The Inheritance of Loss

Twenty

Gyan and Sai. At subsequent pauses in the rain they measured ears, shoulders, and the span of their rib cages.

Collar bones, eyelashes, and chins.

Knees, heels, arch of the feet.

Flexibility of fingers and toes.

Cheekbones, necks, muscles of the upper arm, the small complexities of the hinge bones.

The green and purple of their veins.

The world’s most astonishing tongue display: Sai, tutored by her friend Arlene in the convent, could touch her nose with her tongue and showed Gyan.

He could wiggle his eyebrows, slide his head off his neck from left to right to left like a Bharat Natyam dancer, and he could stand on his head.

Now and then, she recalled certain delicate observations she had made during her own explorations before the mirror that had been overlooked by Gyan, on account of the newness of landscape between them. It was, she knew herself, a matter of education to learn how to look at a woman, and worried that Gyan wasn’t entirely aware of how lucky he was.

Ear lobes downy as tobacco leaves, the tender substance of her hair, the transparent skin of the inner wrist…

She brought up the omissions at his next visit, proffered her hair with the zeal of a shawl merchant: "See – feel. Like silk?"

"Like silk," he confirmed.

Her ears she displayed like items taken from under the counter and put before a discerning customer in one of the town’s curio shops, but when he tried to test the depth of her eyes with his, her glance proved too slippery to hold; he picked it up and dropped it, retrieved it, dropped it again until it slid away and hid.

So they played the game of courtship, reaching, retreating, teasing, fleeing – how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours. But as they eliminated the easily revealable and exhausted propriety, the unexamined portions of their anatomies exerted a more severely distilled potential, and once again the situation was driven to the same desperate pitch of the days when they sat forcing geometry.

Up the bones of the spine.

Stomach and belly button -

"Kiss me!" he pleaded.

"No," she said, delighted and terrified.

She would hold herself ransom.

Oh, but she had never been able to stand suspense.

A fine drizzle spelled an ellipsis on the tin roof…

Moments clocked by precisely, and finally she couldn’t bear it – she closed her eyes and felt the terrified measure of his lips on hers, trying to match one shape with the other.

Just a week or two later, they were shameless as beggars, pleading for more. "Nose?" He kissed it. "Eyes?" Eyes. "Ears?" Ears. "Cheek?" Cheek.

"Fingers." One, two, three, four, five. "The other hand, please." Ten kisses. "Toes?"

They linked word, object, and affection in a recovery of childhood, a confirmation of wholeness, as at the beginning -

Arms legs heart -

All their parts, they reassured each other, were where they should be.

Gyan was twenty and Sai sixteen, and at the beginning they had not paid very much attention to the events on the hillside, the new posters in the market referring to old discontents, the slogans scratched and painted on the side of government offices and shops. "We are stateless," they read. "It is better to die than live as slaves," "We are constitutionally tortured. Return our land from Bengal." Down the other way, the slogans persisted and multiplied along the landslide reinforcements, jostled for place between the "Better late than never" slogans, the "If married don’t flirt with speed," "Drinking whisky is risky," that flashed by as you drove toward the Teesta.

The call was repeated along the road to the army cantonment area; began to pop up in less obvious places; the big rocks along thin paths that veined the mountains, the trunks of trees amid huts made of bamboo and mud, corn drying in bunches under the veranda roofs, prayer flags flying overhead, pigs snorting in pens behind. Climbing perpendicular to the sky, arriving breathless at the top of Ringkingpong hill, you’d see "LIBERATION!" scrawled across the waterworks. Still, for a while nobody knew which way it would go, and it was dismissed as nothing more serious than the usual handful of students and agitators. But then one day fifty boys, members of the youth wing of the GNLF, gathered to swear an oath at Mahakaldara to fight to the death for the formation of a homeland, Gorkhaland. Then they marched down the streets of Darjeeling, took a turn around the market and the mall. "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army." They were watched by the pony men and their ponies, by the proprietors of souvenir shops, by the waiters of Glenary’s, the Planter’s Club, the Gymkhana, and the Windamere as they waved their unsheathed kukris, sliced the fierce blades through the tender mist under the watery sun. Quite suddenly, everyone was using the word insurgency.