Behind Pradhan stood a soldier with a wooden stock rifle pointed out into the room. He looked, to Lola’s eyes, like Budhoo’s brother with Budhoo’s gun.
"Side of road, my land." Lola, dressed in the widow’s sari she had worn to the electric crematorium when Joydeep died, mumbled weakly in broken English, as if to pretend it was English she couldn’t speak properly rather than illuminate the fact that it was Nepali she had never learned.
Pradhan’s home was in a part of Kalimpong she had never visited before. On the outside walls, lengths of bamboo split in half had been filled with earth and planted with succulents. Porcupine and bearded cacti grew in Dalda tins and plastic bags lining the steps to the small rectangular house with a tin roof. The room was full of staring men, some standing, some seated on folding chairs, all crowded in as if at a doctor’s waiting room. She could feel their intense desire to rid themselves of her as of an affliction. Another man with a favor had preceded Lola, a Marwari shopkeeper trying to bring a shipment of prayer lamps past the roadblocks. Strangely, Marwaris controlled the business of selling Tibetan objects of worship – lamps and bells, thunderbolts, the monks’ plum robes and turmeric undershirts, buttons of brass each embossed with a lotus flower.
When the man was ushered in front of Pradhan, he began such a bending, bowing, writhing, that he would not even raise his eyes. He spewed flowery honorifics: "Respected Sir and Huzoor and Your Gracious Presence and Your Wish my Pleasure, Please Grant, Your Blessing Requested, Your Honorable Self, Your Beneficence, May the Blessings of God Rain upon You and Yours, Might Your Respected Gracious Self Prosper and Might You Grant Prosperity to Respectful Supplicants…" He made an overabundant flower garden of speech, but to no avail, and finally, he backed out still scattering roses and pleas, prayers and blessings…
Pradhan dismissed him: "No exceptions."
Then it had been Lola’s turn.
"Sir, property is being encroached on."
"Name of property?"
"Mon Ami."
"What kind of name?"
"French name."
"I didn’t know we live in France. Do we? Tell me, why don’t I speak in French, then?"
He tried to send her away immediately, waving away the surveyor’s plan and the property documents showing the measurements of the plot that she tried to unroll before him.
"My men must be accommodated," Pradhan stated.
"But our land…"
"Along all roads, to a certain depth, it’s government land, and that’s the land we are taking."
The huts that had sprung up overnight were being populated by women, men, children, pigs, goats, dogs, chickens, cats, and cows. In a year, Lola could foresee, they would no longer be made of mud and bamboo but concrete and tiles.
"But it’s our land…
" Do you use it?
"For vegetables."
"You can grow them elsewhere. Put them on the side of your house."
"Have cut into the hill, land weak, landslide may occur," she muttered. "Very dangerous for your men. Landslides on road…" She was trembling like a whisker from terror, although she insisted to herself that it was from rage.
"Landslide? They aren’t building big houses like yours, Aunty, just little huts of bamboo. In fact, it’s your house that might cause a landslide. Too heavy, no? Too big? Walls many feet wide? Stone, concrete? You are a rich woman? House-garden-servants!"
Here he began to smile.
"In fact," he said, "as you can see," he gestured out, "I am the raja of Kalimpong. A raja must have many queens." He jerked his head back to the sounds of the kitchen that came through the curtained door. "I have four, but would you," he looked Lola up and down, tipped his chair back, head at a comical angle, a coy naughty expression catching his face, "dear Aunty, would you like to be the fifth?"
The men in the room laughed so hard, "Ha Ha Ha." He had their loyalty. He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation… Lola, for one of the few times in her life, was the butt of the joke, detested, ridiculous, in the wrong part of town.
"And you know, you won’t be bearing me any sons at your age so I will expect a big dowry. And you’re not much to look at, nothing up" – he patted the front of his khaki shirt – "nothing down" – he patted his behind, which he twisted out of the chair -
"In fact, I have more of both!"
She could hear them laughing as she left.
How did her feet manage to walk? She would thank them all her life.
"Ah, fool," she heard someone say as she made her way down the steps.
The women were laughing at her from the kitchen window. "Look at her expression," one of them said.
They were beautiful girls with hair in silky loops and nose rings in sweet wrinkling noses…
Mon Ami seemed like a supernatural dove of blue-white peace with a wreath of roses in its beak, Lola thought as she passed under the trellis over the gate.
"What happened, what did he say? Did you see him?" Noni asked.
But Lola couldn’t manage to talk to Noni, who had been waiting for her sister to return.
But Lola went into the bathroom and sat trembling on the closed lid of the toilet.
"Joydeep," she screamed silently to her husband, dead so long ago, "look at what you’ve done, you bloody fool!!!"
Her lips stretched out and her mouth was enormous with the extent of her shame.
"Look at what you’ve left me to! Do you know how I have suffered, do you have any idea??? Where are you?! You and your piddling little life, and look what I have to deal with, just look. I don’t even have my decency. "
She held on to her ridiculed old woman’s breasts and shook them. How could she and her sister leave now? If they left, the army would move in. Or squatters claiming squatters’ rights would instigate a court case. They would lose the home that the two of them, Joydeep and Lola, had bought with such false ideas of retirement, sweet peas and mist, cat and books.
The silence rang in the pipes, reached an unbearable pitch, subsided, rose. She wrenched the tap open – not a drop fell – then she twisted the tap viciously shut as if wringing its neck.
Bastard! Never a chink in his certainty, his poise. Never the brains to buy a house in Calcutta – no. No. Not that Joydeep, with his romantic notions of countryside living; with his Wellington boots, binoculars, and bird-watching book; with his Yeats, his Rilke (in German), his Mandelstam (in Russian); in the purply mountains of Kalimpong with his bloody Talisker and his Burberry socks (memento from Scottish holiday of golf+ smoked salmon+ distillery). Joydeep with his old-fashioned gentleman’s charm. He had always walked as if the world were firm beneath his feet and he never suffered a doubt. He was a cartoon. "You were a fool," she screamed at him.
But then, in a moment, quite suddenly, she went weak.
"Your eyes are lovely, dark and deep."
He used to kiss those glistening orbs when he departed to work on his files.
"But I have promises to keep," First one eye then the other -
"And miles to go before I sleep – " "And miles to go before you sleep?"
She would make a duet -
"And miles to go before I sleep."
He would echo.
To the end, and even beyond, he could resurrect the wit that had fired her love when they were not much more than children, after all. "Drink to me only with thine eyes," he had sung to her at their wedding reception, and then they had honeymooned in Europe.