The Inheritance of Loss

Thirty-one

In the month of March, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Lola, Noni, and Sai sat in the Swiss Dairy jeep on their way to the Darjeeling Gymkhana to exchange their library books before the trouble on the hillside got any worse.

It was some weeks after the gun robbery at Cho Oyu and a program of action newly drawn up in Ghoom, threatened:

Roadblocks to bring economic activity to a standstill and to prevent the trees of the hills, the boulders of the river valleys, from leaving for the plains. All vehicles would be stopped.

Black flag day on April 13.

A seventy-two-hour strike in May.

No national celebrations. No Republic Day, Independence Day, or Gandhi’s birthday.

Boycott of elections with the slogan "We will not stay in other people’s state of West Bengal."

Nonpayment of taxes and loans (very clever).

Burning of the Indo-Nepal treaty of 1950.

Nepali or not, everyone was encouraged (required) to contribute to funds and to purchase calendars and cassette tapes of speeches made by Ghising, the top GNLF man in Darjeeling, and by Pradhan, top man in Kalimpong.

It was requested (required) that every family – Bengali, Lepcha, Tibetan, Sikkimese, Bihari, Marwari, Nepali, or whatever else in the mess – send a male representative to every procession, and they were also to show up at the burning of the Indo-Nepal treaty.

If you didn’t, they would know and… well, nobody wanted them to finish the sentence.

"Where is your bum?" said Uncle Potty to Father Booty as he got into the jeep.

He studied his friend severely. A bout of flu had rendered Father Booty so thin his clothes seemed to be hanging on a concavity. "Your bum has gone!"

The priest sat on an inflatable swimming ring, for his gaunt rear ached from riding in that rough jeep running on diesel, just a few skeleton bars and sheets of metal and a basic engine attached, the windscreen spider-webbed with cracks delivered by stones flying up off the broken roads. It was twenty-three years old, but it still worked and Father Booty claimed no other vehicle on the market could touch it.

In the back were the umbrellas, books, ladies, and several wheels of cheese for Father Booty to deliver to the Windamere Hotel and Loreto Convent, where they ate it on toast in the mornings, and an extra cheese for Glenary’s Restaurant in case he could persuade them to switch from Amul, but they wouldn’t. The manager believed that when something came in a factory tin with a name stamped on it, when it was showcased in a national advertising campaign, naturally it was better than anything made by the farmer next door, some dubious Thapa with one dubious cow living down the lane.

"But this is made by local farmers, don’t you wish to support them?" Father Booty would plead.

"Quality control, Father," he countered, "all-India reputation, name brand, customer respect, international standards of hygiene."

Father Booty was with hope, anyway, whizzing through the spring, every flower, every creature preening, flinging forth its pheromones.

The garden at St. Joseph’s Convent was abuzz with such fecundity that Sai wondered, as they drove by in the jeep, if it discomfited the nuns. Huge, spread-open Easter lilies were sticky with spilling anthers; insects chased each other madly through the sky, zip zip; and amorous butterflies, cucumber green, tumbled past the jeep windows into the deep marine valleys; the delicacy of love and courtliness apparent even between the lesser beasts.

Gyan and Sai – she thought of the two of them together, of their fight over Christmas; it was ugly, and how badly it contrasted with the past. She remembered her face in his neck, arms and legs over and under, bellies, fingers, here then there, so much so that at times she kissed him and found instead that she’d kissed herself.

"Jesus is coming," read a sign on the landslide reinforcements as they nose-dived to the Teesta.

"To become a Hindu," someone had added in chalk underneath.

This struck Father Booty as very funny, but he stopped laughing when they passed the Amul billboard.

Utterly Butterly Delicious -

"Plastic! How can they call it butter and cheese? It’s not. You could use it for waterproofing! "

Lola and Noni were waving out of the jeep window. "Hello, Mrs. Thondup." Mrs. Thondup, from an aristocratic Tibetan family, was sitting out with her daughters Pern Pern and Doma in jewel-colored bakus and pale silk blouses woven subtly with the eight propitious Buddhist signs. These daughters, who attended Loreto Convent, were supposed to make friends with Sai – once, long ago, so the adults had conspired – but they didn’t want to be her friends. They had friends already. All full up. No room for oddness.

