The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [6]
“Shut up,” said the judge and thought, These damn servants born and brought up to scream.
He himself sat bolt upright, his expression clenched to prevent its distortion, tightly clasping the arms of the chair to restrict a violent trembling, and although he knew he was trying to stop a motion that was inside him, it felt as if it were the world shaking with a ravaging force he was trying to hold himself against. On the dining table was the tablecloth he had spread out, white with a design of grapevines interrupted by a garnet stain where, many years ago, he had spilled a glass of port while trying to throw it at his wife for chewing in a way that disgusted him.
“So slow,” the boys had taunted him. “You people! No shame…. Can’t do one thing on your own.”
Both Sai and the cook had averted their gaze from the judge and his humiliation, and even now their glances avoided the tablecloth and took the longer way across the room, for if the cloth were acknowledged, there was no telling how he might punish them. It was an awful thing, the downing of a proud man. He might kill the witness.
The cook drew the curtains; their vulnerability seemed highlighted by the glass and they appeared to be hanging exposed in the forest and the night, with the forest and the night hanging their dark shaggy cloaks upon them. Mutt saw her reflection before the cloth was drawn, mistook it for a jackal, and jumped. Then she turned, saw her shadow on the wall, and jumped once more.
______
It was February of 1986. Sai was seventeen, and her romance with Gyan the mathematics tutor was not even a year old.
When the newspapers next got through the road blocks, they read:
In Bombay a band named Hell No was going to perform at the Hyatt International.
In Delhi, a technology fair on cow dung gas stoves was being attended by delegates from all over the world.
In Kalimpong, high in the northeastern Himalayas where they lived—the retired judge and his cook, Sai, and Mutt—there was a report of new dissatisfaction in the hills, gathering insurgency, men and guns. It was the Indian-Nepalese this time, fed up with being treated like the minority in a place where they were the majority. They wanted their own country, or at least their own state, in which to manage their own affairs. Here, where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim, and the army did pull-ups and push-ups, maintaining their tanks with khaki paint in case the Chinese grew hungry for more territory than Tibet, it had always been a messy map. The papers sounded resigned. A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred; between Nepal, England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling stolen from here, Kalimpong plucked from there—despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders.
Two
The judge sent the cook to the police station the next day although he protested, knowing from the same accumulated wisdom of the ages that had led him to plead before the intruders that this was not a sensible idea.
Always bad luck, the police, for if they were being paid off by the robbers, they would do nothing, and if, on the other hand, they were not, then it would be worse, for the boys who had come the evening before would take their revenge. They had guns now, which they might clean of rust, fill with bullets and… shoot! One way or the other, the police would try to extract a bribe. He thought of the 250 rupees from the sale to Uncle Potty of his own meticulously brewed chhang, which so successfully rendered the aging bachelor into flat-on-the-floor drunkenness. Last night he had hidden the money in a pocket of his extra shirt, but that didn’t seem safe enough. He tied it up high on a beam of his mud and bamboo hut at the bottom of the judge’s property, but then, seeing the mice running up and down the rafters, he worried they would eat it. Finally he put it in a tin and hid it in the garage, under the car that never went anywhere anymore. He thought of his son, Biju.
They at Cho Oyu