known you your whole life wouldn’t acknowledge you in the street.
Even the Biharis, Tibetans, Lepchas, and Sikkimese didn’t acknowledge you. They, the unimportant shoals of a minority population, the small powerless numbers that might be caught up in either net, wanted to put the Bengalis on the other side of the argument from themselves, delineate them as the enemy.
“All these years,” said Lola, “I’ve been buying eggs at that Tshering’s shop down the road, and the other day he looked at me right in the face and said he had none. ‘I see a basket of them right there,’ I said, ‘how can you tell me you have none?’ ‘They have been presold,’ he said.
“Pem Pem,” Lola had exclaimed on her way out, seeing her friend Mrs. Thondup’s daughter come in. Just a few months ago Lola and Noni had partaken of fine civilities in her home that had harkened to another kind of life in another place, quail eggs with bamboo shoots, fat Tibetan carpets under their toes.
“Pem Pem??”
Pem Pem gave Lola a beseeching embarrassed look and rushed past.
