The Inheritance of Loss

Nine

"Oh my God," shrieked Lola, when she heard the judge’s guns had been stolen from Cho Oyu. She was very much grayer now, but her personality was stronger than ever. "What if those hooligans come to Mon Ami? They’re bound to come. But we have nothing. Not that that will deter them. They’ll kill for fifty rupees."

"But you have a watchman," said Sai, absentminded, still trailing the thought of how Gyan hadn’t arrived the day of the robbery. His affection was surely on the wane…

"Budhoo? But he’s Nepali. Who can trust him now? It’s always the watchman in a case of robbery. They pass on the information and share the spoils… Remember Mrs. Thondup? She used to have that Nepali fellow, returned from Calcutta one year to find the house wiped clean. Wiped clean. Cups plates beds chairs wiring light fixtures, every single thing – even the chains and floats in the toilets. One of the men had tried to steal the cables along the road and they found him electrocuted. Every bamboo had been cut and sold, every lime was off the tree. Holes had been bored into their water pipes so every hut on the hillside was drawing water from their supply – and no sign of the watchman, of course. Quick across the border, he’d disappeared back into Nepal. My God, Noni," she said, "we had better tell that Budhoo to go."

"Calm down. How can we?" said Noni. "He has given us no reason." In fact, Budhoo had been a comforting presence for the two sisters who’d reached old age together at Mon Ami, its vegetable patch containing, as far as they knew, the country’s only broccoli grown from seeds procured in England; its orchard providing enough fruit for stewed pears every day of pear season and enough leftover to experiment with wine making in the bathtub. Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spencer panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favored with views of Kanchenjunga collared by cloud. At the entrance to the house hung a thangkha of a demon – with hungry fangs and skull necklaces, brandishing an angry penis – to dissuade the missionaries. In the drawing room was a trove of knickknacks. Tibetan choksee tables painted in jade and flame colors piled with books, including a volume of paintings by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian aristocrat who painted the Himalayas with such grave presence it made you shiver just to imagine all that grainy distilled cold, the lone traveler atop a yak, going – where? The immense vistas indicated an abstract destination. Also, Salim Ali’s guide to birds and all of Jane Austen. There was Wedgwood in the dining room cabinet and a jam jar on the sideboard, saved for its prettiness. "By appointment to Her Majesty the queen jam and marmalade manufacturers," it read in gold under a coat of arms, supported by a crowned lion and a unicorn.

Then there was the cat, Mustafa, a sooty hirsute fellow demonstrating a perfection of containment no amount of love or science could penetrate. He was, at this moment, starting up like a lorry on Sai’s lap, but his eyes looked blankly right into hers, warning her against mistaking this for intimacy.

To guard all this and their dignity, the sisters had hired Budhoo, a retired army man who had seen action against guerilla factions in Assam and had a big gun and an equally fierce mustache. He came each night at nine, ringing his bell as he rode up on his bicycle and lifting his bottom off the seat as he went over the bump in the garden.

"Budhoo?" the sisters would call from inside, sitting up in their beds, wrapped in Kulu shawls, sipping Sikkimese brandy, BBC news sputtering on the radio, falling over them in sparky explosions.

"Budhoo?"

"Huzoor!"

They would return to the BBC then, and later, sometimes, to their small black-and-white television, when Doordarshan provided the treat of To the Manor Born or Yes, Minister, featuring gentlemen with faces like moist, contented hams. With Budhoo on the roof fiddling with the aerial, the sisters shouted to him out of the window, "Right, left, no, back," as he swayed, poor fellow, amid the tree branches and moths, the outfall of messy Kalimpong weather.

At intervals through the night Budhoo also marched about Mon Ami, banging a stick and blowing a whistle so Lola and Noni could hear him and feel safe until the mountains once again shimmered in pure 24k and they woke to the powdery mist burning off in the sun.

But they had trusted Budhoo for no reason whatsoever. He might murder them in their nighties -

"But if we dismiss him," said Noni, "then he’ll be angry and twice as likely to do something."

"I tell you, these Neps can’t be trusted. And they don’t just rob. They think absolutely nothing of murdering, as well."

"Well," sighed Lola, "it was bound to happen, really. Been brewing a long time. When has this been a peaceful area? When we moved to Mon Ami, the whole of Kalimpong was upside down, remember? Nobody knew who was a spy and who wasn’t. Beijing had just named Kalimpong a hotbed of anti-Chinese activity…"

Monks had streamed through the forests, garnet lines of fire pouring down the mountains, as they escaped from Tibet along the salt and wool trade routes. Aristocrats had arrived, too, Lhasa beauties dancing waltzes at the Gymkhana Ball, amazing the locals with their cosmopolitan style.

But for a long while there had been severe food shortages, as there always were when political trouble arrived on the hillside.

"We had better run to the market, Noni. It will empty out. And our library books! We must change them."

"I won’t last the month," said Lola. "Almost through," she thumped A Bend in the River, "uphill task – "

"Superb writer," said Noni. "First-class. One of the best books I’ve ever read."

"Oh, I don’t know," Lola said, "I think he’s strange. Stuck in the past… He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he’s never freed himself from it. Quite a different thing now. In fact," she said, "chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the number one take-out dinner in Britain. It was just reported in the Indian Express.

"Tikka masala," she repeated. "Can you believe it?" She imagined the English countryside, castles, hedgerows, hedgehogs, etc., and tikka masala whizzing by on buses, bicycles, Rolls-Royces. Then she imagined a scene in To the Manor Born: "Oh Audrey. How perfectly lovely! Chicken tikka masala! Yes, and I got us some basmati as well. I do think it’s the best rice, don’t you?"

"Well, I don’t like to agree with you, but maybe you have a point," Noni conceded. "After all, why isn’t he writing of where he lives now? Why isn’t he taking up, say, race riots in Manchester?"

"Also the new England, Noni. A completely cosmopolitan society. Pixie, for example, doesn’t have a chip on her shoulder."

Pixie, Lola’s daughter, was a BBC reporter, and now and then Lola visited her and came back making everyone sick, refusing to shut up: "Super play, and oh, the strawberries and cream… And ah, the strawberries and cream…"

"My! What strawberries and cream, my dear, and out in the most lovely garden," Noni mimicked her sister. "As if you can’t get strawberries and cream in Kalimpong!" she said, then. "And you can eat without having to mince your words and behave like a pig on high heels."

"Dreadful legs those English girls have," said Uncle Potty, who had been present at the altercation. "Big pasty things. Good thing they’ve started wearing pants now."

But Lola was too dizzy to listen. Her suitcases were stuffed with Marmite, Oxo bouillon cubes, Knorr soup packets, After Eights, daffodil bulbs, and renewed supplies of Boots cucumber lotion and Marks and Spencer underwear – the essence, quintessence, of Englishness as she understood it. Surely the queen donned this superior hosiery:

She was solid. It was solid.

She was plain. It was plain.

She was strong. It was strong.

She was no-nonsense. It was no-nonsense.

They prevailed.

It was Pixie who inspired the nightly ritual of listening to the radio.

"Budhoo?" Huzoor.

"Good evening… this is Piyali Bannerji with the BBC news."

All over India, people hearing the Indian name announced in pucca British accent laughed and laughed so hard their stomachs hurt.

Disease. War. Famine. Noni exclaimed and was outraged, but Lola purred with pride and heard nothing but the sanitized elegance of her daughter’s voice, triumphant over any horrors the world might thrust upon others. "Better leave sooner rather than later," she had advised Pixie long ago, "India is a sinking ship. Don’t want to be pushy, darling, sweetie, thinking of your happiness only, but the doors won’t stay open forever. …"