Noni at the door: "Are you all right?"
Loudly, Lola said: "No, I’m not all right. Why don’t you go away?"
"Why don’t you open the door?"
"Go away I tell you, go join the boys in the street whom you are always defending."
"Lola, open the door."
"No."
"Open it."
"Bugger off," said Lola.
"Lola?" said Noni. "I made you a rum and nimboo."
"Bug off," Lola said.
"Well, sister, in any such situation atrocities are committed under cover of a legitimate cause – "
"Bosh."
"But if we forget there is some truth to what they are saying the problems will keep coming. Gorkhas have been used – "
"Cock and bull," she said crudely. "These people aren’t good people. Gorkhas are mercenaries, that’s what they are. Pay them and they are loyal to whatever. There’s no principle involved, Noni. And what is this with the GOrkha? It was always GUrkha. AND then there aren’t even many Gurkhas here – some of course, and some newly retired ones coming in from Hong Kong, but otherwise they are only sherpas, coolies – "
"Anglicized spelling. They’re just changing it to – "
"My left toe! Why are they writing in English if they want to have Nepali taught in schools? These people are just louts, and that’s the truth, Noni, you know it, we all know it."
"I don’t know it."
"Then go and join them like I said. Leave your house, leave your books and your Ovaltine and your long johns. HA! I’d like to see you, you liar and fake."
"I will."
"Go on, then. And after you are done with that, go end up in hell!"
"Hell?" Noni said, rattling the door on the other side of the bathroom door. "Why hell?"
"Because you’ll be committing CRIME, that’s why!" screeched Lola.
Noni returned to sit on the dragon cushions on the sofa. Oh, they had been wrong. The real place had evaded them. The two of them had been fools feeling they were doing something exciting just by occupying this picturesque cottage, by seducing themselves with those old travel books in the library, searching for a certain angled light with which to romance themselves, to locate what had been conjured only as a tale to tell before the Royal Geographic Society, when the author returned to give a talk accompanied by sherry and a scrolled certificate of honor spritzed with gold for an exploration of the far Himalayan kingdoms – but far from what? Exotic to whom? It was the center for the sisters, but they had never treated it as such.
Parallel lives were being led by those – Budhoo, Kesang – for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green. They maintained their camping supplies, their flashlights, mosquito netting, raincoats, hot water bottles, brandy, radio, first-aid kit, Swiss army knife, book on poisonous snakes. These objects were talismans imbued with the task of transforming reality into something otherwise, supplies manufactured by a world that equated them with courage. But, really, they were equivalent to cowardice.
Noni tried to rouse herself. Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.
Thirty-nine
In the end what Sai and Gyan had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn’t forget that.
She remembered the ferocious look he had given her in Darjeeling, warning her to stay away.
One last time after refusing to acknowledge her, Gyan had come to Cho Oyu. He had sat at the table as if in chains.
A few months ago the ardent pursuit and now he behaved as if she had chased and trapped him, tail between his legs, into a cage!
What kind of man was this? she thought. She could not believe she had loved something so despicable. Her kiss had not turned him into a prince; he had morphed into a bloody frog.
"What kind of man are you?" she asked. "Is this any way to behave?"
"I’m confused," he said finally, reluctantly. "I’m only human and sometimes I’m weak. Sorry."
That "Sorry" unleashed a demoness of rage: "At whose expense are you weak and human! You’ll never get anywhere in life, my friend, shouted Sai, "if this is what you think makes an excuse. A murderer could say the same and you think he would be let off the hook to hop in the spring? "
The usual thing happened, exactly what always happened in their fighting. He began to feel irritated, for, really, who was she to lecture him? "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army." He was a martyr, a man; a man, in fact, of ambition, principle.
"I don’t have to listen to this," he said jumping up and storming off abruptly just as she was in powerful flow.
And Sai had cried, for it was the unjust truth.
Marooned during curfew, sick about Gyan, and sick with the desire to be desired, she still hoped for his return. She was bereft of her former skill at solitude.
She waited, read Wuthering Heights twice over, each time the potency of the writing imparting a wild animal feeling to her gut – and twice she read the last pages – still Gyan didn’t come.
A stick insect as big as a small branch climbed the steps.
A beetle with an impolitic red behind.
A dead scorpion being dismantled by ants – first its Popeye arm went by, carried by a line of ant coolies, then the sting and, separately, the eye.
But no Gyan.
She went to visit Uncle Potty. "Ahoy there," he shouted to her from his veranda like a ship’s deck.
But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away.
Seeing her subtracted, Uncle Potty was scared and sang:
You’re the tops
You’re Nap-O-lean Brandy,
You’re the tops
You’re Ma-HAT-ma Gandy!
But her laugh was only another confectionary concocted for his sake, a pretense that their friendship was what it had been.
He had anticipated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art; the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than any simple bovine happiness. Years ago, as a student at Oxford, Uncle Potty had considered himself a lover of love. He looked up the word in the card catalog and brought back armfuls of books; he smoked cheroots, drank port and Madeira, read everything he could from psychology to science to pornography to poetry, Egyptian love letters, ninth century Tamilian erotica… There was the joy of the chase and the joy of the fleeing, and when he set off on practical research trips, he had found pure love in the most sordid of spots, the wrong sides of town where the police didn’t venture; medieval, tunneling streets so narrow you had to pass crabwise past the drug dealers and the whores; where, at night, men he never saw ladled their tongues into his mouth. There had been Louis and André, Guillermo, Rassoul, Johan and Yoshi, and "Humberto Santamaria," he had once shouted atop a mountain in the Lake District for an elegant amour. Some loved him while he didn’t love them; others he loved madly, deeply, and they, they didn’t love him at all. But Sai was up too close to appreciate his perspective.