The Inheritance of Loss

Thirty-six

It was Mr. Iype the newsagent who said offhandedly, waving a copy of India Abroad: "You’re from Darjeeling side, no? Lot of trouble over there…"

"Why?"

"Nepalis making trouble… very troublesome people…"

"Strikes?"

"Much worse, bhai, not only strikes, the whole hillside is shut down." "It is?"

"For many months this has been going on. Haven’t you heard?"

"No. I haven’t had any letters for a long time."

"Why do you think?"

Biju had blamed usual disruptions – bad weather, incompetance – for the break in his father’s correspondence.

"They should kick the bastards back to Nepal," continued Mr. Iype. "Bangladeshis to Bangladesh, Afghans to Afghanistan, all Muslims to Pakistan, Tibetans, Bhutanese, why are they sitting in our country?"

"Why are we sitting here?"

"This country is different," he said without shame. "Without us what would they do?"

Biju went back to work.

Through the day, with gradually building momentum, he became convinced his father was dead. The judge wouldn’t know how to find him if he would try to find him at all. His unease began to tighten.

By the next day he couldn’t stand it anymore; he slipped out of the kitchen and purchased a twenty-five-dollar number from a bum who had a talent for learning numbers by lingering outside phone booths, overhearing people spell out their calling codes and recording them in his head. He had loitered behind one unsuspecting Mr. Onopolous making a phone call and charging it to his platinum -

"But be quick," he told Biju, "I’m not sure about this number, a couple of people have already used it…"

The receiver was still moist and warm from the last intimacy it had conducted, and it breathed back at Biju, a dense tubercular crepitation. As there was no phone at Cho Oyu, Biju rang the number for the MetalBox guesthouse on Ringkingpong Road.

"Can you get my father? I will call again in two hours."

So, one evening, some weeks before the phone lines were cut, before the roads and bridges were bombed, and they descended into total madness, the MetalBox watchman came rattling the gate at Cho Oyu. The cook had a broth going with bones and green onions -

"La! Phone! La! Telephone! Telephone call from your son. La! From America. He will phone again in one hour. Come quick!"

The cook went immediately, leaving the rattling skeleton bones topped by dancing scrappy green, for Sai to watch – "Babyji!"

"Where are you going?" asked Sai, who had been pulling burrs from Mutt’s pantaloons while thinking of Gyan’s absence -

But the cook didn’t reply. He was already out of the gate and running.

The phone sat squat in the drawing room of the guesthouse encircled by a lock and chain so the thieving servants might only receive phone calls and not make them. When it rang again, the watchman leapt at it, saying, "Phone, la! Phone! La mai!" and his whole family came running from their hut outside. Every time the phone rang, they ran with committed loyalty. Upkeepers of modern novelties, they would not, would not, let it fall to ordinariness.

"HELLO?"

"HELLO? HELLO?"

They gathered about the cook, giggling in delicious anticipation.

"HELLO?"

"HELLO? PITAJI??"

"BIJU?" By natural logic he raised his voice to cover the distance between them, sending his voice all the way to America.

"Biju, Biju," the watchman’s family chorused, "it’s Biju," they said to one another. "Oh, it’s your son," they told the cook. "It’s his son," they told one another. They watched for his expressions to change, for hints as to what was being said at the other end, wishing to insinuate themselves deeply into the conversation, to become it, in fact.

"HELLO HELLO????"

"???? HAH? I CAN’T HEAR. YOUR VOICE IS VERY FAR."

"I CAN’T HEAR. CAN YOU HEAR?"

"He can’t hear."

"WHAT?"

"Still can’t hear?" they asked the cook.

The atmosphere of Kalimpong reached Biju all the way in New York; it swelled densely on the line and he could feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green-black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gestures of ferns; he could hear the croak trrrr whonk, wee wee butt ock butt ock of frogs in the spinach, the rising note welding imperceptibly with the evening…

"HELLO? HELLO?"

"Noise, noise, "said the watchman’s family, "Can’t hear?"

The cook waved them away angrily, "Shshshshsh" immediately terrified, then, at the loss of a precious second with his son. He turned back to the phone, still shooing them away from behind, almost sending his hand off with the vehemence of his gestures.

They retreated for a moment and then, growing accustomed to the dismissive motion, were no longer intimidated, and returned.

"HELLO?"

"KYA?"

"KYA?"

The shadow of their words was bigger than the substance. The echo of their own voices gulped the reply from across the world.

"THERE IS TOO MUCH NOISE."

The watchman’s wife went outside and studied the precarious wire, the fragile connection trembling over ravines and over mountains, over Kanchenjunga smoking like a volcano or a cigar – a bird might have alighted upon it, a nightjar might have swooped through the shaky signal, the satellite in the firmament could have blipped -

"Too much wind, the wind is blowing," said the watchman’s wife, "the line is swaying like this, like this" – her hand undulating.

