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By Root 781 0

like Disco Dancer. They took the toy train and went to the Darjeeling zoo and viewed in their free, self-righteous, modern love, the unfree and ancient bars, behind which lived a red panda, ridiculously solemn for being such a madly beautiful thing, chewing his bamboo leaves as carefully as a bank clerk doing numbers. They visited the Zang Dog Palri Fo Brang Monastery on Durpin Dara, where little monks were being entertained by the gray-haired ones, running up and down pulling the children on rice sacks, sailing them over the polished monastery floor, before the murals of demons and Guru Padmasambhava with his wrathful smile ensconced in a curly mustache, his carmine cloak, diamond scepter, lotus hat with a vulture feather; before a ghost riding a snow lion and a green Tara on a yak; sailing the children before the doors that opened like bird wings onto the scene of mountains all around.

From Durpin Dara, where you could see so far and high, the world resembled a map from a divine perspective. One could see the landscape stretching below and beyond, rivers and plateaus. Gyan asked Sai about her family, but she felt uncertain about what she should say, because she thought if she told him about the space program, he might feel inferior and ashamed. “My parents eloped and nobody spoke to them again. They died in Russia where my father was a scientist.”

But his own family story also led overseas, he told Sai, quite proudly. They had more in common than they thought.

______

The story went like this:

In the 1800s his ancestors had left their village in Nepal and arrived in Darjeeling, lured by promises of work on a tea plantation. There, in a small hamlet bordering one of the remoter tea estates, they had owned a buffalo renowned for its astonishingly creamy milk. By and by along came the Imperial Army, measuring potential soldiers in villages all over the hills with a measuring tape and ruler, and they had happened upon the impressive shoulders of Gyan’s great-grandfather, who had grown so strong on the milk of their buffalo that he had beaten the village sweet-seller’s son in a wrestling match, an exceptionally glossy and healthy boy. An earlier recruit from their village reported soldiers were kept in ladylike comfort—warm and dry with blankets and socks, butter and ghee, mutton twice a week, an egg each day, water always in the taps, medicine for every ailment, every whim and scuff. You could solicit help for an itch on the bottom or a bee sting without shame, all for no more work than to march up and down the Grand Trunk Road. The army offered far more money to this boy grown strong on buffalo milk than his father had ever earned, for his father labored as a runner for the plantation; left before dawn with a big conical basket divided into sections on his back and strove to return by sundown, struggling uphill. The basket would now be filled with a vegetable layer and a live chicken pecking at the weave; eggs, toilet paper, soap, hairpins, and letter paper on top for the memsahib to write: “My darling daughter, it is wildly beautiful here and the beauty almost, almost makes up for the loneliness….”

So he swore allegiance to the Crown, and off he went, the beginning of over a hundred years of family commitment to the wars of the English.

At the beginning, the promise had held true—all Gyan’s great-grandfather did was march for many prosperous years, and he acquired a wife and three sons. But then they sent him to Mesopotamia where Turkish bullets made a sieve of his heart and he leaked to death on the battlefield. As a kindness to the family, that they might not lose their income, the army employed his eldest son, although the famous buffalo, by now, was dead, and the new recruit was spindly. Indian soldiers fought in Burma, in Gibraltar, in Egypt, in Italy.

Two months short of his twenty-third birthday, in 1943, the spindly soldier was killed in Burma, shakily defending the British against the Japanese. His brother was offered a job and this boy died, too, in Italy, outside Florence, not fighting at all, but making