The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [146]
“It’s not something funny,” said the cook, but he laughed a bit, too, out of relief that this was clearly humorous, but then he felt worse, doubly guilty, and he resumed his mewling. He had ignored his duty…. Why hadn’t he watched that kutti….
In a corner of Thapa’s Canteen was Gyan, who had been let out of the house again. He wasn’t laughing. Oh, that awful day when he had told the boys about the judge’s guns. What, after all, had Sai done to him? The guilt took over again and he felt dizzy and nauseous. When the cook left, he went out after him.
“I haven’t been coming for tuition because of all this trouble…. How is Sai?” he mumbled.
“She is very worried about the dog. She is crying all the time.”
“Tell her that I will look for Mutt.”
“How will you?”
“Tell her that I promise. I will find the dog. Don’t worry at all. Be sure and tell her. I will find Mutt and bring her to the house.”
He uttered this sentence with a conviction that had nothing to do with Mutt or his ability to find her.
The cook looked at him suspiciously. He hadn’t been impressed by Gyan’s capabilities. In fact, Sai herself had told the cook that her tutor was not very bright.
But again Gyan nodded his assurance. Next time he saw Sai, he would have a present for her.
Fifty-two
Biju hadn’t seen such vastness in a long time—the sheer, overwhelming enormity of mountainside and scree coming down the flank of it. In places, the entire mountain had simply fallen out of itself, spread like a glacier with boulders, uprooted trees. Across the destruction, the precarious ant trail of the road was washed away. He felt exhilarated by the immensity of wilderness, by the lunatic creepers, the shooting hooting abundance of green, the great caterwauling vulgarity of frogs that was like the sound of the earth and the air itself. But the problems of the road were tedious. So, feeling patient in the way one feels before the greatness of nature, impatient in the way one feels with human details, he waited to see his father. The work of recarving a path through this ruin was, of course, usually contracted to teams of hunchbacked midget men and women, rebuilding things stone by stone, putting it all together again each time their work was rent apart, carrying rocks and mud in wicker baskets attached to bands around their foreheads, staggering loony with the weight, pounding on hulking river boulders over and over for hours with hammers and chisels until a bit chipped off, then another bit. They laid out the stones and the surface was tarred again—Biju remembered how, as a child, his father had always made him walk across newly spread pitch whenever they encountered some, in order to reinforce, he said, the thin soles of Biju’s shoes. Now that the government had suspended repairs, the GNLF men in the jeep were forced to clamber out themselves and roll boulders aside, remove fallen tree trunks, shovel clods of earth…. They went through seven landslides. At the eighth they kept getting mired in the mud, the jeep rolling back down.
They backed up, needing space to rev up the engine and gather enough momentum to get over the ruts and the unmade soil and drove forward again at high speed. Again and again the engine stalled and shut off and they rolled back down. Backed up and went whroom whroom whroom-ing!…
They got out again, all of them except the driver, untied the luggage, and piled it on the mud. Finally, on the eleventh try, backing up a good long way and rushing, engine surging—the jeep went flustering over, and they applauded with relief, piled up the bags again, clambered in, and went on. They were almost a whole day into a journey that should have taken two hours. Surely they would soon arrive.
Then they veered off onto a smaller road, even harder to traverse.
“Is this the Kalimpong road?” Biju asked, bewildered.
“We have to drop some men off first…. Detour.”
Hours passed…. The ninth