The Inheritance of Loss

Fifty

"No bus to Kalimpong. "

"Why not?"

It was in the newspaper, wasn’t it? The man at the Siliguri bus station had been surprised at Biju’s ignorance. On TV? In every conversation? In the air?

Then the problems were continuing?

Worsening. How could he not know? Where had he come from?

From America. No newspaper, no phone…

He nodded, then, in sympathy.

But: "No vehicles going to Kalimpong. Things are very tense, bhai. There was shooting there. Everyone has gone crazy."

Biju became insistent. "I have to go. My father is there…"

"Can’t go. There’s no way. There’s an emergency situation and they’ve put up roadblocks, spread Mobil oil and nails all over the streets – roads are completely closed."

Biju sat on his belongings in the bus station until the man finally took pity on him.

"Listen," he said, "go to Panitunk and you might find some vehicle from there, but it’s very dangerous. You will have to beg the GNLF men."

Biju waited there for four days until a GNLF jeep was leaving. They were renting extra seats for extortionary amounts.

"No room," the men told him.

He opened his new wallet to dollars.

He paid. Abraham Lincoln, in God we trust… The men had never seen American money, passed the bills around and studied them.

"But you can’t take so much luggage."

He paid some more, they piled his cases onto the roof and banded them with rope, and then they left, riding high on the thin road above the flooded fields, through the incandescence of young rice and banana, through a wildlife sanctuary with giant signs, "DO NOT DISTURB THE WILD ANIMALS," hammered onto the trees. He felt so light-hearted to be back, even this journey with these men didn’t unsettle him. He poked his head out and looked up at his bags to make sure they were still properly fastened.

The road tilted, barely a ledge over the Teesta, an insane river, he remembered, leaping both backward and forward within each moment. Biju hung on to the metal frame of the jeep as it maneuvered through ridged gullies and ruts and over rocks – there were more holes in the road than there was road and everything from his liver to his blood was getting a good shake. He looked down over at oblivion, hurried his vision back to the gouged bank. Death was so close – he had forgotten this in his eternal existence in America – this constant proximity of one’s nearest destination.

So, hanging tightly on to the metal carapace, they twisted uphill. There were many butterflies of myriad varieties, and when it rained a bit, the butterflies disappeared. The rain stopped and they returned; another little spasm, and they vanished again. Clouds blew in and out of the jeep, obscuring the men from one another every now and again. All along, the frogs sang lustily. There were at least a dozen landslides on the road between Siliguri and Kalimpong, and as they waited for them to be cleared, vendors came by offering momos in buckets, coconuts cut into triangle slices. This was where his father lived and where he had visited him and where they had hatched the plot to send him to America, and Biju had, in his innocence, done just what his father had, in his own innocence, told him to do. What could his father have known? This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.