The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [105]
“That isn’t even the cost of the shed, let alone the main house.”
“You will not get any other offers.”
“Why not?”
“I have arranged it and you have no choice. You are lucky to get what I am giving you. You are residing in this country unlawfully and you must sell or lose everything.”
______
“I will look after the cows, Booty,” said his friend Uncle Potty. “No worries. And when the trouble is over, you return and take up where you left off.”
They sat together, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, and Sai. In the background, a tape of Abida Parveen was playing. “Allah hoo, Allah hoo Allah hoo.…” God was just wilderness and space, said the husky voice, careless with the loss of love. It took you to the edge of all you could bear and then—it let go, let go…. “Mujhe jaaaane do.…” All one should desire was freedom. But Father Booty wasn’t comforted by Uncle Potty’s assurance, for it had to be admitted that his friend was an alcoholic and undependable. In a drunken state he would allow anything to happen, he might sign on any line, but it was Father Booty’s own fault: why hadn’t he applied for an Indian passport? Because it was just as silly as NOT applying for an American or a Swiss? He felt a lack in himself, despised his conformity to the ideas of the world even as he disagreed with them.
A mongoose loped like water over the grass, matching the color of the evening, only its movement betraying it.
Anger strained against Sai’s heart. This was Gyan’s doing, she thought. This is what he had done and what people like him were doing in the name of decency and education, in the name of hospitals for Nepalis and management positions. In the end, Father Booty, lovable Father Booty who, frankly, had done much more for development in the hills than any of the locals, and without screaming or waving kukris, Father Booty was to be sacrificed.
In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, noses, enveloping their faces. The black climed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kanchenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink…. each of them separately remembered how many evenings they’d spent like this… how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. “Nothing so sweet, dear friends—” Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank.
There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour….
But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one….
Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was gone now, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.
Her mind returned to the day of the gun robbery at Cho Oyu—the start of everything going wrong.
Thirty-five
How foolishly those rifles had been left mounted on the wall, retired artifacts relegated to history, seen too often to notice or think about. Gyan was the last one to take them down and examine them—boys liked things like that. Even the Dalai Lama, Sai had read, had a collection of war games and toy soldiers. It hadn’t occurred