The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [116]
Parallel lives were being led by those—Budhoo, Kesang—for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green. They maintained their camping supplies, their flashlights, mosquito netting, raincoats, hot water bottles, brandy, radio, first-aid kit, Swiss army knife, book on poisonous snakes. These objects were talismans imbued with the task of transforming reality into something otherwise, supplies manufactured by a world that equated them with courage. But, really, they were equivalent to cowardice.
Noni tried to rouse herself. Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.
Thirty-nine
In the end what Sai and Gyan had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn’t forget that.
She remembered the ferocious look he had given her in Darjeeling, warning her to stay away.
One last time after refusing to acknowledge her, Gyan had come to Cho Oyu. He had sat at the table as if in chains.
A few months ago the ardent pursuit and now he behaved as if she had chased and trapped him, tail between his legs, into a cage!
What kind of man was this? she thought. She could not believe she had loved something so despicable. Her kiss had not turned him into a prince; he had morphed into a bloody frog.
“What kind of man are you?” she asked. “Is this any way to behave?”
“I’m confused,” he said finally, reluctantly. “I’m only human and sometimes I’m weak. Sorry.”
That “Sorry” unleashed a demoness of rage: “At whose expense are you weak and human! You’ll never get anywhere in life, my friend,” shouted Sai, “if this is what you think makes an excuse. A murderer could say the same and you think he would be let off the hook to hop in the spring?”
The usual thing happened, exactly what always happened in their fighting. He began to feel irritated, for, really, who was she to lecture him? “Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army.” He was a martyr, a man; a man, in fact, of ambition, principle.
“I don’t have to listen to this,” he said jumping up and storming off abruptly just as she was in powerful flow.
And Sai had cried, for it was the unjust truth.
______
Marooned during curfew, sick about Gyan, and sick with the desire to be desired, she still hoped for his return. She was bereft of her former skill at solitude.
She waited, read Wuthering Heights twice over, each time the potency of the writing imparting a wild animal feeling to her gut—and twice she read the last pages—still Gyan didn’t come.
______
A stick insect as big as a small branch climbed the steps.
A beetle with an impolitic red behind.
A dead scorpion being dismantled by ants—first its Popeye arm went by, carried by a line of ant coolies, then the sting and, separately, the eye.
But no Gyan.
She went to visit Uncle Potty. “Ahoy there,” he shouted to her from his veranda like a ship’s deck.
But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away.
Seeing her subtracted, Uncle Potty was scared and sang:
You