He remembered the center of the Buddhist wheel of life clasped in a demon’s fangs and talons to indicate the hell that traps us: rooster-snake-pig; lust-anger-foolishness; each chasing, each feeding on, each consumed by the other.
Sai at Cho Oyu also sat contemplating desire, fury, and stupidity. She tried to suppress her anger, but it kept bubbling up; she tried to compromise her own feelings, but they wouldn’t bend.
What on earth was wrong with an excuse for a party? After all, one could then logically continue the argument and make a case against speaking English, as well, or eating a patty at the Hasty Tasty – all matters against which Gyan could hardly defend himself. She spent some time developing her thoughts against his to show up all the cracks.
"You bastard," she said to the emptiness. "My dignity is worth a thousand of you."
"Where did he go so soon?" asked the cook later that evening.
"Who knows?" she said. "But you’re right about the fish and Nepalis.
He isn’t very intelligent. The more we study, the less he seems to know, and the fact that he doesn’t know and that I can tell – it makes him furious."
"Yes," said the cook sympathetically, having forecast the boy’s stupidity himself.
At Thapa’s Canteen, Gyan told Chhang and Bhang, Owl and Donkey, of how he was forced to tutor in order to earn money. How glad he would be if he could get a proper job and leave that fussy pair, Sai and her grandfather with the fake English accent and the face powdered pink and white over dark brown. Everyone in the canteen laughed as he mimicked the accent: "What poets are they reading these days, young man?" And, encouraged by their "Ha ha," tongue tingling and supple with alcohol, he leaped smoothly to a description of the house, the guns on the wall, and a certificate from Cambridge that they didn’t even know to be ashamed of.
Why should he not betray Sai?
She who could speak no language but English and pidgin Hindi, she who could not converse with anyone outside her tiny social stratum.
She who could not eat with her hands; could not squat down on the ground on her haunches to wait for a bus; who had never been to a temple but for architectural interest; never chewed a paan and had not tried most sweets in the mithaishop, for they made her retch; she who left a Bollywood film so exhausted from emotional wear and tear that she walked home like a sick person and lay in pieces on the sofa; she who thought it vulgar to put oil in your hair and used paper to clean her bottom; felt happier with so-called English vegetables, snap peas, French beans, spring onions, and feared – feared – loki, tinda, kathal, kaddu, patrel, and the local saag in the market.
Eating together they had always felt embarrassed – he, unsettled by her finickiness and her curbed enjoyment, and she, revolted by his energy and his fingers working the dal, his slurps and smacks. The judge ate even his chapatis, his puris and parathas, with knife and fork. Insisted that Sai, in his presence, do the same.
Still, Gyan was absolutely sure that she was proud of her behavior; masqueraded it about as shame at her lack of Indianness, maybe, but it marked her status. Oh yes. It allowed her that perverse luxury, the titillation of putting yourself down, criticizing yourself and having the opposite happen – you did not fall, you mystically rose.
So, in the excitement of the moment, he told. Of the guns and the well-stocked kitchen, the liquor in the cabinet, the lack of a phone and there being nobody to call for help.
Next morning, when he woke, though, he felt guilty all over again. He thought of lying entangled in the garden last year, on the rough grass under high trees jigsawing the sky, spidery stars through the prehistoric ferns.
But so fluid a thing was love. It wasn’t firm, he was learning, it wasn’t a scripture; it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal, taking the mold of whatever he poured it into. And in fact, it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels. It could be used for all kinds of purposes… He wished it were a constraint. It was truly beginning to frighten him.
Thirty
Worried about growing problems in the market and the disruption of supplies due to strikes, the cook was putting some buffalo meat that was growing harder and harder to buy into Mutt’s stew. He unwrapped the flank from its newspaper wrapping soaked in blood, and suddenly he had the overwhelming thought that he held two kilos of his son’s body there, dead like that.
Years ago when the cook’s wife had been killed falling from a tree while gathering leaves for their goat, everyone in his village had said her ghost was threatening to take Biju with her, since she had died violently. The priests claimed that a spirit passing on in such a way remained angry. His wife had been a mild person – in fact he had little memory of her speaking at all – but they had insisted it was true, that Biju had seen his mother, a transparent apparition in the night, trying to claw at him. The extended family walked all the way to the post office in the nearest town to send a barrage of telegrams to the judge’s address. The telegrams in those days had arrived via postal runner who ran shaking a spear from village to village. "In the name of Queen Victoria let me pass," he sang in a high voice, although he neither knew nor cared that she was long gone.
"The priest has said the balli must be done at amavas, darkest no-moon night of the month. You must sacrifice a chicken."
The judge refused to let the cook go. "Superstition. You fool! Why aren’t there ghosts here? Wouldn’t they be here as well as in your village?"
"Because there is electricity here," said the cook. "They get a scare from electricity and in our village there is no electricity, that’s why…"
"What has your life been for?" said the judge, "You live with me, go to a proper doctor, you have even learned to read and write a little, sometimes you read the newspaper, and all to no purpose! Still the priests make a fool of you, rob you of your money."
All the other servants set up a chorus advising the cook to disregard their employer’s opinions and save his son instead, for there certainly were ghosts: "Hota hai hota hai, you have to do it."
The cook went to the judge with a made-up story of the roof of his village hut having blown off again in the latest storm. The judge gave up and the cook traveled to the village.
He became worried now, all these years later, that the sacrifice hadn’t really worked, that its effect had been undone by the lie he told the judge, that his wife’s spirit hadn’t actually been appeased, that the offering hadn’t been properly recorded, or wasn’t big enough. He had sacrificed a goat and a chicken, but what if the spirit still had a hunger for Biju?
The cook had first made the effort to send his son abroad four years ago when a recruiting agent for a cruise ship line appeared in Kalimpong to solicit applications for waiters, vegetable choppers, toilet cleaners – basic drudge staff, all of whom would appear at the final gala dinner in suits and bow ties, skating on ice, standing on one another’s shoulders, with pineapples on their heads, and flambéing crepes.
"Will procure legal employment in the USA!!!!" said the advertisements that appeared in the local paper and were pasted on the walls in various locations around town.
The man set up a temporary office in his room at Sinclair’s Hotel.
The line that formed outside circled the hotel and came all the way back around, at which point the head of the line got mixed up with the tail and there was some foul play.