Uncle Potty scratched his feet so the dead skin flew: "Once you start scratching, my dear, you cannot stop…"
When Sai next went to Mon Ami, they laughed and guessed, glad for a bit of fun in the midst of trouble: "Who is the lucky boy? Tall and fair and handsome?"
"And rich?" Noni said. "Let’s hope he’s rich?"
Fortunately, though, a single bit of luck fell on Sai and shrouded this fall of her dignity. Her rescuer was the common domestic cold. Heroically, it caught her common domestic grief in the nick of time, muddled the origin of her streaming eyes and sore throat, shuffled the symptoms of virus and disgraceful fall from the tightrope of splendrous love. Shielded thus from simple diagnosis, she enveloped her face in the copious folds of a man’s handkerchief. "A cold!" Whonk whonk. One part common cold to nine parts common grief. Lola and Noni prepared toddies of honey, lemon, rum, hot water.
"Sai, you look terrible, terrible."
Her eyes were red and raw, spilling over. Pressure weighed downward like a gestapo boot on her brain.
Back in Cho Oyu, the cook rummaged in the medicine drawer for the Coldrin and the Vicks Vaporub. He found a silk scarf for her throat, and Sai hung in the hot and cold excitement of Vicks, buffeted by arctic winds of eucalyptus, still feeling the perpetual gnawing urgency and intensity of waiting, of hope living on without sustenance. It must feed on itself. It would drive her mad.
Was her affection for Gyan just a habit? How on earth could she think of someone so much?
The more she did, the more she did, the more she did.
Summoning her strength, she spoke directly to her heart. "Oh why must you behave so badly?"
But it wouldn’t soften its stance.
There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to – everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life.
The giant squid, the last dodo.
One morning, her cold on the wane, she realized her excuse would no longer hold. As curfew was lifted, in order to salvage her dignity, Sai started out on the undignified mission of searching for Gyan.
Forty
He wasn’t anywhere in the market, not in the music and video shop where Rinzy and Tin Tin Dorji rented out exhausted tapes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies.
"No, haven’t seen him," said Dawa Bhutia sticking his head out from the steam of cabbage cooking in the Chin Li Restaurant kitchen.
"Isn’t in yet," said Tashi at the Snow Lion, who had closed down the travel side of the business, what with the lack of tourists, and set up a pool table. The posters still hung on the walls: "Experience the grandeur of the Raj; come to Sikkim, land of over two hundred monasteries." Locked at the back, he still had the treasures he took out to sell to the wealthier traveler: a rare thangkha of lamas sailing on magical sea beasts to spread the dharma to China; a nobleman’s earring; a jade cup smuggled from a Tibetan monastery, so transparent the light shone through making a green and black stormy cloudscape. "Tragic what is happening in Tibet," the tourists would say, but their faces showed only glee in the booty. "Only twenty-five dollars!"
But now he was forced to depend on local currency. Tashi’s retarded cousin was running back and forth carrying bottles between Gompu’s and the pool table, so the men could continue drinking as they played and talked of the movement. A sud of vomit lay all around.
Sai walked by the deserted classrooms of Kalimpong college, dead insects boiled in piles against rimy windows, bees noosed by spiders’ silk, blackboard still with its symbols and calculations. Here, in this chloroformed atmosphere, Gyan had studied. She walked around to the other side of the mountain that overlooked the Relli River and Bong Busti, where he lived. It was two hours downhill to his house in a poor part of Kalimpong quite foreign to her.
He had told her the story of his brave ancestors in the army, but why didn’t he ever speak of his family here and now? In the back of her mind, Sai knew she should stay home, but she couldn’t stop herself.
She walked by several churches: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals. The old English church stood at the town’s heart, the Americans at the edge, but then the new ones had more money and more tambourine spirit, and they were catching up fast. Perfect practitioners, too, of the hide-behind-the-tree-and-pop-out technique to surprise those who might have run away; of the salwar kameez disguise (all the better to gobble you up, my dear…); and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear…), that was it – they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba.
But Sai walked by unmolested. The churches were dark; the missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace.
She passed by fields and small clusters of houses, became confused in a capillary web of paths that crisscrossed the mountains, perpendicular as creepers, dividing and petering into more paths leading to huts perched along eyebrow-width ledges in the thick bamboo. Tin roofs promised tetanus; outhouses gestured into the ether so that droppings would fall into the valley. Bamboo cleaved in half carried water to patches of corn and pumpkin, and wormlike tubes attached to pumps led from a stream to the shacks. They looked pretty in the sun, these little homes, babies crawling about with bottoms red through pants with the behinds cut out so they could do their susu and potty; fuschia and roses – for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it.
Sai knew that once the day failed, though, you wouldn’t be able to ignore the poverty, and it would become obvious that in these homes it was cramped and wet, the smoke thick enough to choke you, the inhabitants eating meagerly in the candlelight too dim to see by, rats and snakes in the rafters fighting over insects and birds’ eggs. You knew that rain collected down below and made the earth floor muddy, that all the men drank too much, reality skidding into nightmares, brawls, and beating.
A woman holding a baby passed by. The woman smelled of earth and smoke and an oversweet intense smell came from the baby, like corn boiling.
"Do you know where Gyan lives?" Sai asked.
She pointed at a house just ahead; there it stood and Sai felt a moment of shock.
It was a small, slime-slicked cube; the walls must have been made with cement corrupted by sand, because it came spilling forth from pock-marks as if from a punctured bag.
Crows’ nests of electrical wiring hung from the corners of the structure, split into sections that disappeared into windows barred with thin jail grill. She could smell an open drain that told immediately of a sluggish plumbing system failing anew each day despite being so rudimentary. The drain ran from the house under a rough patchwork of stones and emptied over the property that was marked with barbed wire, and from under this wire came a perturbed harem of sulfurous hens being chased by a randy rooster.
The upper story of the house was unfinished, presumably abandoned for lack of funds, and, while waiting to stockpile enough to resume building, it had fallen into disrepair; no walls and no roof, just a few posts with iron rods sprouting from the top to provide a basic sketch of what was to have followed. An attempt had been made to save the rods from rust with upturned soda bottles, but they were bright orange anyway.