"What an elegant lady," Lola and Noni always said when they saw her, for they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful: the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx.

Thus, they did not wave to Mrs. Sen emerging from the post office. "They keep begging and begging my daughter to please just take a green card," Lola mimicked her neighbor. Liar, liar, pants on fire…

They waved again as they passed the Afghan princesses sitting on cane chairs among white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick. From their house came the unmistakable smell of chicken.

"Soup?" shouted Uncle Potty, already hungry, nose trembling with excitement. He had missed his usual leftovers-inside-an-omelet breakfast.

"Soup!"

Waving, then, at the Graham’s School orphans in the playground – they were so angelically beautiful, they looked as if they had already died and gone to heaven.

The army came jogging along overlaid by courting butterflies and the colorful dashes – blue, red, orange – of dragonflies, hinged in the severely cricked geometric angles of their mating. The men puffed and panted, their spindly legs protruding from comically wide shorts: how would they defend India against the Chinese so close over the mountains at Nathu-La?

From the army mess kitchens came rumors of increasing vegetarianism.

Lola often encountered young officers who were not only vegetarian, but also teetotalers. Even the top command.

"I think to be in the army you should eat fish at least," she said.

"Why?" asked Sai.

"To kill you must be carnivorous or otherwise you’re the hunted. Just look at nature – the deer, the cow. We are animals after all and to triumph you must taste blood." But the army was retreating from being a British-type army and was becoming a true Indian army. Even in choice of paint. They passed the Striking Lion’s Club that was painted a bridal pink.

"Well," said Noni, "they must be tired of that mud color over every single thing."

"FLOWERS," it read on a grand sign nearby as part of the Army Beautification Program, though it was the only spot on the hill where there were none.

They stopped for a pair of young monks crossing to the gates of a mansion recently bought by their order.

"Hollywood money," Lola said. "And once upon a time the monks used to be grateful to Indians, the only country to take them in! Now they despise us. Waiting for Americans to take them to Disneyland. Fat chance!"

"God, they’re so handsome," said Uncle Potty, "who wants them to leave?"

He remembered the time he and Father Booty had first met… their admiring eyes on the same monk in the market… the start of a grand friendship…

"Everyone says poor Tibetans – poor Tibetans," Lola continued, "but what brutal people, barely a Dalai Lama survived – they were all popped off before their time. That Potala Palace – the Dalai Lama must be thanking his lucky stars to be in India instead, better climate, and let’s be honest, better food. Good fat mutton momos."

Noni: "But he must be vegetarian, no?"

"These monks are not vegetarian. What fresh vegetables grow in Tibet? And in fact, Buddha died of greed for pork."

"What a situation," said Uncle Potty. "The army is vegetarian and the monks are gobbling down meat…"

Down they hurtled through the sal trees and the pani saaj, Kiri te Kanawa on the cassette player, her voice soaring from valley level to hover around the five peaks of Kanchenjunga.

Lola: "But give me Maria Callas any day. Nothing like the old lot. Caruso over Pavarotti."

In an hour, they had descended into the tropical density of air thick and hot over the river and into even greater concentrations of butterflies, beetles, dragonflies. "Wouldn’t it be nice to live there?" Sai pointed at the government rest house with its view over the sand banks, through the grasses to the impatient Teesta -

Then they rose up again into the pine and ether amid little snips of gold rain. "Blossom rain, metok-chharp," said Father Booty. "Very auspicious in Tibet, rain and sunshine at the same time." He beamed at the sunny buds through the broken windows as he sat on his swimming ring.

In order to accommodate the population boom, the government had recently passed legislation that allowed an extra story to be built on each home in Darjeeling; the weight of more concrete pressing downward had spurred the town’s lopsided descent and caused more landslides than ever. As you approached it, it looked like a garbage heap rearing above and sliding below, so it seemed caught in a photostill, a frozen moment of its tumble. "Darjeeling has really gone downhill," the ladies said with satisfaction, and meant it not just literally. "Remember how lovely it used to be?"

