The Inheritance of Loss

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!"

But now he was forced to depend on local currency. Tashi’s retarded cousin was running back and forth carrying bottles between Gompu’s and the pool table, so the men could continue drinking as they played and talked of the movement. A sud of vomit lay all around.

Sai walked by the deserted classrooms of Kalimpong college, dead insects boiled in piles against rimy windows, bees noosed by spiders’ silk, blackboard still with its symbols and calculations. Here, in this chloroformed atmosphere, Gyan had studied. She walked around to the other side of the mountain that overlooked the Relli River and Bong Busti, where he lived. It was two hours downhill to his house in a poor part of Kalimpong quite foreign to her.

He had told her the story of his brave ancestors in the army, but why didn’t he ever speak of his family here and now? In the back of her mind, Sai knew she should stay home, but she couldn’t stop herself.

She walked by several churches: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals. The old English church stood at the town’s heart, the Americans at the edge, but then the new ones had more money and more tambourine spirit, and they were catching up fast. Perfect practitioners, too, of the hide-behind-the-tree-and-pop-out technique to surprise those who might have run away; of the salwar kameez disguise (all the better to gobble you up, my dear…); and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear…), that was it – they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba.

But Sai walked by unmolested. The churches were dark; the missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace.

She passed by fields and small clusters of houses, became confused in a capillary web of paths that crisscrossed the mountains, perpendicular as creepers, dividing and petering into more paths leading to huts perched along eyebrow-width ledges in the thick bamboo. Tin roofs promised tetanus; outhouses gestured into the ether so that droppings would fall into the valley. Bamboo cleaved in half carried water to patches of corn and pumpkin, and wormlike tubes attached to pumps led from a stream to the shacks. They looked pretty in the sun, these little homes, babies crawling about with bottoms red through pants with the behinds cut out so they could do their susu and potty; fuschia and roses – for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it.

Sai knew that once the day failed, though, you wouldn’t be able to ignore the poverty, and it would become obvious that in these homes it was cramped and wet, the smoke thick enough to choke you, the inhabitants eating meagerly in the candlelight too dim to see by, rats and snakes in the rafters fighting over insects and birds’ eggs. You knew that rain collected down below and made the earth floor muddy, that all the men drank too much, reality skidding into nightmares, brawls, and beating.

A woman holding a baby passed by. The woman smelled of earth and smoke and an oversweet intense smell came from the baby, like corn boiling.

"Do you know where Gyan lives?" Sai asked.

She pointed at a house just ahead; there it stood and Sai felt a moment of shock.

It was a small, slime-slicked cube; the walls must have been made with cement corrupted by sand, because it came spilling forth from pock-marks as if from a punctured bag.

Crows’ nests of electrical wiring hung from the corners of the structure, split into sections that disappeared into windows barred with thin jail grill. She could smell an open drain that told immediately of a sluggish plumbing system failing anew each day despite being so rudimentary. The drain ran from the house under a rough patchwork of stones and emptied over the property that was marked with barbed wire, and from under this wire came a perturbed harem of sulfurous hens being chased by a randy rooster.

The upper story of the house was unfinished, presumably abandoned for lack of funds, and, while waiting to stockpile enough to resume building, it had fallen into disrepair; no walls and no roof, just a few posts with iron rods sprouting from the top to provide a basic sketch of what was to have followed. An attempt had been made to save the rods from rust with upturned soda bottles, but they were bright orange anyway.

Still, she could tell it was someone’s precious home. Marigolds and zinnias edged the veranda; the front door was ajar and she could see past its puckered veneer to a gilt clock and a poster of a bonneted golden-haired child against a moldering wall, just the kind of thing that Lola and Noni made merciless fun of.

There were houses like this everywhere, of course, common to those who had struggled to the far edge of the middle class – just to the edge, only just, holding on desperately – but were at every moment being undone, the house slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal – modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next.

The house didn’t match Gyan’s talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn’t match his future. Every single thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world. Sisters’ marriages, younger brother’s studies, grandmother’s teeth – all on hold, silenced, until he left, strove, sent something back.

