The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [110]
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?”
Thirty-seven
The situation will improve, the SDO had said, but though they had begun to torture random people all over town, it didn’t.
A series of strikes kept businesses closed.
A one-day strike.
A three-day strike.
Then a seven day.
When Lark’s General Store opened briefly one morning, Lola fought a victorious battle with the Afghan princesses over the last jars and cans. Later that month the princesses could think of nothing but jam, furious about it, in the midst of murder and burning properties: “That thoroughly nasty woman!”
Lola gloated each day as she spread the Druk’s marmalade thin so it would last.
A thirteen-day strike.
A twenty-one-day strike.
More strike than no strike.
More moisture in the air than air. It was hard to breathe and there was a feeling of being stifled in a place that was, after all, generous with space if nothing else.
Finally, the shops and offices didn’t open at all—the Snow Lion Travel Agency and the STD booth, the shawl shop, the deaf tailors, Kan-shi Nath & Sons Newsagents—everyone terrorized to keep their shutters down and not even poke their noses out of the windows. Roadblocks stopped traffic, prevented timber and stone trucks from leaving, halted tea from being transported. Nails were scattered on the road, Mobil oil spilled all about. The GNLF boys charged large sums of money if they let you through at all and coerced you to buy GNLF speeches on cassette tapes and Gorkhaland calendars.
Men arrived in trucks from Tindharia and Mahanadi, gathered outside the police station, and threw bricks and bottles. Tear gas didn’t scatter them; neither did the lathi charge.
“Well, how much land do they want?” asked Lola gloomily.
Noni: “The subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong, and extending to the foothills, parts of Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar districts, from Bengal into Assam.”
“No peace for the wicked,” said Mrs. Sen, knitting needles going, for she was making a sweater for the prime minister out of sympathy for his troubles. Even in Delhi it gets cold… especially in those drafty bungalows in which they house top government officials. But she was not an accomplished knitter. Very slow. Unlike her mother, who, in the course of watching a movie, could knit a whole baby blanket.
“Who’s wicked?” said Lola. “Not us. It’s they who are wicked. And we are the ones who have no peace. No peace for the not wicked.”
What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.
______
They were done with their library books, but of course there was no question of returning them. One morning when the trim major who ran the Gymkhana Club arrived, he found the GNLF had scuttled out the librarians and desk clerks and were enjoying the most space and privacy they’d ever had in their lives, sleeping between the bookshelves, cavorting in the ladies’ cloakroom, where, not so long ago, Lola had blown on her puff and delicately powdered her nose.
No tourists arrived from Calcutta in hilarious layers as if preparing for the Antarctic, weaving the cauterizing smell