By the time they found a parking space half in a drain behind the bazaar, the point had been too well proven and their smugness had changed to sourness as they dismounted between cows quaffing fruit peels, made their way past nefarious liquid pouring down the streets, and through traffic jams on the market road. To add to the confusion and noise, monkeys loped over the tin roofs overhead, making a crashing sound. But then, just as Lola was going to make another remark about Darjeeling’s demise, suddenly the clouds broke and Kanchenjunga came looming – it was astonishing; it was right there; close enough to lick: 28,168 feet high. In the distance, you could see Mt. Everest, a coy triangle.

A tourist began generously to scream as if she had caught sight of a pop star.

Uncle Potty departed. He wasn’t in Darjeeling for the sake of books but to procure enough alcohol to last him through civil unrest. He’d already bought up the entire supply of rum in the Kalimpong shops and with the addition of a few more cartons here, he would be prepared for curfew and a disruption of liquor supplies during strikes and roadblocks.

"Not a reader," said Lola, disapproving.

"Comics," corrected Sai. He was an appreciative consumer of As-terix, Tin Tin, and also Believe It or Not in the loo, didn’t consider himself above such literature though he had studied languages at Oxford. Because of his education, the ladies put up with him, and also because he came from a well-known Lucknow family and had called his parents Mater and Pater. Mater had been such the belle in her day that a mango was named for her: Haseena. "She was a notorious flirt," said Lola who had heard from someone who had heard from someone of a sari slipping off the shoulder, low-cut blouse and all… After packing in as much fun as she possibly could, she’d married a diplomat named Alphonso (also, of course, the name of a distinguished mango). Haseena and Alphonso, they celebrated their wedding with the purchase of two racehorses, Chengiz Khan and Tamerlane, who once made front page of the Times of India. They had been sold along with a home off Marble Arch in London, and defeated by bad luck and changing times, Mater and Pater finally became reconciled to India, went like mice into an ashram, but this sad end to their fabulous spirit their son refused to accept.

"What kind of ashram?" Lola and Noni had asked him. "What are their teachings?"

"Starvation, sleep deprivation," mourned Uncle Potty, "followed by donation. Proper dampening of the spirits so you howl out to God to save you." He liked to tell the story of when, into strict vegetarian surroundings – no garlic or onions, even, to heat the blood – he’d smuggled a portion of roast jungli boar that he had caught rooting in his garlic field and shot. The meat was redolent with the creature’s last meal. "Licked up every scrap, they did, Mater and Pater!"

They made a plan to meet for lunch, and Uncle Potty, with the dregs of his family fortune in his pocket, went to the liquor shop while the rest continued to the library.

The Gymkhana library was a dim morguelike room suffused with the musk, almost too sweet and potent to bear, of aging books. The books had titles long faded into the buckled covers; some of them had not been touched in fifty years and they broke apart in one’s hands, shedding glue like chitinous bits of insect. Their pages were stenciled with the shapes of long disintegrated fern collections and bored by termites into what looked like maps of plumbing. The yellowed paper imparted a faint acidic tingle and fell easily into mosaic pieces, barely perceptible between the fingers – moth wings at the brink of eternity and dust.

There were bound copies of the Himalayan Times, "the only English weekly serving Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, the Darjeeling tea gardens, and Dooars," and the Illustrated Weekly, which had once printed a poem on a cow by Father Booty.

Of course they had The Far Pavilions and The Raj Quartet – but Lola, Noni, Sai, and Father Booty were unanimous in the opinion that they didn’t like English writers writing about India; it turned the stomach; delirium and fever somehow went with temples and snakes and perverse romance, spilled blood, and miscarriage; it didn’t correspond to the truth. English writers writing of England was what was nice: P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, countryside England where they remarked on the crocuses being early that year and best of all, the manor house novels. Reading them you felt as if you were watching those movies in the air-conditioned British council in Calcutta where Lola and Noni had often been taken as girls, the liquid violin music swimming you up the driveway; the door of the manor opening and a butler coming out with an umbrella, for, of course, it was always raining; and the first sight you got of the lady of the manor was of her shoe, stuck out of the open door; from the look of the foot you could already delightedly foresee the snooty nature of her expression.

There were endless accounts of travel in India and over and over, in book after book, there was the scene of late arrival at a dak bungalow, the cook cooking in a black kitchen, and Sai realized that her own delivery to Kalimpong in such a manner was merely part of the monotony, not the original. The repetition had willed her, anticipated her, cursed her, and certain moves made long ago had produced all of them: Sai, judge, Mutt, cook, and even the mashed-potato car.

