How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and a small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together.
Now he did and crying, continued crawling his way back to Cho Oyu, hiding in the bushes as he was passed by army tanks rolling down from the cantonment area into the town. Instead of foreign enemies, instead of the Chinese they had been preparing for, building their hatred against, they must fight their own people…
This place, this market where he had bargained contentedly over potatoes, and insulted, yes insulted, the fruit wallah with happy impunity, enjoyed the rude words about decayed produce that flew from his lips; this place where he had with utter safety genuinely lost his temper with the deaf tailors, the inept plumber, the tardy baker with the cream horns; this place where he had resided secure in the knowledge that this was basically a civilized place where there was room for them all; where he had existed in what seemed a sweetness of crabbiness – was showing him now that he had been wrong. He wasn’t wanted in Kalimpong and he didn’t belong.
At this moment, a fear overtook him that he might never see his son again -
The letters that had come all these years were only his own hope writing to him. Biju was just a habit of thought. He didn’t exist. Could he?
Forty-four
The incidents of horror grew, through the changing of the seasons, through winter and a flowery spring, summer, then rain and winter again. Roads were closed, there was curfew every night, and Kalimpong was trapped in its own madness. You couldn’t leave the hillsides; nobody even left their houses if they could help it but stayed locked in and barricaded.
If you were a Nepali reluctant to join in, it was bad. The Metal-Box watchman had been beaten, forced to repeat "Jai Gorkha," and dragged to Mahakala Temple to swear an oath of loyalty to the cause.
If you weren’t Nepali it was worse.
If you were Bengali, people who had known you your whole life wouldn’t acknowledge you in the street.
Even the Biharis, Tibetans, Lepchas, and Sikkimese didn’t acknowledge you. They, the unimportant shoals of a minority population, the small powerless numbers that might be caught up in either net, wanted to put the Bengalis on the other side of the argument from themselves, delineate them as the enemy.
"All these years," said Lola, "I’ve been buying eggs at that Tshering’s shop down the road, and the other day he looked at me right in the face and said he had none. ‘I see a basket of them right there,’ I said, ‘how can you tell me you have none?’ ‘They have been presold,’ he said.
"Pem Pem," Lola had exclaimed on her way out, seeing her friend Mrs. Thondup’s daughter come in. Just a few months ago Lola and Noni had partaken of fine civilities in her home that had harkened to another kind of life in another place, quail eggs with bamboo shoots, fat Tibetan carpets under their toes.
"Pem Pem??"
Pem Pem gave Lola a beseeching embarrassed look and rushed past.
"All of a sudden wrong side, no?" said Lola, "There is nobody who won’t abandon you."
On the ledge below Mon Ami, among the row of illegal huts, the sisters had noticed a small temple flying a red and gold flag, ensuring that no matter what, into eternity, no official – police, government, nobody – would dare dispute the legitimacy of the landgrab. The gods themselves had blessed it now. Little shrines were springing up all over Kalimpong, adjoining constructions forbidden by the municipality – squatter genius. And the trespassers were tapping phone lines, water pipes, electric lines in jumbles of illegal connections. The trees that provided Lola and Noni with pears, so many that they had cursed it, "Stewed pears and cream, stewed pears and cream every damn day!" had been stripped overnight. The broccoli patch was gone, the area near the gate was being used as a bathroom. Little children lined up in rows to spit at Lola and Noni as they walked by, and when Kesang, their maid, was bitten by one of the sqatter’s dogs, she screamed away, "Look your dog has bitten me, now you must put oil and turmeric on the wound so I don’t die from an infection."
But they just laughed.
The GNLF boys had burned down the government rest house by the river, beyond the bridge where Father Booty had photographed the polka-dotted butterfly. In fact, forest inspection bungalows all over the district were burning, upon whose verandas generations of ICS men had stood and admired the serenity, the hovering, angelic peace of dawn and dusk in the mountains.
The circuit house was burned, and the house of the chief minister’s niece. Detonators set off landslides as negotiations went nowhere. Kalimpong was transformed into a ghost town, the wind tumbling around the melancholy streets, garbage flying by unhindered. Whatever point the GNLF might have had, it was severely out of hand; even one man’s anger, in those days, seemed enough to set the hillside alight.
Women rushed by on the roads. The men trembled at home for fear of being picked up, being tortured on any kind of flimsy excuse, the GNLF accusing them of being police informers, the police accusing them of being militants. It was dangerous to drive even for those who might, for a car was just a trap; vehicles were being surrounded and stolen; they could be more nimble on their feet, hide in the jungle at the sound of trouble, wade through the jhoras and make their way home on footpaths. Anyway, after a while, there was no more fuel because the GNLF boys had siphoned off the last of it, and the pumps were closed.
The cook tried to calm himself by repeating, "It will be all right, everything goes through a bad time, the world goes in a cycle, bad things happen, pass, and things are once again good…" But his voice had more pleading in it than conviction, more hope than wisdom.
After this – after the gun robbery and after the parade, after his seeing the frailty of his life here as a non-Nepali – he couldn’t manage to compose himself properly; there was nobody, nothing – but a sinister presence loomed – he was sure something even worse stood around the corner. Where was Biju, where was he? He leaped at every shadow.
So, it was usually Sai who walked to the shuttered market searching for a shop with a half open back door signaling quick secret business, or a cardboard sign propped at the window of a hut of someone selling a handful of peanuts or a few eggs.
Excepting these meager purchases Sai made, the garden was feeding them almost entirely. For the first time, they in Cho Oyu were eating the real food of the hillside. Dalda saag, pink-flowered, flat-leafed; bhutiya dhaniya growing copiously around the cook’s quarter; the new tendrils of squash or pumpkin vine; curled ningro fiddleheads, churbi cheese and bamboo shoots sold by women who appeared from behind bushes on forest paths with the cheese wrapped in ferns and the yellow slices of bamboo shoots in buckets of water. After the rains, mushrooms pushed their way up, sweet as chicken and glorious as Kanchenjunga, so big, fanning out. People collected the oyster mushrooms in Father Booty’s abandoned garden. For a while the smell of them cooking gave the town the surprising air of wealth and comfort.