The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [130]
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Everyone was running, the unwilling participants, the perpetrators, and the bashed-up police. They scattered into the side paths towards Bong Busti and to Teesta Bazaar. The cook ran alone because he’d lost the Metal-Box watchman, who had been torn away in another direction. He ran as fast as his lungs and legs would let him, his heart pounding painfully in his chest, ears, and throat, each breath poisonous. He managed to get some distance up the steep shortcut to Ringkingpong Road, and there he felt his legs collapse under him, they were trembling so hard. He sat above the bazaar among staffs of bamboo bearing white prayer flags, the script faded like the markings on a shell that’s been washed by the ocean a long time. The Victorian tower of the Criminal Investigation Division was behind him and the dark bulk of Galingka, Tashiding, and Morgan House, dating to the British, but all company guesthouses now. A gardener squatted on the lawn of Morgan House still planted with the plants Mrs. Morgan had bought from England. He seemed unaware of what was going on; stared out without curiosity or ambition, without worry, developing a quality devoid of qualities to get him through this life.
The cook could see the fires burning below him and the men scattering. As they crossed the heat vapor of the flames, they seemed to ripple and blow like mirages. Above was Kanchenjunga, solid, extraordinary, a sight that for centuries had delivered men their freedom and thinned clogged human hearts to joy. But of course the cook couldn’t feel this now and he didn’t know if the sight of the mountain could ever be the same to him. Clawing at his heart as if it were a door was his panic—a scrabbling rodent creature.
How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and a small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together.
Now he did and crying, continued crawling his way back to Cho Oyu, hiding in the bushes as he was passed by army tanks rolling down from the cantonment area into the town. Instead of foreign enemies, instead of the Chinese they had been preparing for, building their hatred against, they must fight their own people….
This place, this market where he had bargained contentedly over potatoes, and insulted, yes insulted, the fruit wallah with happy impunity, enjoyed the rude words about decayed produce that flew from his lips; this place where he had with utter safety genuinely lost his temper with the deaf tailors, the inept plumber, the tardy baker with the cream horns; this place where he had resided secure in the knowledge that this was basically a civilized place where there was room for them all; where he had existed in what seemed a sweetness of crabbiness—was showing him now that he had been wrong. He wasn’t wanted in Kalimpong and he didn’t belong.
At this moment, a fear overtook him that he might never see his son again—
The letters that had come all these years were only his own hope writing to him. Biju was just a habit of thought. He didn’t exist. Could he?
Forty-four
The incidents of horror grew, through the changing of the seasons, through winter and a flowery spring, summer, then rain and winter again. Roads were closed, there was curfew every night, and Kalimpong was trapped in its own