The Inheritance of Loss

Forty-six

Sai looked out of her window and couldn’t tell what all the noise was about.

The judge was shouting: "Mutt, Mutt." It was her stew time and the cook had boiled soy Nutrinuggets with pumpkin and a Maggi soup cube. It worried the judge that she should have to eat like this, but she’d already had the last of the meat; the judge had barred himself and Sai from it, and the cook, of course, never had the luxury of eating meat in the first place. There was still some peanut butter, though, for Mutt’s chapatis, and powdered milk.

But Mutt wouldn’t answer.

"Mutty, Mutt, stew…" The judge walked around the garden, out of the gate, and walked up and down the road.

"Stew stew -

"Mutty Mutt? MUTT?" His voice became anxious.

The afternoon turned into evening, the mist swept down, but Mutt didn’t appear.

He remembered the boys in their guerilla outfits arriving for the guns. Mutt had barked, the boys had screamed like a bunch of schoolgirls, retreated down the steps to cower behind the bushes. But Mutt had been scared, too; she wasn’t the brave dog they imagined.

"MUTT-MUTT MUTTY-MUTTMUTTYMUTTMUTT?!"

She hadn’t arrived by the time darkness settled in.

He felt more keenly than ever that at nightfall in Kalimpong, there was a real ceding of power. You couldn’t rise against such a powerful dark, so enormous, without a chink. He went out with the biggest flashlight they had, shone it uselessly into the jungle; listened for jackals; waited on the veranda all night; watched the invisible mountainsides opposite as the falling lanterns of drunks plummeted like shooting stars. By the time dawn showed, he was frantic. He ventured to the small busti houses to ask if they had seen her; he asked the milkman and the baker, who was now at home with his battered tin trunk, which contained the khari biscuits and milk rusks Mutt so enjoyed.

"No, have not seen the kutti."

The judge was angry at hearing her referred to as a "kutti" but restrained himself because he couldn’t afford to shout at those whose help he might now need.

He asked the plumber, the electrician. Uselessly, he gestured at the deaf tailors who had made Mutt a winter coat out of a blanket, with a buckle at the belly.

He received blank faces, some angry laughter. "Saala Machoot… what does he think? We’re going to look for his dog?" People were insulted. "At a time like this. We can’t even eat!"

He knocked on the doors of Mrs. Thondup, Lola and Noni, anyone who might be kind, if not on his behalf, then for Mutt, or for the sake of their profession, position, religion. (He missed the missionaries – they would have understood and would have been duty-bound to help.) Everyone he called on responded with immediate doom. Was this a hopeful time? They were already reconciled to Mutt’s fate, and the judge wished to strangle them as they spoke.

Mrs. Thondup: "Was she expensive?"

The judge never thought of her that way, but yes, she had been expensive, delivered from a Calcutta kennel specializing in red setters. A certificate of pedigree had accompanied her: "Sire: Cecil. Dam: Ophelia."

"La ma ma ma ma, must have been stolen, Justice," Mrs. Thondup said. "Our dogs, Ping and Ting – we brought them all the way from Lhasa, and when we got here, Ping vanished. The robber kept him captive to breed pups, mated and mated him. Good source of income, no? Just go to thirteenth mile, you’ll see watered down versions of Ping running about everywhere. Finally he broke away and escaped, but his whole personality had changed." She pointed out the victim, drooling out of his old man’s mouth, glaring at the judge.

Uncle Potty: "Somebody must be out to rob you, Justice Sahib – getting rid of obstacles. That Gobbo, he poisoned my Kutta Sahib, years ago now."

"But we were just robbed."

"Someone else must have decided to do the same…"

Afghan princesses: "Our dog, Afghan hound, you know, we were traveling with our father and one day she went missing. She was eaten by the Nagas, yes, they eat dogs – they ate Frisky. Even our slaves – yes, we had slaves – we threatened them with their lives, but still they didn’t manage to rescue her in time."

Lola: "The trouble with us Indians is that we have no love of animals. A dog, a cat is there just to kick. We can’t resist – beat, stone, torment, we don’t rest until the creature is dead and then we feel very content – good! Put it down! Destroyed it! All gone! – we feel satisfaction in this."

What had he done? He hadn’t been fair to her. He had put Mutt in a place where she could never survive, a rough, mad place. Bhutia hill dogs – battle-scarred mastiffs, grins disfigured by violence, ears stiff from having been bloodied over and over – might have torn her to bits. Nightshade grew in every ravine, flowers crisp and white as the pope’s robes, but hallucinogenic – she might have imbibed the poisonous sap. The cobras – husband-wife, wide as the biscuit jar, living in the bank behind Cho Oyu – might have bitten her. Rabid, hallucinating jackals, unable to drink, unable to swallow, might have come from the forest, thirsty, so thirsty… Just two years ago, when they had brought a rabies epidemic into town, the judge had taken Mutt for a vaccine most people could not afford. He had saved her while stray dogs were rounded up and slaughtered by the truckful (mistaking the only ride of their lives for a new life of luxury smiling and wagging away) and whole families too penniless to pay for the three-thousand-rupee vaccine died; the hospital staff had been ordered to say they had no medicine for fear of riots. In between the madness of rabies came moments of lucidity, so the victims knew exactly what was happening to them, exactly what lunacy looked like, felt like…

He had thought his vigilance would protect his dog from all possible harm.