The children climbed up the tree and tried to hold the line steady.

A gale of static inflicted itself on the space between father and son.

"WHAT HAPPENED?" – shrieking even louder – "EVERY-THING ALL RIGHT?!"

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

"Let it go," the wife said, plucking the children from the tree, "you’re making it worse."

"WHAT IS HAPPENING? ARE THERE RIOTS? STRIKES?"

"NO TROUBLE NOW." (Better not worry him.) "NOT NOW!!"

"Is he going to come?" said the watchman.

"ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?" Biju shrieked on the New York street.

"DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME. DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING HERE. ARE THERE PROPER ARRANGEMENTS FOR EATING AT THE HOTEL? IS THE RESTAURANT GIVING YOU ACCOMMODATION? ARE THERE ANY OTHER PEOPLE FROM UTTAR PRADESH THERE?"

"Give accommodation. Free food. EVERYTHING FINE. BUT ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?" Biju asked again.

"EVERYTHING QUIET NOW."

"YOUR HEALTH IS ALL RIGHT?"

"YES. EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT."

"Ahh, everything all right," everyone said, nodding. "Everything all right? Everything all right."

Suddenly, after this there was nothing more to say, for while the emotion was there, the conversation was not; one had bloomed, not the other, and they fell abruptly into emptiness.

"When is he coming?" the watchman prompted.

"WHEN ARE YOU COMING?"

"I DON’T KNOW. I WILL TRY…"

Biju wanted to weep.

"CAN’T YOU GET LEAVE?"

He hadn’t even attained the decency of being granted a holiday now and then. He could not go home to see his father.

"WHEN WILL YOU GET LEAVE?"

"I DON’T KNOW…"

"HELLO?"

"La ma ma ma ma ma ma, he can’t get leave. Why not? Don’t know, must be difficult there, make a lot of money, but one thing is certain, they have to work very hard for it… Don’t get something for nothing… nowhere in the world…"

"HELLO? HELLO?"

"PITAJI, CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

They retreated from each other again -

Beep beep honk honk trr butt ock, the phone went dead and they were stranded in the distance that lay between them.

"HELLO? HELLO?" – into the rictus of the receiver.

"Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?" they echoed back to themselves.

The cook put down the phone, trembling.

"He’ll ring again," said the watchman.

But the phone remained mute.

Outside, the frogs said tttt tttt, as if they had swallowed the dial tone.

He tried to shake the gadget back into life, wishing for at least the customary words of good-bye. After all, even on clichéd phrases, you could hoist true emotion.

"There must be a problem with the line." Yes, yes, yes.

As always, the problem with the line.

"He will come back fat. I have heard they all come back fat," said the watchman’s sister-in-law abruptly, trying to comfort the cook.

The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced. He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other’s lives except for the hope that they would be relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual Fuck-ShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse – the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart.

If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.

They all grow fat there…

The cook knew about them all growing fat there. It was one of the things everyone knew:

"Are you growing fat, beta, like everyone in America?" he had written to his son long ago, in a departure from their usual format.

"Yes, growing fat," Biju had written back, "when you see me next, I will be myself times ten." He laughed as he wrote the lines and the cook laughed very hard when he read them; he lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air like a cockroach.

"Yes," Biju had said, "I am growing fat – ten times myself," and was shocked when he went to the ninety-nine-cent store and found he had to buy his shirts at the children’s rack. The shopkeeper, a man from Lahore, sat on a high ladder in the center and watched to make sure nobody stole anything, and his eyes clutched onto Biju as soon as he entered, making Biju sting with a feeling of culpability. But he had done nothing. Everyone could tell that he had, though, for his guilty look was there for all to see.

He missed Saeed. He wanted to look, once again, if briefly, at the country through the sanguine lens of his eyes.

Biju returned to the Gandhi Café where they had not noticed his absence. "You all come and watch the cricket match, OK?" Harish-Harry had brought in a photo album to show his staff pictures of the New Jersey condominium for which he had just made a down payment. He had already mounted a giant satellite dish smack-bang in the middle of the front lawn despite the fact that the management of this select community insisted it be placed subtly to the side like a discreet ear; he had prevailed in his endeavor, having cleverly cried, "Racism! Racism! I am not getting good reception of Indian channels."

That left just his daughter to worry about. Their friend and competitor, Mr. Shah’s wife, had hooked a bridegroom by making Galawati kebabs and Fed-Exing them overnight all the way to Oklahoma. "Some dehati family in the middle of the cornfield," Harish-Harry told his wife. "And you should see this fellow they are showing off about – what a lutoo. American size – he looks like something you would use to break down the door."

He told his daughter: "It used to be a matter of pride for a girl to have a pleasant personality. Act like a stupid now and you can regret later on for the rest of your life… Then don’t come crying to us, OK?"