Sai felt shame, then, for him. How he must have hoped his silence would be construed as dignity. Of course he had kept her far away. Of course he had never mentioned his father. The dilemmas and stresses that must exist within this house – how could he have let them out? And she felt distaste, then, for herself. How had she been linked to this enterprise, without her knowledge or consent?

She stood staring at the chickens, unsure of what to do.

Chickens, chickens, chickens bought to supplement a tiny income. The birds had never revealed themselves to her so clearly; a grotesque bunch, rape and violence being enacted, hens being hammered and pecked as they screamed and flapped, attempting escape from the rapist rooster.

Several minutes passed. Should she leave, should she stay?

The door was pushed open farther, and a girl of about ten came out of the house with a cooking pot to scrub out with mud and gravel at the outside tap.

"Does Gyan live here?" Sai asked despite herself.

Suspicion shadowed the girl’s face. It was an old, unsurprised sure-ness of ulterior motives, a funny look in a child.

"He’s my mathematics tutor."

Still looking as if someone like Sai could only mean trouble, she set down the pot and went back into the house as the rooster rushed forth to peck the grain stuck at the bottom, climbing right inside, giving the hens a reprieve.

At that moment, Gyan came out, caught her expression of distaste before she had a chance to disguise it, and was outraged. How dare she seek him out to find her indulgence in pity! He had been feeling guilty about his extended silence, was considering returning to see her, but now he knew he was quite right. The rooster climbed out of the pot and began to strut about. He was the only grand thing around, crowned, spurred, crowing like a colonial.

"What do you want?"

She saw his thoughts recast his eyes and mouth, remembered that he had abandoned her, not the other way around, and she was bitterly angry.

Dirty hypocrite.

Pretending one thing, living another. Nothing but lies through and through.

Farther away, she could see an outhouse made of four bamboo poles and threadbare sacking over an alarming drop.

Perhaps he’d hoped he’d wheedle his way into Cho Oyu; maybe his whole family could move in there, if he played his cards right, and use those capacious bathrooms, each as big as his entire home. Cho Oyu might be crumbling, but it had once been majestic; it had its past if not its future, and that might be enough – a gate of black lace, the name worked into imposing stone pillars with mossy cannonballs on top as in To the Manor Born.

The sister was looking at them curiously.

"What do you want?" Gyan’s refrigerated voice repeated.

To think that she had come to call him momo, cosy scoop of minced mutton in charming dimpled wrapping, that she had come to climb into his lap, ask why he hadn’t forgiven her as before at the Christmastime fight, but she wouldn’t satisfy him by admitting any vulnerability now.

Instead she said she had come about Father Booty.

Her outrage at the injustice done to her friend returned to her in a rush. Dear Father Booty, who had been forced onto a jeep leaving for the Siliguri airport, having lost everything but his memories: the time he had given a lecture on how dairies might create a mini Swiss-style economy in Kalimpong and had been greeted with a standing ovation; his poem on a cow in the Illustrated Weekly; and "Nothing so sweet, dear friends" – evenings on Uncle Potty’s veranda, when the music ended on a drawn-out note of honey, and the moon – it was whole – sailed upward, an alchemist’s marvel of illuminated cheese. How fast the earth spun! It was all over.

How was he to live where, he despaired, he would be snipped into an elderly person supported by the state and packaged in a very clean box alongside other aged people with supposedly everything in common with him -

He had left his friend Uncle Potty in mourning, drinking, the world breaking in waves about him; chair going one way, the table and stove the other; the whole kitchen rocking back and forth.

"Look at what you people are doing," she accused Gyan.

"What am I doing? What have I to do with Father Booty?"

"Everything."

"Well, if that’s what it will take, so be it. Should Nepalis sit miserably for another two hundred years so the police don’t have an excuse to throw out Father Booty?" He came out of the gate, marched her away from his house.

"Yes," said Sai. "You, for one, are better gone than Father Booty. Think you’re wonderful… well, you know what? You’re not! He’s done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside."

