The Inheritance of Loss

Fifty-two

Biju hadn’t seen such vastness in a long time – the sheer, overwhelming enormity of mountainside and scree coming down the flank of it. In places, the entire mountain had simply fallen out of itself, spread like a glacier with boulders, uprooted trees. Across the destruction, the precarious ant trail of the road was washed away. He felt exhilarated by the immensity of wilderness, by the lunatic creepers, the shooting hooting abundance of green, the great caterwauling vulgarity of frogs that was like the sound of the earth and the air itself. But the problems of the road were tedious. So, feeling patient in the way one feels before the greatness of nature, impatient in the way one feels with human details, he waited to see his father. The work of recarving a path through this ruin was, of course, usually contracted to teams of hunchbacked midget men and women, rebuilding things stone by stone, putting it all together again each time their work was rent apart, carrying rocks and mud in wicker baskets attached to bands around their foreheads, staggering loony with the weight, pounding on hulking river boulders over and over for hours with hammers and chisels until a bit chipped off, then another bit. They laid out the stones and the surface was tarred again – Biju remembered how, as a child, his father had always made him walk across newly spread pitch whenever they encountered some, in order to reinforce, he said, the thin soles of Biju’s shoes. Now that the government had suspended repairs, the GNLF men in the jeep were forced to clamber out themselves and roll boulders aside, remove fallen tree trunks, shovel clods of earth… They went through seven landslides. At the eighth they kept getting mired in the mud, the jeep rolling back down.

They backed up, needing space to rev up the engine and gather enough momentum to get over the ruts and the unmade soil and drove forward again at high speed. Again and again the engine stalled and shut off and they rolled back down. Backed up and went whroom whroom whroom-ing!…

They got out again, all of them except the driver, untied the luggage, and piled it on the mud. Finally, on the eleventh try, backing up a good long way and rushing, engine surging – the jeep went flustering over, and they applauded with relief, piled up the bags again, clambered in, and went on. They were almost a whole day into a journey that should have taken two hours. Surely they would soon arrive.

Then they veered off onto a smaller road, even harder to traverse.

"Is this the Kalimpong road?" Biju asked, bewildered.

"We have to drop some men off first… Detour."

Hours passed… The ninth landslide and the tenth.

"But when will we reach Kalimpong?" asked Biju. "Will we reach it by night?"

"Calm down, bhai." They didn’t seem worried, although the sun was sinking fast and a cool damp darkness spilled from the jungle.

It was late evening by the time they reached a few small huts along a dirt track of churned mud and deep puddles of water. The men got out and took down all their belongings, including Biju’s boxes and cases.

"How long are we staying?"

"This is as far as we are going. You can walk up to Kalimpong by yourself," they said and pointed at a path through the trees. "Shortcut."

Panic lurched in him. "How will I take my things?"

"Leave them here. Safekeeping." They laughed. "We’ll send them to you later."

"No," said Biju, terrified by the realization that he was being robbed.

"Go!" They pointed.

He stood there. The foliage loomed in a single mass; the sound of frogs swelled into the same tone that had expanded in Biju’s ear through the phone that day when he called his father from the streets of New York.

Up above, the mountains stretched -

Below, they dropped straight down, as in a nightmare, all the way to the Teesta.

"Go, will you?! Bhago," a man said, pointing now with his rifle.

Biju turned.

"But give us your wallet and remove your shoes before you go."

He turned around again.

"His belt is also nice," said another of the men, eyeing the leather. "Such nice clothes you get in America. The quality is very good."

Biju handed over his wallet. He took off his belt.

"You’re forgetting your shoes."

He took them off. Under fake soles were his savings.

"Your jacket." And when his denim jacket was off, they decided even his jeans and T-shirt were desirable.

Biju began to quake, and fumbling, tripping, he took off the last items of clothing, stood in his white underpants.

By this time, dogs from all over the busti had arrived galloping. They were battered and balding from fights and disease, but they, like their masters, had the air of outlaws. They surrounded Biju with gangster swagger, tails curved up over them like flags, growling and barking.

Children and women peered from the shadows.

"Let me go," he begged.

One of the men, laughing wildly, pulled a nightgown off a hedge where it was drying. "No, no, don’t give that to him," squealed a toothless crone, clearly the owner of the garment. "Let him have it, we’ll buy you another. He’s come from America. How can he go and see his family naked?"

They laughed.

And Biju ran -

He ran into the jungle chased by the dogs, who also seemed in on the joke, grinning and snapping.

Finally, when Biju had passed what the dogs deemed their line of control, they tired of him and wandered back.

Darkness fell and he sat right in the middle of the path – without his baggage, without his savings, worst of all, without his pride. Back from America with far less than he’d ever had.

He put on the nightgown. It had large, faded pink flowers and yellow, puffy sleeves, ruffles at the neck and hem. It must have been carefully picked from a pile at the bazaar.

Why had he left? Why had he left? He’d been a fool. He thought of Harish-Harry – "Go for a rest and then return." Mr. Kakkar, the travel agent, who had warned him – "My friend, I am telling you, you are making a big mistake."

He thought of Saeed Saeed.

One last time, Biju had run into him.

"Biju, man, I see this girl, Lutfi’s sister, she is visiting from Zanzibar, and the MINUTE I see her, I say to Lutfi, ‘I think she is the ONE, man.’"

"You’re already married."

"But in four years I get my green card and.. .fsshht… out of there… I get divorced and I marry for real. Now we are only going to have a ceremony in the mosque… This girl… she is…"

Biju waited.

Saeed exploded with amazement: "SO…"

Biju waited.

"CLEAN!! She smell… SO NICE! And size fourteen. BEST SIZE!"

Saeed showed him with his hands apart what a sweet handful his second wife was.

"But when I meet her, I don’t even touch her. Not even like this – " He stuck out his finger like a coy snail from a shell. "I behave myself. We will buy a house in New Jersey. I’m taking a course in airplane maintenance."

Biju sat there in terror of what he’d done, of being alone in the forest, and of the men coming after him again. He couldn’t stop thinking of all that he’d bought and lost. Of the money he’d hidden under fake soles in his shoes. Of his wallet. Suddenly, he felt an old throbbing of the knee that he had hurt slipping on Harish-Harry’s floor.