The Inheritance of Loss

Thirty-eight

It didn’t come from nothing, even Lola knew, but from an old feeling of anger that couldn’t be divorced from Kalimpong. It was part of every breath. It was in the eyes that waited, attached themselves to you as you approached, rode on your back as you walked on, with a muttered remark you couldn’t catch in the moment of passing; it was in the snickering of those gathered at Thapa’s Canteen, at Gompu’s, at every unnamed roadside shack that sold eggs and matches.

These people could name them, recognize them – the few rich – but Lola and Noni could barely distinguish between the individuals making up the crowd of poor.

Only before, the sisters had never paid much attention for the simple reason that they didn’t have to. It was natural they would incite envy, they supposed, and the laws of probability favored their slipping through life without anything more than muttered comments, but every now and then, somebody suffered the rotten luck of being in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time when it all caught up – and generations worth of trouble settled on them. Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past – Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas – all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong.

It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country; it did matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the evening, even one that sparked and shocked; it did matter to fly to London and return with chocolates filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not. They had pretended it didn’t, or had nothing to do with them, and suddenly it had everything to do with them. The wealth that seemed to protect them like a blanket was the very thing that left them exposed. They, amid extreme poverty, were baldly richer, and the statistics of difference were being broadcast over loudspeakers, written loudly across the walls. The anger had solidified into slogans and guns, and it turned out that they, they, Lola and Noni, were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations.

Lola went to pay a visit to Pradhan, the flamboyant head of the Kalim-pong wing of the GNLF, so as to complain about the illegal huts being built by his followers on Mon Ami property.

Pradhan said: "But I have to accommodate my men." He looked like a bandit teddy bear, with a great beard and a bandana around his head, gold earrings. Lola didn’t know much about him, merely that he had been called the "maverick of Kalimpong" in the newspapers, renegade, fiery, unpredictable, a rebel, not a negotiator, who ran his wing of the GNLF like a king his kingdom, a robber his band. He was wilder, people said, and angrier than Ghising, the leader of the Darjeeling wing, who was the better politician and whose men were now occupying the Gymkhana Club. Ghising’s resume had appeared in the last Indian Express to get through the roadblocks: "Born on Manju tea estate; education, Singbuli tea estate; Ex-army Eighth Gorkha Rifles, action in Nagaland; actor in plays; author of prose works and poems [fifty-two books – could it be?]; bantamweight boxer; union man."

Behind Pradhan stood a soldier with a wooden stock rifle pointed out into the room. He looked, to Lola’s eyes, like Budhoo’s brother with Budhoo’s gun.

"Side of road, my land." Lola, dressed in the widow’s sari she had worn to the electric crematorium when Joydeep died, mumbled weakly in broken English, as if to pretend it was English she couldn’t speak properly rather than illuminate the fact that it was Nepali she had never learned.

Pradhan’s home was in a part of Kalimpong she had never visited before. On the outside walls, lengths of bamboo split in half had been filled with earth and planted with succulents. Porcupine and bearded cacti grew in Dalda tins and plastic bags lining the steps to the small rectangular house with a tin roof. The room was full of staring men, some standing, some seated on folding chairs, all crowded in as if at a doctor’s waiting room. She could feel their intense desire to rid themselves of her as of an affliction. Another man with a favor had preceded Lola, a Marwari shopkeeper trying to bring a shipment of prayer lamps past the roadblocks. Strangely, Marwaris controlled the business of selling Tibetan objects of worship – lamps and bells, thunderbolts, the monks’ plum robes and turmeric undershirts, buttons of brass each embossed with a lotus flower.

When the man was ushered in front of Pradhan, he began such a bending, bowing, writhing, that he would not even raise his eyes. He spewed flowery honorifics: "Respected Sir and Huzoor and Your Gracious Presence and Your Wish my Pleasure, Please Grant, Your Blessing Requested, Your Honorable Self, Your Beneficence, May the Blessings of God Rain upon You and Yours, Might Your Respected Gracious Self Prosper and Might You Grant Prosperity to Respectful Supplicants…" He made an overabundant flower garden of speech, but to no avail, and finally, he backed out still scattering roses and pleas, prayers and blessings…

Pradhan dismissed him: "No exceptions."

Then it had been Lola’s turn.

"Sir, property is being encroached on."

"Name of property?"

"Mon Ami."

"What kind of name?"

"French name."

"I didn’t know we live in France. Do we? Tell me, why don’t I speak in French, then?"

He tried to send her away immediately, waving away the surveyor’s plan and the property documents showing the measurements of the plot that she tried to unroll before him.

"My men must be accommodated," Pradhan stated.

"But our land…"

"Along all roads, to a certain depth, it’s government land, and that’s the land we are taking."

The huts that had sprung up overnight were being populated by women, men, children, pigs, goats, dogs, chickens, cats, and cows. In a year, Lola could foresee, they would no longer be made of mud and bamboo but concrete and tiles.

"But it’s our land…

" Do you use it?

"For vegetables."

"You can grow them elsewhere. Put them on the side of your house."

"Have cut into the hill, land weak, landslide may occur," she muttered. "Very dangerous for your men. Landslides on road…" She was trembling like a whisker from terror, although she insisted to herself that it was from rage.

"Landslide? They aren’t building big houses like yours, Aunty, just little huts of bamboo. In fact, it’s your house that might cause a landslide. Too heavy, no? Too big? Walls many feet wide? Stone, concrete? You are a rich woman? House-garden-servants!"

Here he began to smile.

"In fact," he said, "as you can see," he gestured out, "I am the raja of Kalimpong. A raja must have many queens." He jerked his head back to the sounds of the kitchen that came through the curtained door. "I have four, but would you," he looked Lola up and down, tipped his chair back, head at a comical angle, a coy naughty expression catching his face, "dear Aunty, would you like to be the fifth?"