Gyan became seriously angry.

"In fact, good thing they kicked him out," he said, "who needs Swiss people here? For how many thousands of years have we produced our own milk?"

"Why don’t you then? Why don’t you make cheese?"

"We live in India, thank you very much. We don’t want any cheese and the last thing we need is chocolate cigars."

"Ah, that same old thing again." She wished to claw him. She wanted to pluck out his eyes and kick him black-and-blue. The taste of blood, salty, dark – she could anticipate its flavor. "Civilization is important," she said.

"That is not civilization, you fool. Schools and hospitals. That is."

You fool – how dare he!

"But you have to set a standard. Or else everything will be brought down to the same low level as you and your family."

She was shocked at herself as she spoke, but in this moment she was willing to believe anything that lay on the other side of Gyan.

"I see, Swiss luxury sets a standard, chocolates and watches set the standard… Yes, soothe your guilty conscience, stupid little girl, and hope someone doesn’t burn down your house for the simple reason that you are a fool."

Again he was calling her fool -

"If this is what you’ve been thinking, why didn’t you boycott the cheese instead of gobbling it down? Now you attack it? Hypocrite! But it was very nice to eat the cheese when you got a chance, no? All that cheese toast? Hundreds of pieces of cheese toast you must have eaten. Let alone the chocolate cigars… So greedy, eating them like a fat pig. And tuna fish on toast and peanut butter biscuits!"

By now, with the conversation disintegrating, his sense of humor began to return to him, and Gyan began to giggle, his eyes to soften, and she could see his expression shift. They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn’t believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring cozi-ness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A wild daring love to bicycle them into the sky, but also a rice and dal love blessed by the unexciting feel of everyday, its surprises safely enmeshed in something solidly familiar like marrying the daughter or son of your father’s best friend and grumbling about the cost of potatoes, the cost of onions. Every single contradiction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction.

Sai began to laugh a bit as well.

"Momo?" she said, switching to a pleading tone.

Then, in a flash he veered back, was angry again. Remembered this was not a conversation he wished to end in laughter. The infantile nickname, the tender feel of her eyes – it aroused his ire. Her getting him to apologize, trying to smother him, swaddle him, drag him to drown in this pish pash mash, sicky sticky baby sweetieness… eeeshhh…

He needed to be a man. He needed to stand tall and be rough. Dryness, space, good firm gestures. Not this fritter, flutter, this worming in sugar…

Oh yes, how he needed to be strong -

For, if truth be told, as the weeks went by, he, Gyan, was scared – he who had thought there was no joy like screaming victory over oppression, he who had raised his fist to authority, who had found the fire of his college friends purifying, he who had claimed the hillside, enjoyed the thought of those Mon Ami sisters with their fake English accents blanching and trembling – he, who was hero for the homeland…

He listened with growing trepidation as the conversation in Gompu’s gained in fervor. When did shouting and strikes get you anywhere, they said, and talked of burning the circuit house, robbing the petrol pump.

When Chhang and Bhang, Gyan, Owl and Donkey had leaped into jeeps, filled up at the petrol station and driven off without paying, Gyan had been shaking just as much as the pump manager on the other side of the window, the muscles of his heart performing uncontrollable spasms.

There were those who were provoked by the challenge, but Gyan was finding that he wasn’t one of these. He was angry that his family hadn’t thought to ban him, keep him home. He hated his tragic father, his mother who looked to him for direction, had always looked to him for direction, even when he was a little boy, simply for being male. He spent the nights awake, worrying he couldn’t live up to his proclamations.

But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn’t leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?

Yes, he owed much to his rejection of Sai.

The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way. In pushing her away, an energy was born, a purpose whittled. He wouldn’t sweetly reconcile.

"You hate me," said Sai, as if she’d read his thoughts, "for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me. You aren’t being fair."

