The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [132]
After this—after the gun robbery and after the parade, after his seeing the frailty of his life here as a non-Nepali—he couldn’t manage to compose himself properly; there was nobody, nothing—but a sinister presence loomed—he was sure something even worse stood around the corner. Where was Biju, where was he? He leaped at every shadow.
So, it was usually Sai who walked to the shuttered market searching for a shop with a half open back door signaling quick secret business, or a cardboard sign propped at the window of a hut of someone selling a handful of peanuts or a few eggs.
Excepting these meager purchases Sai made, the garden was feeding them almost entirely. For the first time, they in Cho Oyu were eating the real food of the hillside. Dalda saag, pink-flowered, flat-leafed; bhutiya dhaniya growing copiously around the cook’s quarter; the new tendrils of squash or pumpkin vine; curled ningro fiddleheads, churbi cheese and bamboo shoots sold by women who appeared from behind bushes on forest paths with the cheese wrapped in ferns and the yellow slices of bamboo shoots in buckets of water. After the rains, mushrooms pushed their way up, sweet as chicken and glorious as Kanchenjunga, so big, fanning out. People collected the oyster mushrooms in Father Booty’s abandoned garden. For a while the smell of them cooking gave the town the surprising air of wealth and comfort.
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One day, when Sai arrived home with a kilo of damp atta and some potatoes, she found two figures, familiar from a previous occasion, on the veranda, pleading with the cook and judge.
“Please, sahib….” It was the same wife and father of the tortured man.
“Oh no,” the cook had said in horror when he saw them, “Oh no, baap re, what are you coming here for?” although he knew.
It was the impoverished who walked the line so thin it was questionable if it existed, an imaginary line between the insurgents and the law, between being robbed (who would listen to them if they went to the police?) and being hunted by the police as scapegoats for the crimes of others.
They were hungriest.
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“Why are you coming here making trouble? We already told you we had nothing to do with the police picking up your husband. We were hardly the ones to accuse him or beat him…. Had they told us, we would have gone at once and said this is not the man… we were not informed…. What do we owe you?” said the cook. But he was giving them the atta Sai had brought back… when the judge barked, “Don’t give them anything,” and continued his chess game.
“Please, sahib,” they begged with hands folded, heads bent. “Who comes to our help? Can we live on no food at all? We will be your servants forever… God will repay you… God will reward you….”
But the judge was adamant.
Again, herded out, they sat outside the gate.
“Tell them to go,” he told the cook.
“Jao jao, “ said the cook, although he was concerned that they might need to rest before having to walk another five to six hours through the forest to their village.
Again they moved and sat farther up so as not to give offense. Again they saw Mutt. She was attached by her snout to her favorite whiffy spot, unaware of anything else. The woman suddenly brightened and said to the man, “Sell that kind of dog and you can get a lot of money….” Mutt didn’t budge from the smell for a long, long time. If the judge hadn’t been there, they could have reached out—and grabbed her.
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Some days later, when they at Cho Oyu had again forgotten these two unimportant if upsetting people, they returned.
But they didn’t come to the gate; they secreted themselves immediately in the jhora ravine and waited for Mutt, that connoisseur of smells, to appear for her daily round of the property. Rediscovering scents and enhancing them was an ever evolving art form. She was involved with an old favorite, grown better with