The price of such arrogance had been great.

He went to see the subdivisional officer who had visited Cho Oyu after the robbery, but trouble had upset the SDO’s good nature. He was no longer the gardening enthusiast who had complimented the judge’s passionflower.

"My dear sir," he said to the judge, "I am fond of animals myself, but in these times… it’s a luxury we can’t afford – "

He had given up his special cherry tobacco, as well – it seemed an embarrassment at a time like this. One always felt compelled to go back to Gandhian-style austerity when the integrity of the nation was being threatened, rice-dal, roti-namak, over and over. It was just horrible…

The judge persisted, "But can’t you do anything…" and he became angry, threw up his hands.

"A dog! Justice, just listen to yourself. People are being killed. What can I do? Of course I have such high regard… I have made time despite worry of being accused of favoritism… but we are in an emergency situation. In Calcutta, in Delhi, there is great concern about this severe deterioration of law and order, and in the end that’s what we must think of, isn’t it so? Our country. We must suffer inconvenience and I don’t need to tell someone of your experience this…" The SDO fixed the judge with a certain gluey look that convinced him he meant to be rude.

The judge went on to the police station where the sound of a man’s screaming issued from the inner chamber on purpose, the judge thought, to intimidate him, to extract a bribe.

He looked at the policemen in front of him. They looked insolently back.

They were waiting in the front room, biding time until they would all go in and give the man a final lesson he couldn’t unlearn. They began to snigger. "Ha, ha, ha. Come about his dog! Dog? Ha, ha ha ha ha… Madman!" They became angry halfway through their humor. "Don’t waste our time," they said. "Get out."

Did they perhaps know the name of the person they had picked up after the gun robbery? The judge persisted. He wondered, just a thought, could he be responsible?

Which person?

The one whom they had accused of stealing his guns… he wasn’t blaming the police in any way, but the man’s wife and father had visited him and seemed upset… There was no such person, they said, what was he talking about? Now, would he stop wasting their time and get out? The sound of the victim screaming in the back intensified as if on cue to give the judge a not so subtle message.

He couldn’t conceive of punishment great enough for humanity. A man wasn’t equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone any harm. "We should be dying," the judge almost wept.

The world had failed Mutt. It had failed beauty; it had failed grace. But by having forsaken this world, for having held himself apart, Mutt would suffer.

The judge had lost his clout… A bit of "sir sahib huzoor" for politeness’ sake, but that was just residual veneer now; he knew what they really thought of him.

He remembered all of a sudden why he had gone to England and joined the ICS; it was clearer than ever why – but now that position of power was gone, frittered away in years of misanthropy and cynicism.

"Biscuit, pooch, din din, milkie, khana, ishtoo, porridge, daha, chalo, car, pom-pom, doo-doo, walkie " -

He shouted all the language that was between Mutt and himself, sending nursery words of love flying over the Himalayas, rattled her leash so it clinked the way that made her jump – whoop! – up on all four legs together, as if on a pogo stick.

"Walkie, baba, muffin…

"Mutt, mutton, little chop … "he cried, then, "forgive me, my little dog… Please let her go whoever you are…"

He kept burning the image of Mutt, how she sometimes lay on her back with all four legs in the air, warming her tummy as she snoozed in the sun. How he’d recently tempted her to eat her lousy pumpkin stew by running around the garden making buzzing noises as if the vegetable were a strange insect, and then he’d popped the cube into her wide-open-with-surprise mouth, and in amazement she’d hastily swallowed.

He pictured the two of them cozy in bed: good night, good morning.

The army came out at dusk to make sure curfew was strictly enforced.

"You must return, sir," said a soldier.

"Get out of my way," he said in a British accent to make the man back away, but the soldier continued to follow at a safe distance until the judge turned angrily toward home while pretending not to be hurried.

Please come home, my dear, my lovely girl,

Princess Duchess Queen,

Soo-soo, Poo-poo, Cuckoo, good good smelly smell,

Naughty girl,

Treat-treat, dinnertime,

Diamond Pearl,

Teatime! Biscuit!

Sweetheart! Chicki!

Catch the bone!

How ridiculous it all sounded without a dog to receive the words.

The soldier followed meekly, surprised at what was coming from the judge’s mouth.

Something was wrong, he told his wife back in the quarters for married servicemen, concrete blocks defacing the wilderness.

Something indecent was happening.

"What?" she said, newly married, absolutely delighted by her modern plumbing and cooking gadgets.

"God knows what happens, these senile men and their animals… you know," he said, "all kinds of strange things…"

Then they forgot the conversation, because the army was still being well fed and the wife informed her husband that they had been allotted so much butter that they could share it with their extended family, even though this was against the law, and that while a broiler chicken was usually between six hundred and eight hundred grams, the chicken they had been delivered was almost double the weight: was the army poultry supplier injecting the birds with water?