The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [112]
But they did understand. They understood her English and she didn’t understand their Nepali.
“Any contribution to the effort for Gorkhaland is all right.”
“All right for you, not all right for us.”
“Shhh,” Noni shushed her sister. “Don’t be reckless,” she gasped.
“We will issue you a receipt,” said the boys, eyes on the food lying on the counter—intestinal-looking Essex Farm sausages; frozen salami with a furze of permafrost melting away.
“Nothing doing,” said Lola.
“Shhkh,” Noni said again. “Give us a calendar then.”
“Only one, Aunty?”
“All right, well, two.”
“But you know how we need money….”
They invested in three calendars and two cassettes. Still the boys did not leave.
“Can we sleep on the floor? The police will never search for us here.”
“No,” said Lola.
“Fine, but please don’t make any noise or trouble,” said Noni.
The boys ate all the food before they slept.
______
Lola and Noni barricaded the door to their bedroom by moving the chest of drawers in front of it as quietly as they could. The boys heard and laughed loudly: “Don’t worry. You are too old for us, you know.”
The sisters spent the night awake, eyes aching against the dark. Mustafa sat rigid in Noni’s arms, feeling his self-respect assaulted, the hole of his bottom a tight exclamation point of anger, his tail a straight and uncompromising line above it.
And Budhoo, their watchman?
They waited for him to arrive with his gun and scare the boys away, but Budhoo did not arrive.
“I told you….” Lola said in a scorched whisper, “these Neps! Hand in hand….”
“Maybe the boys threatened him,” spat Noni.
“Oh, come on. He’s probably uncle to one of them! We should have told them to go and now you’ve started this, Noni, they’ll come all the time.”
“What choice did we have? If we had said no, we would have paid for it. Don’t be naïve.”
“You’re the one who is naïve: ‘They have a point, they have poiiiintt, three-fourths of their point if not the whole poiiintt,’ now look… you stupid woman!”
______
“Are you worried you’ll be caught by the police,” one of them asked with a smirk next morning, “for sheltering us? Is that what you’re worried about? The police won’t touch rich people, only people like us, but if you say anything we will be forced to take action against you.”
“What action?”
“You’ll find out, Aunty.”
Still, their exquisite politeness.
They left with the rice and the soap, the oil, and the garden’s annual output of five jars of tomato chutney, and as they climbed down the steps, they noticed what they hadn’t seen in the darkness of their arrival—how nicely the property stretched into a lawn, then dropped into tiers below. There was quite enough land to accommodate a thin line of huts. Overhead, a grim leathern bobble of electrocuted bats hanging on wires strung between the trees indicated a powerful supply of electricity during peaceful times. The market was close; a beautiful tarred road was right in front; so they might walk to shops and schools in twenty minutes instead of two hours, three hours, each way….
Not a month had passed before the sisters woke one morning to find that, under cover of night, a hut had come up like a mushroom on a newly cut gash at the bottom of the Mon Ami vegetable patch. They watched with horror as two boys calmly chopped down a bamboo from their property and carried it off right in front of their noses, a long taut drumstick, still cloudy and shivering with the push and pull, the contradiction between flexibility and contrariness, long enough to span an entire home of not-so-modest a size.
They rushed out: “This is our land!”
“It is not your land. It is free land,” they countered, putting down the sentence, flatly, rudely.
“It is our land.”
“It is unoccupied land.”
“We’11 call the police.”
They shrugged, turned back, and kept on working.
Thirty-eight
It didn’t come from nothing, even Lola knew, but from an old feeling of anger that couldn’t be divorced from Kalimpong. It was part of every breath. It was in the eyes that waited, attached themselves to you as you approached, rode