The men in the room laughed so hard, "Ha Ha Ha." He had their loyalty. He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation… Lola, for one of the few times in her life, was the butt of the joke, detested, ridiculous, in the wrong part of town.

"And you know, you won’t be bearing me any sons at your age so I will expect a big dowry. And you’re not much to look at, nothing up" – he patted the front of his khaki shirt – "nothing down" – he patted his behind, which he twisted out of the chair -

"In fact, I have more of both!"

She could hear them laughing as she left.

How did her feet manage to walk? She would thank them all her life.

"Ah, fool," she heard someone say as she made her way down the steps.

The women were laughing at her from the kitchen window. "Look at her expression," one of them said.

They were beautiful girls with hair in silky loops and nose rings in sweet wrinkling noses…

Mon Ami seemed like a supernatural dove of blue-white peace with a wreath of roses in its beak, Lola thought as she passed under the trellis over the gate.

"What happened, what did he say? Did you see him?" Noni asked.

But Lola couldn’t manage to talk to Noni, who had been waiting for her sister to return.

But Lola went into the bathroom and sat trembling on the closed lid of the toilet.

"Joydeep," she screamed silently to her husband, dead so long ago, "look at what you’ve done, you bloody fool!!!"

Her lips stretched out and her mouth was enormous with the extent of her shame.

"Look at what you’ve left me to! Do you know how I have suffered, do you have any idea??? Where are you?! You and your piddling little life, and look what I have to deal with, just look. I don’t even have my decency. "

She held on to her ridiculed old woman’s breasts and shook them. How could she and her sister leave now? If they left, the army would move in. Or squatters claiming squatters’ rights would instigate a court case. They would lose the home that the two of them, Joydeep and Lola, had bought with such false ideas of retirement, sweet peas and mist, cat and books.

The silence rang in the pipes, reached an unbearable pitch, subsided, rose. She wrenched the tap open – not a drop fell – then she twisted the tap viciously shut as if wringing its neck.

Bastard! Never a chink in his certainty, his poise. Never the brains to buy a house in Calcutta – no. No. Not that Joydeep, with his romantic notions of countryside living; with his Wellington boots, binoculars, and bird-watching book; with his Yeats, his Rilke (in German), his Mandelstam (in Russian); in the purply mountains of Kalimpong with his bloody Talisker and his Burberry socks (memento from Scottish holiday of golf+ smoked salmon+ distillery). Joydeep with his old-fashioned gentleman’s charm. He had always walked as if the world were firm beneath his feet and he never suffered a doubt. He was a cartoon. "You were a fool," she screamed at him.

But then, in a moment, quite suddenly, she went weak.

"Your eyes are lovely, dark and deep."

He used to kiss those glistening orbs when he departed to work on his files.

"But I have promises to keep," First one eye then the other -

"And miles to go before I sleep – " "And miles to go before you sleep?"

She would make a duet -

"And miles to go before I sleep."

He would echo.

To the end, and even beyond, he could resurrect the wit that had fired her love when they were not much more than children, after all. "Drink to me only with thine eyes," he had sung to her at their wedding reception, and then they had honeymooned in Europe.

Noni at the door: "Are you all right?"

Loudly, Lola said: "No, I’m not all right. Why don’t you go away?"

"Why don’t you open the door?"

"Go away I tell you, go join the boys in the street whom you are always defending."

"Lola, open the door."

"No."

"Open it."

"Bugger off," said Lola.

"Lola?" said Noni. "I made you a rum and nimboo."

"Bug off," Lola said.

"Well, sister, in any such situation atrocities are committed under cover of a legitimate cause – "

"Bosh."

"But if we forget there is some truth to what they are saying the problems will keep coming. Gorkhas have been used – "

"Cock and bull," she said crudely. "These people aren’t good people. Gorkhas are mercenaries, that’s what they are. Pay them and they are loyal to whatever. There’s no principle involved, Noni. And what is this with the GOrkha? It was always GUrkha. AND then there aren’t even many Gurkhas here – some of course, and some newly retired ones coming in from Hong Kong, but otherwise they are only sherpas, coolies – "

"Anglicized spelling. They’re just changing it to – "

"My left toe! Why are they writing in English if they want to have Nepali taught in schools? These people are just louts, and that’s the truth, Noni, you know it, we all know it."

"I don’t know it."

"Then go and join them like I said. Leave your house, leave your books and your Ovaltine and your long johns. HA! I’d like to see you, you liar and fake."

"I will."

"Go on, then. And after you are done with that, go end up in hell!"

"Hell?" Noni said, rattling the door on the other side of the bathroom door. "Why hell?"

"Because you’ll be committing CRIME, that’s why!" screeched Lola.

Noni returned to sit on the dragon cushions on the sofa. Oh, they had been wrong. The real place had evaded them. The two of them had been fools feeling they were doing something exciting just by occupying this picturesque cottage, by seducing themselves with those old travel books in the library, searching for a certain angled light with which to romance themselves, to locate what had been conjured only as a tale to tell before the Royal Geographic Society, when the author returned to give a talk accompanied by sherry and a scrolled certificate of honor spritzed with gold for an exploration of the far Himalayan kingdoms – but far from what? Exotic to whom? It was the center for the sisters, but they had never treated it as such.

Parallel lives were being led by those – Budhoo, Kesang – for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green. They maintained their camping supplies, their flashlights, mosquito netting, raincoats, hot water bottles, brandy, radio, first-aid kit, Swiss army knife, book on poisonous snakes. These objects were talismans imbued with the task of transforming reality into something otherwise, supplies manufactured by a world that equated them with courage. But, really, they were equivalent to cowardice.

Noni tried to rouse herself. Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.