The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [99]
On the table, when the judge got in, he found the telegram waiting. “To Justice Patel from St. Augustine’s: regarding your granddaughter, Sai Mistry.”
The judge had considered the convent’s request in the brief interlude of weakness he experienced after Bose’s visit, when he was forced to confront the fact that he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. He couldn’t knock down the lies or else the past would crumble, and therefore the present…. But he now acquiesced to something in the past that had survived, returned, that might, without his paying too much attention, redeem him—
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Sai could look after Mutt, he reasoned. The cook was growing decrepit. It would be good to have an unpaid somebody in the house to help with things as the years went by. Sai arrived, and he was worried that she would incite a dormant hatred in his nature, that he would wish to rid himself of her or treat her as he had her mother, her grandmother. But Sai, it had turned out, was more his kin than he had thought imaginable. There was something familiar about her; she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India. The journey he had started so long ago had continued in his descendants. Perhaps he had made a mistake in cutting off his daughter… he’d condemned her before he knew her. Despite himself, he felt, in the backwaters of his unconscious, an imbalance in his deeds balancing itself out.
This granddaughter whom he didn’t hate was perhaps the only miracle fate had thrown his way.
Thirty-three
Six months after Sai, Lola and Noni, Uncle Potty and Father Booty made a library trip to the Gymkhana Club, it was taken over by the Gorkha National Liberation Front, who camped out in the ballroom and the skating rink, ridiculing even further whatever pretensions the club might still harbor despite having already been brought low by the staff.
Men with guns rested in the ladies’ powder room, enjoyed the spacious plumbing that was still stamped BARHEAD SCOTLAND, PATENTEES in mulberry letters and dawdled before the long mirror, because like most of the towns’ residents, they rarely had the opportunity to see themselves from top to bottom.
The dining room was filled with men in khaki, posing for pictures, feet on the stuffed head of a leopard, whiskey in hand, fire in the fireplace still with rosette tiles. They drank up the entire bar, and on chilly nights they took down the skins from the walls and slept in the musty folds.
Later evidence proved they also stockpiled guns, drew maps, plotted the bombing of bridges, hatched plans that grew in daring as managers fled from the tea plantations that stretched in waves over the Singalila Mountains all around the Gymkhana, from Happy Valley, Makaibari, Chonglu, Pershok.
Then, when it was all over, and the men had signed a peace treaty and moved out—here at this very spot in the Gymkhana Club, on these dining tables placed side by side in a row—they had staged a public surrender of arms.
On October 2, 1988, Gandhi Jayanti Day, seven thousand men surrendered more than five thousand pipe guns, country-made revolvers, pistols, double and single-barrel guns, Sten guns. They gave up thousands of rounds of ammunition, thirty-five hundred bombs, gelatine sticks, detonators and land mines, kilograms of explosives, mortar shells, cannons. Ghising’s men alone had more than twenty-four thousand pieces. In the pile was the judge’s BSA pump gun, the Springfield rifle, the double-barreled Holland & Holland with which he had roamed, after teatime, in the countryside surrounding Bonda.
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But when Lola, Noni, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, and Sai were turned away from the Gymkhana dining room, they didn’t expect things to go so badly with the club. They mistook the gloom for present trouble, just as the manager had suggested, and not for a premonition of the dining