Browsing the shelves, Sai had not only located herself but read My Vanishing Tribe, revealing to her that she meanwhile knew nothing of the people who had belonged here first. Lepchas, the Rong pa, people of the ravine who followed Bon and believed the original Lepchas, Fodongth-ing, and Nuzongnyue were created from sacred Kanchenjunga snow.

There was also James Herriot that funny vet, Gerald Durrell, Sam Pig and Ann Pig, Paddington Bear, and Scratchkin Patchkin who lived like a leaf in the apple tree.

And:

The Indian gentleman, with all self-respect to himself, should not enter into a compartment reserved for Europeans, any more than he should enter a carriage set apart for ladies. Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European, have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian, and in all such cases, identify yourself with the race to which you belong.

– H. Hardless, The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette

A rush of anger surprised her. It was unwise to read old books; the fury they ignited wasn’t old; it was new. If she couldn’t get the pompous fart himself, she wanted to search out the descendants of H. Hardless and stab the life out of them. But the child shouldn’t be blamed for a father’s crime, she tried to reason with herself, then. But should the child therefore also enjoy the father’s illicit gain?

Sai eavesdropped instead on Noni talking to the librarian about Crime and Punishment: "Half awed I was by the writing, but half I was bewildered," said Noni, "by these Christian ideas of confession and forgiveness – they place the burden of the crime on the victim! If nothing can undo the misdeed, then why should sin be undone?"

The whole system seemed to favor, in fact, the criminal over the righteous. You could behave badly, say you were sorry, you would get extra fun and be reinstated in the same position as the one who had done nothing, who now had both to suffer the crime and the difficulty of forgiving, with no goodies in addition at all. And, of course, you would feel freer than ever to sin if you were aware of such a safety net: sorry, sorry, oh so so sorry.

Like soft birds flying you could let the words free.

The librarian who was the sister-in-law of the doctor they all went to in Kalimpong, said: "We Hindus have a better system. You get what you deserve and you cannot escape your deeds. And at least our gods look like gods, no? Like Raja Rani. Not like this Buddha, Jesus – beggar types."

Noni: "But we, too, have wriggled out! Not in this lifetime, we say, in others, perhaps…"

Added Sai: "Worst are those who think the poor should starve because it’s their own misdeeds in past lives that are causing problems for them…"

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell.

For a moment their conversation was drowned out by the sounds of a procession in the street. "What are they saying?" asked Noni. "They’re shouting something in Nepali."

They watched from the window as a group of boys went by with signs.

"Must be the Gorkha lot again."

"But what are they saying?"

"It’s not as if it’s being said for anyone to understand. It’s just noise, tamasha," said Lola.

"Ha, yes, they keep on going up and down, something or the other…," the librarian said. "It just takes a few degenerate people and they drum up the illiterates, all the no-gooders hanging about with nothing to do…"

Uncle Potty had joined them now, having delivered his rum supply to the jeep, and Father Booty emerged from the mysticism stacks.

"Should we eat here?"

They went into the dining room, but it seemed deserted, the tables with overturned plates and glasses to signal it was not open for business.

The manager came out of his office, looking harried.

"So sorry, ladies. We’re having cash flow problems and we’ve had to close the dining hall. Getting more and more difficult to maintain things."

He paused to wave at some foreigners. "Going for sightseeing. Yes? At one time all the rajas came to Darjeeling, the Cooch Behar raja, the raja of Burdwan, the Purnia raja… Don’t miss the Ghoom Monastery…"

"You must get money from these tourists?"

The Gymkhana had begun to rent out rooms to keep the club going.

"Hah! What money? They are so scared they’ll get taken advantage of because of their wealth, they try and bargain down on the cheapest room… And yet, just see." He showed them a postcard the couple had left for the front desk to post: "Had a great dinner for $4.50. We can’t believe how cheap this country is!!! We’re having a great time, but we’ll be glad to get home, where, let’s be honest (sorry, we’ve never been the PC types!) there is widespread availability of deodorant…"

"And these are the last of the tourists. We’re lucky to have them. This political trouble will drive them away."