Sai began to follow brother and sister but then stopped. Shame caught up with her. What had she done? It would be her they would laugh at, a desperate girl who had walked all this way for unrequited love. Gyan would be slapped on the back and cheered for his conquest. She would be humiliated. He had hit on the age-old trick that remade him into a hero, "the desired male"… The more he insulted her behind her back – "Oh, that crazy girl is following me…" – the more the men would cheer, the more his status would grow at Thapa’s Canteen, the more Sai would be remade behind her back into a lunatic female, the more Gyan would fatten with pride… She felt her own dignity departing, watched it from far away as Gyan and his sister walked down the path. As they turned into their house, it vanished as well.
She walked home very slowly, sick, sick. The mist was thickening, smoke adding to the dusk and the vapor. The smell of potatoes cooking came from busti houses all along the way, a smell that would surely connote comfort to souls across the world, but that couldn’t comfort her. She felt none of the pity she’d felt earlier while contemplating this scene; even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her…
When she arrived home she saw two people on the veranda talking to the cook and the judge.
A woman was pleading: "Who do you go to when you’re poor? People like us have to suffer. All the goondas come out and the police go hand in hand with them."
"Who are you?"
It was the wife, begging for mercy, of the drunk the police had caught and questioned about the gun robbery and on whom they had practiced their new torture strategy. They, at Cho Oyu, had forgotten about this man, but the man’s wife had traced the connection and she’d come with her father-in-law to see the judge, walking half a day from a village across the Relli River.
"What will we do?" she begged. "We are not even Nepalis, we are Lepchas… He was innocent and the police have blinded him. He knew nothing about you, he was in the market as usual, everyone knows," sobbed the wife, looking to her father-in-law for help.
What use is it for a woman to protest and cry?
But her father-in-law was too scared. He said nothing at all, just stood there; his expression couldn’t be told apart from his wrinkles. His son, when he was not drinking, had worked to rebuild the roads in the district, filling stones from the Teesta riverbed into contractors’ trucks, unloading them at building sites, clearing landslides that tumbled over and over in the same eternal motion as the river coming down. His son’s wife worked on the highways as well, but no work was being done now that the GNLF had closed down the roads.
"Why come to me? Go to the police. They are the ones who caught your husband, not I. It’s not my fault," said the judge, alarmed into eloquence. "You had better leave from here."
"You can’t send this woman to the police," said the cook, "they’ll probably assault her."
The woman looked raped and beaten already. Her clothes were very soiled and her teeth resembled a row of rotten corn kernels, some of them missing, some blackened, and she was quite bent from carrying stone – common sight, this sort of woman in the hills. Some foreigners had actually photographed her as proof of horror…
"George!…! George!" said a shocked wife to her husband with a camera.
And he had leaned out of the car: Click! "Got it, babe…!"
"Help us," she begged.
The judge seemed suddenly to remember his personality, stiffened, and said nothing, set his mouth in a mask, would look neither left nor right, went back to his game of chess.
In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. He was embarrassed by the attention that was being drawn to his humiliation yet again, the setting of the table with the tablecloth, the laughter, the robbery of the rifles that had never contributed to a fast-forward death ballet come duck season.
Now, typically, the mess had grown.
This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority. He had done his duty as far as it was any citizen’s duty to report problems to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a bit and one could find oneself supporting the whole family forever after, a constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food, the husband might be blind and with broken legs, and the woman might be anemic and bent, but they’d still pop out an infant every nine months. If you let such people get an inch, they’d take everything you had – the families yoked together because of guilt on one side, and an unending greed and capacity for dependance on the other – and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.
The cook looked at the man and woman and sighed.
They looked at Sai. "Didi…, "the woman said. Her eyes were too devastated to look at directly.
Sai turned away and told herself she didn’t care.
She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favored her she would, perhaps, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth in their own image, a perfect devilish student to the devil gods…
It took a while for them to leave. They went and sat outside the gate, the cook forced to herd them out like cows, and then for a long while they squatted down on their haunches and didn’t move, just stared emotionless, as if drained of hope and initiative.
They watched the judge taking Mutt for her walk and feeding her. He was angry and embarrassed that they were watching. Why didn’t they GO!
"Tell them to leave or else we’ll call the police," he told the cook.
"Jao, jao," the cook said, "jao jao," through the gate, but they only retreated up the hill, behind the bushes and settled back down with the same blank look on their faces.
Sai climbed to her room, slammed the door, and flung herself at her reflection in the mirror:
What will happen to me?!
Gyan would find adulthood and purity in a quest for a homeland and she would be left forever adolescent, trapped in shameful dramatics. This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot…
She cried for a while, tears taking on their own momentum, but despite herself the image of the begging woman came back. She went downstairs and asked the cook: "Did you give them anything?"
"No," said the cook, also miserable. "What can you do," he said flatly, as if giving an answer, not asking a question.
Then he went back out with a sack of rice. "Hss sss hsss? " he hissed.
But by this time the pair had vanished.
Forty-one
The sky over Manhattan was messy, lots of stuff in it, branches and pigeons and choppy clouds lit with weird yellow light. The wind blew strongly and the pink pom-poms of the cherry trees in Riverside Park swished against the unsettled mix.
The unease that had followed Biju’s phone call to Kalimpong was no longer something in the pit of his stomach; it had grown so big, he was in its stomach.
He had tried to telephone again the next day and the day after, but the line was quite dead now.
"More trouble," said Mr. Iype. "It will go on for a while. Very violent people. All those army types…"