The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [102]
“Take your time, Sai, long wait anyway, the cars are backed up.”
Father Booty got out himself, walked up and down, stretching his limbs, glad of the rest to his aching behind, when he spotted a remarkable butterfly.
The Teesta valley was renowned for its butterflies, and specialists came from around the world to paint and record them. Rare and spectacular creatures depicted in the library volume Marvelous Butterflies of the North-Eastern Himalayas were flying about before their eyes. One summer, when she was twelve, Sai had made up names for them—”Japanese mask butterfly, butterfly of the far mountain, Icarus falling from the sun butterfly, butterfly that a flute set free, kite festival butterfly”—and written them into a book labeled “My Butterfly Collection” and accompanied the names with illustrations.
“Astonishing.” said Father Booty. “Just look at this one here.” Peacock blue and long emerald streamer tails. “Oh goodness, and that one”—black with white spots and a pink flame at its heart…. “Oh my camera… Potty, can you just rummage in the glove compartment?”
Uncle Potty was reading Asterix: Ave Gaul! By Toutatis!!!!#@***!!, but he roused himself and handed the little Leica through the window.
As the butterfly fluttered beguilingly on a cable of the bridge, Father Booty snapped the photograph. “Oh dear, I think I shook, the picture might be blurry.”
He was about to try again when the guards began to shout and one of them came racing up. “Photography strictly prohibited on the bridge.” Didn’t he know?
Oh dear, he did, he did, a mistake, he had forgotten in his excitement. “So sorry, officer.” He knew, he knew. It was a very important bridge, this, India’s contact with the north, with the border at which they might have to fight the Chinese again someday, and now, of course, there was the Gorkha insurgency as well.
It didn’t help that he was a foreigner.
They took his camera and began to search the jeep.
A disturbing smell.
“What is that smell?”
“Cheese.”
“Kya cheez?” said a fellow from Meerut.
They had never heard of cheese. They looked unconvinced. It smelled far too suspicious and one of them reported that he thought it smelled of bomb-making materials. “Gas maar raha hai,” said the Meerut boy.
“What did he say?” asked Father Booty.
“Something is whacking gas. Something is firing gas.”
“Throw it out,” they told Father Booty. “It’s gone bad.”
“No it hasn’t.”
“Yes, it has, the whole vehicle is smelling.”
The checkpoint guards now began to examine the pile of books, regarding them with the same wrinkled noses as the unclaimed cheese that had been destined for Glenary’s.
“What is this?” They hoped for literature of an antinational and inflammatory nature.
“Trollope,” Lola said brightly, excited and aroused by the turn of events. “I always said,” she turned to the others in a frivolous fashion, “that I would save Trollope for my dotage; I knew it would be a perfect slow indulgence when I had nothing much to do and, well, here I am. Old-fashioned books is what I like. Not the new kind of thing, no beginning, no middle, no end, just a thread of… free-floating plasma…
“English writer,” she told the guard.
He flipped through: The Last Chronicle of Barset: The Archdeacon goes to Framley, Mrs. Dobbs Broughton Piles her Fagots.
“Did you know,” Lola asked the others, “that he also invented the post box?”
“Why are you reading it?”
“To take my mind off all of this.” She gestured vaguely and rudely at the scene in general and the guard himself. Who had his pride. Knew he was something. Knew his mother knew he was something. Not even an hour ago she had fed her belief and her son with puri aloo accompanied by a lemony-limy-luscious Limca, the fizz from which had made a mini excitement about his nose.
Angry at Lola’s insolence, his face still awake from the soda spray, he gave orders for the book to be placed in the police jeep.