One day, when Sai arrived home with a kilo of damp atta and some potatoes, she found two figures, familiar from a previous occasion, on the veranda, pleading with the cook and judge.
"Please, sahib…" It was the same wife and father of the tortured man.
"Oh no," the cook had said in horror when he saw them, "oh no, baap re, what are you coming here for?" although he knew.
It was the impoverished who walked the line so thin it was questionable if it existed, an imaginary line between the insurgents and the law, between being robbed (who would listen to them if they went to the police?) and being hunted by the police as scapegoats for the crimes of others.
They were hungriest.
"Why are you coming here making trouble? We already told you we had nothing to do with the police picking up your husband. We were hardly the ones to accuse him or beat him… Had they told us, we would have gone at once and said this is not the man… we were not informed… What do we owe you?" said the cook. But he was giving them the atta Sai had brought back… when the judge barked, "Don’t give them anything," and continued his chess game.
"Please, sahib," they begged with hands folded, heads bent. "Who comes to our help? Can we live on no food at all? We will be your servants forever… God will repay you… God will reward you…"
But the judge was adamant.
Again, herded out, they sat outside the gate.
"Tell them to go," he told the cook.
"Jao jao," said the cook, although he was concerned that they might need to rest before having to walk another five to six hours through the forest to their village.
Again they moved and sat farther up so as not to give offense. Again they saw Mutt. She was attached by her snout to her favorite whiffy spot, unaware of anything else. The woman suddenly brightened and said to the man, "Sell that kind of dog and you can get a lot of money…" Mutt didn’t budge from the smell for a long, long time. If the judge hadn’t been there, they could have reached out – and grabbed her.
Some days later, when they at Cho Oyu had again forgotten these two unimportant if upsetting people, they returned.
But they didn’t come to the gate; they secreted themselves immediately in the jhora ravine and waited for Mutt, that connoisseur of smells, to appear for her daily round of the property. Rediscovering scents and enhancing them was an ever evolving art form. She was involved with an old favorite, grown better with age, that brought forth certain depths and facets of her personality. She was wholly absorbed, didn’t notice the intruders who crept up to her and pounced!
Startled, she yelped, but immediately they clamped her muzzle with hands strong from physical labor.
The judge was having his bucket bath, the cook was churning butter, Sai was in her bed whispering venomously, "Gyan, you bastard, you think I’m going to cry over you?" They didn’t see or hear a thing.
The trespassers lifted Mutt up, bound her with rope, and put her in a sack. The man slung the sack over his shoulders, and they carried her through town without drawing any attention to themselves. They walked around the mountainside, then all the way down and across the Relli and over three ridges that billowed like blue-green ocean, to a small hamlet that was far from any paved road.
"You don’t think they’ll find us?" the father asked his daughter-in-law.
"They won’t walk so far and they can’t drive here. They don’t know our names, they don’t know our village, they asked us no questions."
She was right.
Even the police hadn’t bothered to find out the name of the man they had beaten and blinded. They would hardly bother to look for a dog.
Mutt was healthy, they noticed, when they pinched her through the sack; fat and ready to make them a little money. "Or maybe we can use her to breed and then we can sell the puppies…" (They didn’t know, of course, that she had been fixed long ago by a visiting vet when she was beginning to attract love from all kinds of scurrilous loafers on the hillside, wheedling strays, conniving gentleman dogs…)
"Should we take her out of the sack?"
"Better leave her in for now. She’ll just start barking…"
Forty-five
Like a failing bus laboring through the sky, the Gulf Air plane seemed barely to be managing, though most of the passengers felt immediately comfortable with this lack of oomph. Oh yes, they were going home, knees cramped, ceiling level at their heads, sweat-gluey, fate-resigned, but happy.
The first stop was Heathrow and they crawled out at the far end that hadn’t been renovated for the new days of globalization but lingered back in the old age of colonization.
All the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European – North American travelers came and went, making those brisk no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named The Milano.
Frankfurt. The planeload spent the night in a similar quarantined zone, a thousand souls stretched out as if occupying a morgue, even their faces covered to block the buzzing tube lights.
Like a bus, New York-London-Frankfurt-Abu Dhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta, the plane stopped again to allow men from the Gulf countries to clamber on. They came racing – Quick! Quick!… Quick!! – unzipping their carry-ons for the Scotch, drinking straight from the bottle’s mouth. Crooked little ice crystals formed on the plane window. Inside, it was hot. Biju ate his tray of chicken curry, spinach and rice, strawberry ice cream, rinsed his mouth into the empty ice-cream cup, then tried to get another dinner. "As it is we are short," the stewardesses said, harassed by the men, drunk and hooting, pinching them as they passed, calling them by name, "Sheila! Raveena! Kusum! Nandita!"
Added to the smell of sweat, there was now the thick odor of food and cigarettes, the recycled breathing of an entire plane, the growing fetor of the bathroom.
In the mirror of this bathroom, Biju saluted himself. Here he was, on his way home, without name or knowledge of the American president, without the name of the river on whose bank he had lingered, without even hearing about any of the tourist sights – no Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, Little Italy, Brooklyn Bridge, Museum of Immigration; no bialy at Barney Greengrass, soupy dumpling at Jimmy’s Shanghai, no gospel churches of Harlem tour. He returned over the lonely ocean and he thought that this kind of perspective could only make you sad. Now, he promised himself, he would forget the insight, begin anew. He would buy a taxi. His savings were small, collected in his shoe, his sock, his underwear, through all these years, but he thought he could manage it. He’d drive up and down the mountainside on market days, gold tinsel, gods above the dashboard, a comical horn, PAWpumPOMpaw or TWEE-deee-deee DEE-TWEE-deee-deee. And he’d build a house with solid walls, a roof that wouldn’t fly off every monsoon season. Biju played the scene of meeting his father again and again like a movie in his head, wept a bit at the thought of so much happiness and emotion. They’d sit out in the evenings, drink chhang, tell jokes of the kind he had overheard on the plane being exchanged by drunk men: