The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [111]
Nobody came to the Himalayan Hotel and sat under the Roerich painting of a mountain lit up by the moon like a ghost in bedsheets, to “Experience a Quaint Return to Yesteryears” as the brochure suggested, to order Irish stew, and chew chew chew on the scrawny goats of Kalimpong.
The company guesthouses closed. The watchmen who always had to move at this time of year from their illicit occupation of the main houses during winter into their peripheral huts; who had to alter their expressions from dignity to “Ji huzoor” servitude; replace cupboard locks they had picked to disinter televisions and made-in-Japan electric heaters; this year, they found their comforts uninterrupted.
And while they stayed put, children were being plucked from boarding schools as parents opened the papers to read with horror of the salubrious climate of the hills being disturbed by separatist rebels and guerilla tactics. The mounting hysteria all around was perhaps to blame for the last group of boys at St. Xavier’s disgracing themselves. When instructed to help with the preparation of dinner (cooks having vanished into the mist), they discovered that a chicken’s head was best removed by twisting and popping it like a cork—much better than sawing away with a blunt knife. An orgy of blood and feathers ensued, a great skauwauking kerfuffle, headless birds running about spilling guts and excrement. The boys screamed until they cried with disgraceful laughter, their laughs drowning and struggling in sobs, and sobs bubbling and rising with laughter. The master in charge turned on the hosepipe to blast them into sense with cold water, but of course by now there was no water left in the tanks.
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No gas either, or kerosene. They were all back to cooking on wood.
There was no water.
“Left the buckets out in the garden,” said Lola to Noni, “to fill with rain. We better not flush the toilet anymore. Just add some Sunny Fresh to keep the smell down. For small jobs anyway.”
There was no electricity, because the electricity department had been burned to protest arrests made at the roadblocks.
When the fridge shuddered silent the sisters were forced to cook all the perishable food at once. It was Kesang’s day off.
Outside, rain was falling and it was almost time for curfew; drawn by the poignant smell of mutton cooking, a group of passing GNLF boys searching for shelter climbed through the kitchen window.
“Why your front door is locked, Aunty?”
The enormous locks that were usually on the tin trunks containing valuables had been moved to the front and back doors as extra precaution. Above their heads, in the attic, several objects of worth had been left vulnerable. Family puja silver from their preaetheist days; Bond Street baby cups with trowellike utensils that had once gathered and packed Farex into their own guppy mouths; a telescope made in Germany; their great-grandmother’s pearly nose ring; bat eyeglasses from the sixties; silver marrow spoons (they had always been a great family for eating their marrow); damask napkins with a pocket sewn in to enfold triangles of cucumber sandwich—”Just a sprinkle of water, remember, to dampen the cloth before you set off for the picnic….” Magpie things gleaned from a romantic version of the West and a fanciful version of the East that contained power enough to maintain dignity across the rotten offences between nations.
“What do you want?” Lola asked the boys and her face showed them that she had something to protect.
“We are selling calendars, Aunty, and cassettes for the movement.”
“What calendars, cassettes?”
Balanced against the forced entry and their rebel camouflage attire was their disconcerting politeness.
The cassettes were recorded with the favorite washing-bloody-kukris-in-the-mother-waters-of-the-Teesta speech.
“Don’t give them anything,” hissed Lola in English, feeling faint, thinking they wouldn’t understand. “Once you start, they’ll keep coming