The Inheritance of Loss

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.

"All of a sudden wrong side, no?" said Lola, "There is nobody who won’t abandon you."

On the ledge below Mon Ami, among the row of illegal huts, the sisters had noticed a small temple flying a red and gold flag, ensuring that no matter what, into eternity, no official – police, government, nobody – would dare dispute the legitimacy of the landgrab. The gods themselves had blessed it now. Little shrines were springing up all over Kalimpong, adjoining constructions forbidden by the municipality – squatter genius. And the trespassers were tapping phone lines, water pipes, electric lines in jumbles of illegal connections. The trees that provided Lola and Noni with pears, so many that they had cursed it, "Stewed pears and cream, stewed pears and cream every damn day!" had been stripped overnight. The broccoli patch was gone, the area near the gate was being used as a bathroom. Little children lined up in rows to spit at Lola and Noni as they walked by, and when Kesang, their maid, was bitten by one of the sqatter’s dogs, she screamed away, "Look your dog has bitten me, now you must put oil and turmeric on the wound so I don’t die from an infection."

But they just laughed.

The GNLF boys had burned down the government rest house by the river, beyond the bridge where Father Booty had photographed the polka-dotted butterfly. In fact, forest inspection bungalows all over the district were burning, upon whose verandas generations of ICS men had stood and admired the serenity, the hovering, angelic peace of dawn and dusk in the mountains.

The circuit house was burned, and the house of the chief minister’s niece. Detonators set off landslides as negotiations went nowhere. Kalimpong was transformed into a ghost town, the wind tumbling around the melancholy streets, garbage flying by unhindered. Whatever point the GNLF might have had, it was severely out of hand; even one man’s anger, in those days, seemed enough to set the hillside alight.

Women rushed by on the roads. The men trembled at home for fear of being picked up, being tortured on any kind of flimsy excuse, the GNLF accusing them of being police informers, the police accusing them of being militants. It was dangerous to drive even for those who might, for a car was just a trap; vehicles were being surrounded and stolen; they could be more nimble on their feet, hide in the jungle at the sound of trouble, wade through the jhoras and make their way home on footpaths. Anyway, after a while, there was no more fuel because the GNLF boys had siphoned off the last of it, and the pumps were closed.

The cook tried to calm himself by repeating, "It will be all right, everything goes through a bad time, the world goes in a cycle, bad things happen, pass, and things are once again good…" But his voice had more pleading in it than conviction, more hope than wisdom.

After this – after the gun robbery and after the parade, after his seeing the frailty of his life here as a non-Nepali – he couldn’t manage to compose himself properly; there was nobody, nothing – but a sinister presence loomed – he was sure something even worse stood around the corner. Where was Biju, where was he? He leaped at every shadow.

So, it was usually Sai who walked to the shuttered market searching for a shop with a half open back door signaling quick secret business, or a cardboard sign propped at the window of a hut of someone selling a handful of peanuts or a few eggs.

Excepting these meager purchases Sai made, the garden was feeding them almost entirely. For the first time, they in Cho Oyu were eating the real food of the hillside. Dalda saag, pink-flowered, flat-leafed; bhutiya dhaniya growing copiously around the cook’s quarter; the new tendrils of squash or pumpkin vine; curled ningro fiddleheads, churbi cheese and bamboo shoots sold by women who appeared from behind bushes on forest paths with the cheese wrapped in ferns and the yellow slices of bamboo shoots in buckets of water. After the rains, mushrooms pushed their way up, sweet as chicken and glorious as Kanchenjunga, so big, fanning out. People collected the oyster mushrooms in Father Booty’s abandoned garden. For a while the smell of them cooking gave the town the surprising air of wealth and comfort.

One day, when Sai arrived home with a kilo of damp atta and some potatoes, she found two figures, familiar from a previous occasion, on the veranda, pleading with the cook and judge.

"Please, sahib…" It was the same wife and father of the tortured man.

"Oh no," the cook had said in horror when he saw them, "oh no, baap re, what are you coming here for?" although he knew.

It was the impoverished who walked the line so thin it was questionable if it existed, an imaginary line between the insurgents and the law, between being robbed (who would listen to them if they went to the police?) and being hunted by the police as scapegoats for the crimes of others.

They were hungriest.

"Why are you coming here making trouble? We already told you we had nothing to do with the police picking up your husband. We were hardly the ones to accuse him or beat him… Had they told us, we would have gone at once and said this is not the man… we were not informed… What do we owe you?" said the cook. But he was giving them the atta Sai had brought back… when the judge barked, "Don’t give them anything," and continued his chess game.

"Please, sahib," they begged with hands folded, heads bent. "Who comes to our help? Can we live on no food at all? We will be your servants forever… God will repay you… God will reward you…"

But the judge was adamant.

Again, herded out, they sat outside the gate.

"Tell them to go," he told the cook.

"Jao jao," said the cook, although he was concerned that they might need to rest before having to walk another five to six hours through the forest to their village.

Again they moved and sat farther up so as not to give offense. Again they saw Mutt. She was attached by her snout to her favorite whiffy spot, unaware of anything else. The woman suddenly brightened and said to the man, "Sell that kind of dog and you can get a lot of money…" Mutt didn’t budge from the smell for a long, long time. If the judge hadn’t been there, they could have reached out – and grabbed her.

Some days later, when they at Cho Oyu had again forgotten these two unimportant if upsetting people, they returned.

But they didn’t come to the gate; they secreted themselves immediately in the jhora ravine and waited for Mutt, that connoisseur of smells, to appear for her daily round of the property. Rediscovering scents and enhancing them was an ever evolving art form. She was involved with an old favorite, grown better with age, that brought forth certain depths and facets of her personality. She was wholly absorbed, didn’t notice the intruders who crept up to her and pounced!

Startled, she yelped, but immediately they clamped her muzzle with hands strong from physical labor.

The judge was having his bucket bath, the cook was churning butter, Sai was in her bed whispering venomously, "Gyan, you bastard, you think I’m going to cry over you?" They didn’t see or hear a thing.

The trespassers lifted Mutt up, bound her with rope, and put her in a sack. The man slung the sack over his shoulders, and they carried her through town without drawing any attention to themselves. They walked around the mountainside, then all the way down and across the Relli and over three ridges that billowed like blue-green ocean, to a small hamlet that was far from any paved road.

"You don’t think they’ll find us?" the father asked his daughter-in-law.

"They won’t walk so far and they can’t drive here. They don’t know our names, they don’t know our village, they asked us no questions."

She was right.

Even the police hadn’t bothered to find out the name of the man they had beaten and blinded. They would hardly bother to look for a dog.

Mutt was healthy, they noticed, when they pinched her through the sack; fat and ready to make them a little money. "Or maybe we can use her to breed and then we can sell the puppies…" (They didn’t know, of course, that she had been fixed long ago by a visiting vet when she was beginning to attract love from all kinds of scurrilous loafers on the hillside, wheedling strays, conniving gentleman dogs…)

"Should we take her out of the sack?"

"Better leave her in for now. She’ll just start barking…"