The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [101]
And in all India, nothing better than Calcutta Chinese! Remember Ta Fa Shun? Where ladies out shopping met for hot-and-acrid soup and accompanied it with hot-and-acrid gossip—
“So what should we have?” asked Uncle Potty who had finished all the bread sticks now.
“Chicken or pork?”
“Chee Chee. Don’t trust the pork, full of tapeworms. Who knows what pig it comes from?”
“Chili chicken, then?”
From outside came the noise of the parading boys going by again.
“God, what a racket. All this do-or-die stuff.”
The chili chicken arrived and, after depositing it on their table, the waiter wiped his nose on the curtain. “Just take a look at that,” said Lola. “No wonder we Indians never progress.” They began to eat. “But food here is good.” Chomping.
______
As they were exiting the restaurant, the same procession that had disturbed them while they were eating and while they were at the library came back up the road after having traversed all of Darjeeling.
“Gorkhaland for Gorkhas.”
“Gorkhaland for Gorkhas.”
They stood back to let them pass and who should almost stamp on Sai’s toes?—
Gyan!!!
In his tomato red sweater, yelling lustily in a way she couldn’t recognize.
What would he be doing in Darjeeling?! Why would he be at a GNLF rally rallying on behalf of independence for Nepali-Indians?
She opened her mouth to shout to him, but at that moment he caught sight of her, too, and the dismay on his face was followed by a slight ferocious gesture of his head and a cold narrow look in his eye that was a warning not to approach. She shut her mouth like a fish, and astonishment flooded over her gills.
By that time he had passed on.
“Isn’t that your mathematics tutor?” asked Noni.
“I don’t think so,” she said, scrabbling for dignity, scrabbling for sense. “Looked just like him, I thought it was him myself, but it wasn’t….”
______
On their steep way back down to the Teesta, they noticed Sai had turned green.
“Are you all right?” asked Father Booty.
“Travel sick.”
“Look at the horizon, that always helps.”
She fixed her eyes on the highest ridge of the Himalayas, on the un-moving stillness. But this didn’t make any difference. There was a whirl in Sai’s brain and she couldn’t register what her eyes saw. Finally, a mordant bile rose up her throat, frizzling her system, burning her mouth, corroding her teeth—she could feel them turn to chalk as they were attacked by a resurgence of the chili chicken.
“Stop the car, stop the car,” said Lola. “Let her out.”
Sai began to retch into the grass, vomiting up a sort of mulligatawny, giving them another unfortunate look at their lunch now so much the worse for wear. Noni poured her a cup of icy water from the space-age silver capsule of the thermos flask, and Sai rested on a rock in the sunshine by the beautiful transparent Teesta. “Take some deep breaths, dear, that food was very greasy, they’ve really gone downhill—dirty kitchen—oh, just the sight of that waiter should have been enough to warn us.”
At the other end of the bridge the checkpoint guards were inspecting some vehicles going through. Careful in this time of trouble, they had opened the bundles and cases of everyone in a bus and turned their belongings inside out. The passengers waited impassively inside; poor people, their faces squashed against the windows, hundreds of pairs of eyes half dead, like animals on their way to death; as if the journey had been so exhausting, their spirits had already been extinguished. The bus had vomit-strewn sides, great banners of brown flared back by the wind. Several other vehicles waited in line after the bus for the same treatment, barred from going on by a metal pole across the road.
The afternoon sun lay thick and golden on the trees, and with the light so bright, the shadows in the foliage, by the