"What’s fair? What’s fair? Do you have any idea of the world? Do you bother to look? Do you have any understanding of how justice operates or, rather, does NOT operate? You’re not a baby anymore, you know…"

"And how grown-up are you?! Too scared even to come for tuition because you know you’ve behaved nastily and you’re too much of a coward to admit it! You’re probably just sitting waiting for your mummy to arrange your marriage. Low-class family, uncultured, arranged-marriage types… they’ll find you a silly fool to marry and you’ll be delighted all your life to have a dummy. Why not admit it, Gyan??"

Coward! How dare she? Who would marry her!

"You think it’s brave of me to sit on your veranda? I can’t spend my life eating cheese toast, can I?"

"I didn’t ask you to. You did it of your own free will, and pay us back for it, if that’s what you think." She found a new attack and went after it even though she grew steadily more horrified by the vermin that coursed from her mouth, but it was as if she were on a stage; the role was more powerful than herself.

"Ate it for free… typical of you people, demand and take and then spit on what you’ve been given. There is exactly one reason why you will get nowhere -

"Because you don’t deserve to. Why did you eat it if it was beneath you?"

"Not beneath me. Nothing to DO with me, YOU FOOL – "

"Don’t call me FOOL. Through this whole conversation you’ve been repeating it, FOOL FOOL – "

Lunging at him with hands and nails, having learned something from the conduct of the common chicken some minutes ago, she scratched his arms in red streaks and – "You told them about the guns, didn’t you?" she was shouting all of a sudden. "You told them to come to Cho Oyu? You did, didn’t you, DIDN’T YOU?"

It all came bursting out although she hadn’t considered this possibility before. Suddenly her anger, Gyan’s absences, his ignoring her in Darjeeling – all came together.

His guilt hooked unawares, rose in his eye, disappeared reappeared. Wriggling leaping trying to get away like a caught fish. "You’re crazy."

"I saw that," pounced Sai. Jumped to seize it from his eyes. But he caught her before she reached him and then threw her aside into the lan-tana bushes and beat about with a stick.

"Gyan bhaiya?" His sister’s tentative voice as Sai managed to stand.

They both turned in horror. It had all been observed. He dropped the stick and told his sister: "Don’t stick your nose here. Go back. Or I’ll smack you hard."

And he shouted at Sai, "Never come here again." Oh, and now it would all be reported to his parents.

Sai screamed at the sister: "Good you saw, good that you heard. Go and tell your parents what your brother has been up to, telling me he loves me, making all kinds of promises and then sending robbers to our house. I’ll go to the police and then let’s see what happens to your family. Gyan will get his eyes pulled out, his head cut off, and then let’s see when you all come crying to beg… Hah!"

The sister was trying to hear but Gyan had her by the braids and was pulling her home. Sai had betrayed him, led him to betray others, his own people, his family. She had enticed him, sneaked up on him, spied on him, ruined him, caused him to behave badly. He couldn’t wait for the day his mother would show him the photograph of the girl he was to marry, a charming girl, he hoped, with cheeks like two Simla apples, who hadn’t allowed her mind to traverse the gutters and gray areas, and he would adore her for the miracle she was.

Sai was not miraculous; she was an uninspiring person, a reflection of all the contradictions around her, a mirror that showed him himself far too clearly for comfort.

Sai began to follow brother and sister but then stopped. Shame caught up with her. What had she done? It would be her they would laugh at, a desperate girl who had walked all this way for unrequited love. Gyan would be slapped on the back and cheered for his conquest. She would be humiliated. He had hit on the age-old trick that remade him into a hero, "the desired male"… The more he insulted her behind her back – "Oh, that crazy girl is following me…" – the more the men would cheer, the more his status would grow at Thapa’s Canteen, the more Sai would be remade behind her back into a lunatic female, the more Gyan would fatten with pride… She felt her own dignity departing, watched it from far away as Gyan and his sister walked down the path. As they turned into their house, it vanished as well.

She walked home very slowly, sick, sick. The mist was thickening, smoke adding to the dusk and the vapor. The smell of potatoes cooking came from busti houses all along the way, a smell that would surely connote comfort to souls across the world, but that couldn’t comfort her. She felt none of the pity she’d felt earlier while contemplating this scene; even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her…

When she arrived home she saw two people on the veranda talking to the cook and the judge.

