Somewhere, in the course of those dusky years, a second telegram arrived, the telegram that preceded the telegram about Sai’s impending arrival at Cho Oyu.
A woman had caught fire over a stove.
Oh, this country, people exclaimed, glad to fall into the usual sentences, where human life was cheap, where standards were shoddy, where stoves were badly made and cheap saris caught fire as easily -
– as a woman you wanted dead or -
– well, as a woman who wanted to kill herself -
– without a witness, without a case -
– so simple, a single movement of the hand -
– and for the police, a case so simple, just another quick movement of the hand -
– the rupees made an oiled movement between palms -
"Oh thank you, sir," said a policeman.
"Nothing to thank me for," said the brother-in-law.
And in a blink of an eye you could have missed the entire thing.
The judge chose to believe it was an accident.
Ashes have no weight, they tell no secrets, they rise too lightly for guilt; too lightly for gravity, they float upward and, thankfully, disappear.
These years were blurry for many, and when they came out of them, exhausted, the whole world had changed, there were gaps in everything – what had happened in their own families, what had happened elsewhere, what filth had occurred like an epidemic everywhere in a world that was now full of unmarked graves – they didn’t look, because they couldn’t afford to examine the past. They had to grasp the future with everything they had.
One true thing Jemubhai learned: a human can be transformed into anything. It was possible to forget and sometimes essential to do so.
Now Jemubhai wondered if he had killed his wife for the sake of false ideals. Stolen her dignity, shamed his family, shamed hers, turned her into the embodiment of their humiliation. Even they couldn’t accept her then, and her life could only be useless after that, and his daughter could only be useless and absurd. He had condemmed the girl to convent boarding schools, relieved when she reached a new height of uselessness and absurdity by eloping with a man who had grown up in an orphanage. Not even the relatives expected him to pay any attention to her again -
He hadn’t liked his wife, but that was no excuse, was it?
Then he remembered a moment long ago when he had indeed liked her. He was twenty, she fourteen. The place was Piphit and they were on a bicycle, traversing gloriously down a slope through cow pats.
Sai had arrived so many years later, and though he had never properly admitted the fact to himself, he knew he hoped an unacknowledged system of justice was beginning to erase his debts.
"Mutt," his voice splintered. "My funny love. My naughty love. My funny naughty love." Over the mountains he went searching.
… Joined by Sai and the cook.
When Mutt went missing, Sai, who had hidden her loss of Gyan first in a cold and then in the madness of the hillside, found a disguise so perfect, even she was confused as to the origin of her misery. "Mutt Mutty Mutton chop," she yodeled wildly, in a way she could never ever have publicly proclaimed her own unhappiness. She felt grateful for the greatness of this landscape, walked on trying to recover the horizon – for it felt as if the space bequeathed her at the end of a romance that had promised a wide vista – well, it was nonexistent. Sadness was so claustrophobic.
The cook was walking, too, shouting, "MUTTY," his worry over his son gloved in Mutt’s vanishing, "MUTTY." He was talking to his fate – his hand was out, his palm was open, the letter, it had not come.
Fifty
"No bus to Kalimpong. "
"Why not?"
It was in the newspaper, wasn’t it? The man at the Siliguri bus station had been surprised at Biju’s ignorance. On TV? In every conversation? In the air?
Then the problems were continuing?
Worsening. How could he not know? Where had he come from?
From America. No newspaper, no phone…
He nodded, then, in sympathy.
But: "No vehicles going to Kalimpong. Things are very tense, bhai. There was shooting there. Everyone has gone crazy."
Biju became insistent. "I have to go. My father is there…"
"Can’t go. There’s no way. There’s an emergency situation and they’ve put up roadblocks, spread Mobil oil and nails all over the streets – roads are completely closed."
Biju sat on his belongings in the bus station until the man finally took pity on him.
"Listen," he said, "go to Panitunk and you might find some vehicle from there, but it’s very dangerous. You will have to beg the GNLF men."
Biju waited there for four days until a GNLF jeep was leaving. They were renting extra seats for extortionary amounts.
"No room," the men told him.
He opened his new wallet to dollars.
He paid. Abraham Lincoln, in God we trust… The men had never seen American money, passed the bills around and studied them.
"But you can’t take so much luggage."
He paid some more, they piled his cases onto the roof and banded them with rope, and then they left, riding high on the thin road above the flooded fields, through the incandescence of young rice and banana, through a wildlife sanctuary with giant signs, "DO NOT DISTURB THE WILD ANIMALS," hammered onto the trees. He felt so light-hearted to be back, even this journey with these men didn’t unsettle him. He poked his head out and looked up at his bags to make sure they were still properly fastened.
The road tilted, barely a ledge over the Teesta, an insane river, he remembered, leaping both backward and forward within each moment. Biju hung on to the metal frame of the jeep as it maneuvered through ridged gullies and ruts and over rocks – there were more holes in the road than there was road and everything from his liver to his blood was getting a good shake. He looked down over at oblivion, hurried his vision back to the gouged bank. Death was so close – he had forgotten this in his eternal existence in America – this constant proximity of one’s nearest destination.
So, hanging tightly on to the metal carapace, they twisted uphill. There were many butterflies of myriad varieties, and when it rained a bit, the butterflies disappeared. The rain stopped and they returned; another little spasm, and they vanished again. Clouds blew in and out of the jeep, obscuring the men from one another every now and again. All along, the frogs sang lustily. There were at least a dozen landslides on the road between Siliguri and Kalimpong, and as they waited for them to be cleared, vendors came by offering momos in buckets, coconuts cut into triangle slices. This was where his father lived and where he had visited him and where they had hatched the plot to send him to America, and Biju had, in his innocence, done just what his father had, in his own innocence, told him to do. What could his father have known? This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.
Fifty-one
The judge, exhausted from waiting, fell asleep and dreamed that Mutt was dying – for a moment she came out of a delirium, gave him a familiar look, wagged with a heroic effort, and then, in a second it was gone, the soul behind the eyes.
"Mutt?" The judge bent toward her, searching for a nicker.
"No," said the cook, also in the judge’s dream, "she’s dead, look," he insisted with an air of finality, and he lifted one of Mutt’s legs and let it go. It didn’t snap back. It settled slowly. She was stiffening, and he flicked her with his nails, but she didn’t flinch.