"How about a wee drink, ladies?" said Uncle Potty.
"Oh Potty, starting so early."
"Suit yourselves. Gin tonic," he ordered and dipped his bread stick directly into the butter dish. Came up with a cheerful golden berg. "I do like a bit of bread with my butter," he proclaimed.
"They do a good fish and chips with tartar sauce," said Father Booty with a flutter of hope, thinking of river fish in crisp gold uniforms of bread crumbs.
"Is the fish fresh?" Lola demanded of the waiter. "From the Teesta?"
"Why not?" said the waiter.
"Why not???!! I don’t know! You know WHY if NOT!!!"
"Better not risk it. How about chicken in cheese sauce?"
"What cheese?" asked Father Booty.
Everyone froze… chilled silence.
They knew the insult was coming -
Utterly butterly delicious… All India Cheese Champ -
"AMUL!!"
"WATERPROOFING!!" cried Father Booty.
As always they pondered their options and picked Chinese.
"It’s not like real Chinese food, of course," Lola reminded everyone that Joydeep, her now dead husband, had once visited China and reported that Chinese food in China was quite another matter. A much worse matter, in fact. He described the hundred-day-old egg (and sometimes he said it was a two-hundred-day) buried and dug up as a delicacy, and everyone groaned with horrified delight. He had been a great success at cocktail parties upon his return. "Don’t much care for their looks, either," he said, "chapta features. Much better, Indian women, Indian antiquities, Indian music, Indian Chinese – "
And in all India, nothing better than Calcutta Chinese! Remember Ta Fa Shun? Where ladies out shopping met for hot-and-acrid soup and accompanied it with hot-and-acrid gossip -
"So what should we have?" asked Uncle Potty who had finished all the bread sticks now.
"Chicken or pork?"
"Chee Chee. Don’t trust the pork, full of tapeworms. Who knows what pig it comes from?"
"Chili chicken, then?"
From outside came the noise of the parading boys going by again.
"God, what a racket. All this do-or-die stuff."
The chili chicken arrived and, after depositing it on their table, the waiter wiped his nose on the curtain. "Just take a look at that," said Lola. "No wonder we Indians never progress." They began to eat. "But food here is good." Chomping.
As they were exiting the restaurant, the same procession that had disturbed them while they were eating and while they were at the library came back up the road after having traversed all of Darjeeling.
"Gorkhaland for Gorkhas." "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas."
They stood back to let them pass and who should almost stamp on Sai’s toes? -
Gyan!!!
In his tomato red sweater, yelling lustily in a way she couldn’t recognize.
What would he be doing in Darjeeling?! Why would he be at a GNLF rally rallying on behalf of independence for Nepali-Indians?
She opened her mouth to shout to him, but at that moment he caught sight of her, too, and the dismay on his face was followed by a slight ferocious gesture of his head and a cold narrow look in his eye that was a warning not to approach. She shut her mouth like a fish, and astonishment flooded over her gills.
By that time he had passed on.
"Isn’t that your mathematics tutor?" asked Noni.
"I don’t think so," she said, scrabbling for dignity, scrabbling for sense. "Looked just like him, I thought it was him myself, but it wasn’t…"
On their steep way back down to the Teesta, they noticed Sai had turned green.
"Are you all right?" asked Father Booty.
"Travel sick."
"Look at the horizon, that always helps."
She fixed her eyes on the highest ridge of the Himalayas, on the un-moving stillness. But this didn’t make any difference. There was a whirl in Sai’s brain and she couldn’t register what her eyes saw. Finally, a mordant bile rose up her throat, frizzling her system, burning her mouth, corroding her teeth – she could feel them turn to chalk as they were attacked by a resurgence of the chili chicken.
"Stop the car, stop the car," said Lola. "Let her out."
Sai began to retch into the grass, vomiting up a sort of mulligatawny, giving them another unfortunate look at their lunch now so much the worse for wear. Noni poured her a cup of icy water from the space-age silver capsule of the thermos flask, and Sai rested on a rock in the sunshine by the beautiful transparent Teesta. "Take some deep breaths, dear, that food was very greasy, they’ve really gone downhill – dirty kitchen – oh, just the sight of that waiter should have been enough to warn us."
At the other end of the bridge the checkpoint guards were inspecting some vehicles going through. Careful in this time of trouble, they had opened the bundles and cases of everyone in a bus and turned their belongings inside out. The passengers waited impassively inside; poor people, their faces squashed against the windows, hundreds of pairs of eyes half dead, like animals on their way to death; as if the journey had been so exhausting, their spirits had already been extinguished. The bus had vomit-strewn sides, great banners of brown flared back by the wind. Several other vehicles waited in line after the bus for the same treatment, barred from going on by a metal pole across the road.
The afternoon sun lay thick and golden on the trees, and with the light so bright, the shadows in the foliage, by the car, and between the blades of grass and the rocks were black as night. It was hot here in the valley, but the river, when Sai dipped her hand in, was icy enough to numb her veins.
"Take your time, Sai, long wait anyway, the cars are backed up."
Father Booty got out himself, walked up and down, stretching his limbs, glad of the rest to his aching behind, when he spotted a remarkable butterfly.
The Teesta valley was renowned for its butterflies, and specialists came from around the world to paint and record them. Rare and spectacular creatures depicted in the library volume Marvelous Butterflies of the North-Eastern Himalayas were flying about before their eyes. One summer, when she was twelve, Sai had made up names for them – "Japanese mask butterfly, butterfly of the far mountain, Icarus falling from the sun butterfly, butterfly that a flute set free, kite festival butterfly" – and written them into a book labeled "My Butterfly Collection" and accompanied the names with illustrations.
"Astonishing." said Father Booty. "Just look at this one here." Peacock blue and long emerald streamer tails. "Oh goodness, and that one" – black with white spots and a pink flame at its heart… "Oh my camera… Potty, can you just rummage in the glove com-partment?"
Uncle Potty was reading Asterix: Ave Gaul! By Toutatis!!!!# @***!!, but he roused himself and handed the little Leica through the window.
As the butterfly fluttered beguilingly on a cable of the bridge, Father Booty snapped the photograph. "Oh dear, I think I shook, the picture might be blurry."
He was about to try again when the guards began to shout and one of them came racing up. "Photography strictly prohibited on the bridge." Didn’t he know?
Oh dear, he did, he did, a mistake, he had forgotten in his excitement. "So sorry, officer." He knew, he knew. It was a very important bridge, this, India’s contact with the north, with the border at which they might have to fight the Chinese again someday, and now, of course, there was the Gorkha insurgency as well.
It didn’t help that he was a foreigner.
They took his camera and began to search the jeep.
A disturbing smell.
"What is that smell?"
"Cheese."
"Kya cheez?" said a fellow from Meerut.
They had never heard of cheese. They looked unconvinced. It smelled far too suspicious and one of them reported that he thought it smelled of bomb-making materials. "Gas maar raha hai," said the Meerut boy.