A woman was pleading: "Who do you go to when you’re poor? People like us have to suffer. All the goondas come out and the police go hand in hand with them."

"Who are you?"

It was the wife, begging for mercy, of the drunk the police had caught and questioned about the gun robbery and on whom they had practiced their new torture strategy. They, at Cho Oyu, had forgotten about this man, but the man’s wife had traced the connection and she’d come with her father-in-law to see the judge, walking half a day from a village across the Relli River.

"What will we do?" she begged. "We are not even Nepalis, we are Lepchas… He was innocent and the police have blinded him. He knew nothing about you, he was in the market as usual, everyone knows," sobbed the wife, looking to her father-in-law for help.

What use is it for a woman to protest and cry?

But her father-in-law was too scared. He said nothing at all, just stood there; his expression couldn’t be told apart from his wrinkles. His son, when he was not drinking, had worked to rebuild the roads in the district, filling stones from the Teesta riverbed into contractors’ trucks, unloading them at building sites, clearing landslides that tumbled over and over in the same eternal motion as the river coming down. His son’s wife worked on the highways as well, but no work was being done now that the GNLF had closed down the roads.

"Why come to me? Go to the police. They are the ones who caught your husband, not I. It’s not my fault," said the judge, alarmed into eloquence. "You had better leave from here."

"You can’t send this woman to the police," said the cook, "they’ll probably assault her."

The woman looked raped and beaten already. Her clothes were very soiled and her teeth resembled a row of rotten corn kernels, some of them missing, some blackened, and she was quite bent from carrying stone – common sight, this sort of woman in the hills. Some foreigners had actually photographed her as proof of horror…

"George!…! George!" said a shocked wife to her husband with a camera.

And he had leaned out of the car: Click! "Got it, babe…!"

"Help us," she begged.

The judge seemed suddenly to remember his personality, stiffened, and said nothing, set his mouth in a mask, would look neither left nor right, went back to his game of chess.

In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. He was embarrassed by the attention that was being drawn to his humiliation yet again, the setting of the table with the tablecloth, the laughter, the robbery of the rifles that had never contributed to a fast-forward death ballet come duck season.

Now, typically, the mess had grown.

This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority. He had done his duty as far as it was any citizen’s duty to report problems to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a bit and one could find oneself supporting the whole family forever after, a constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food, the husband might be blind and with broken legs, and the woman might be anemic and bent, but they’d still pop out an infant every nine months. If you let such people get an inch, they’d take everything you had – the families yoked together because of guilt on one side, and an unending greed and capacity for dependance on the other – and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.

The cook looked at the man and woman and sighed.

They looked at Sai. "Didi…, "the woman said. Her eyes were too devastated to look at directly.

Sai turned away and told herself she didn’t care.

She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favored her she would, perhaps, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth in their own image, a perfect devilish student to the devil gods…

It took a while for them to leave. They went and sat outside the gate, the cook forced to herd them out like cows, and then for a long while they squatted down on their haunches and didn’t move, just stared emotionless, as if drained of hope and initiative.

They watched the judge taking Mutt for her walk and feeding her. He was angry and embarrassed that they were watching. Why didn’t they GO!

"Tell them to leave or else we’ll call the police," he told the cook.

"Jao, jao," the cook said, "jao jao," through the gate, but they only retreated up the hill, behind the bushes and settled back down with the same blank look on their faces.

Sai climbed to her room, slammed the door, and flung herself at her reflection in the mirror:

What will happen to me?!

Gyan would find adulthood and purity in a quest for a homeland and she would be left forever adolescent, trapped in shameful dramatics. This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot…

She cried for a while, tears taking on their own momentum, but despite herself the image of the begging woman came back. She went downstairs and asked the cook: "Did you give them anything?"

"No," said the cook, also miserable. "What can you do," he said flatly, as if giving an answer, not asking a question.

Then he went back out with a sack of rice. "Hss sss hsss? " he hissed.

But by this time the pair had vanished.