"Don’t touch her! I’ll kill you!" screamed the judge aloud, waking himself up, convinced by the logic of his dream.
The next day when he came back from another fruitless search, he repeated the words. "If you don’t find her RIGHT NOW," he said, shrilly, to the cook, "I’LL KILL YOU. That’s it. I’ve had enough. It’s your fault. It was your responsibility to watch her when I went for my bath."
Here was the difference: the cook had been fond of Mutt. He had taken her for walks, made toast for her breakfast with an egg in the wintertime, made her stew, called to her, "Mutty, Ishtu, Ishtoo," but it was clear, always, that she was just an animal to him.
The judge and his cook had lived together for more years than they had with anyone else, practically in the same room, closer to each other than to any other human being and – nothing, zero, no understanding.
It was so long since Mutt had gone missing. She would be dead now if she’d been bitten by a snake or she’d have starved to death if lost or injured far away.
"But FIND OUT," he told the cook. "FIND HER. RIGHT NOW."
"How, how can I, sahib?" He begged… "I am trying, I have tried…"
"FIND HER. It’s your fault. Mutt was in your care! I will KILL YOU. Wait and see. You didn’t do your duty. You didn’t watch over her. It was your duty and you let her be stolen. How dare you? How dare you??"
The cook wondered if he had done something wrong and his guilt began to grow. Had he indeed been negligent? He had failed in his duty, hadn’t he? He hadn’t looked hard enough. He hadn’t shown respect. He should have been watching the dog the day she went missing…
He began to weep without looking at anyone or anything and disappeared into the forest.
It occurred to him as he stumbled about that he’d done something so awful, he’d be paid back by fate and something even more awful would happen -
Sai now walked up and down the path shouting into the trees for the cook: "Come home, it’s all right, he doesn’t mean it, he is so sad he’s crazy, he doesn’t know what he’s saying…"
The judge was drinking on the veranda and telling himself he felt no remorse, he was perfectly justified in what he had said to the cook… Of course he was! I’ll kill you!
"Where are you?" called Sai, walking under the Milky Way, which, she had read in My Vanishing Tribe, the Lepchas called Zo-lungming, "world of rice."
Uncle Potty called out – "Did you find the dog?"
"No, and now the cook has also gone."
"He’ll be back. Join me for a tipple?"
But she continued.
The cook didn’t hear her because he had stumbled into Thapa’s Canteen, full of men drinking, spending the dregs of their money. He told them what had happened and it made them laugh, a bit of humor in these frightening days. Dog died! The hilarity spread. They could barely stop laughing. In a place where people died without being given any attention. They died of TB, hepatitis, leprosy, plain old fever… And no jobs, no work, nothing to eat – this commotion over a dog! Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
"It’s not something funny," said the cook, but he laughed a bit, too, out of relief that this was clearly humorous, but then he felt worse, doubly guilty, and he resumed his mewling. He had ignored his duty… Why hadn’t he watched that kutti…
In a corner of Thapa’s Canteen was Gyan, who had been let out of the house again. He wasn’t laughing. Oh, that awful day when he had told the boys about the judge’s guns. What, after all, had Sai done to him? The guilt took over again and he felt dizzy and nauseous. When the cook left, he went out after him.
"I haven’t been coming for tuition because of all this trouble… How is Sai?" he mumbled.
"She is very worried about the dog. She is crying all the time."
"Tell her that I will look for Mutt."
"How will you?"
"Tell her that I promise. I will find the dog. Don’t worry at all. Be sure and tell her. I will find Mutt and bring her to the house."
He uttered this sentence with a conviction that had nothing to do with Mutt or his ability to find her.
The cook looked at him suspiciously. He hadn’t been impressed by Gyan’s capabilities. In fact, Sai herself had told the cook that her tutor was not very bright.
But again Gyan nodded his assurance. Next time he saw Sai, he would have a present for her.
Fifty-two
Biju hadn’t seen such vastness in a long time – the sheer, overwhelming enormity of mountainside and scree coming down the flank of it. In places, the entire mountain had simply fallen out of itself, spread like a glacier with boulders, uprooted trees. Across the destruction, the precarious ant trail of the road was washed away. He felt exhilarated by the immensity of wilderness, by the lunatic creepers, the shooting hooting abundance of green, the great caterwauling vulgarity of frogs that was like the sound of the earth and the air itself. But the problems of the road were tedious. So, feeling patient in the way one feels before the greatness of nature, impatient in the way one feels with human details, he waited to see his father. The work of recarving a path through this ruin was, of course, usually contracted to teams of hunchbacked midget men and women, rebuilding things stone by stone, putting it all together again each time their work was rent apart, carrying rocks and mud in wicker baskets attached to bands around their foreheads, staggering loony with the weight, pounding on hulking river boulders over and over for hours with hammers and chisels until a bit chipped off, then another bit. They laid out the stones and the surface was tarred again – Biju remembered how, as a child, his father had always made him walk across newly spread pitch whenever they encountered some, in order to reinforce, he said, the thin soles of Biju’s shoes. Now that the government had suspended repairs, the GNLF men in the jeep were forced to clamber out themselves and roll boulders aside, remove fallen tree trunks, shovel clods of earth… They went through seven landslides. At the eighth they kept getting mired in the mud, the jeep rolling back down.
They backed up, needing space to rev up the engine and gather enough momentum to get over the ruts and the unmade soil and drove forward again at high speed. Again and again the engine stalled and shut off and they rolled back down. Backed up and went whroom whroom whroom-ing!…
They got out again, all of them except the driver, untied the luggage, and piled it on the mud. Finally, on the eleventh try, backing up a good long way and rushing, engine surging – the jeep went flustering over, and they applauded with relief, piled up the bags again, clambered in, and went on. They were almost a whole day into a journey that should have taken two hours. Surely they would soon arrive.
Then they veered off onto a smaller road, even harder to traverse.
"Is this the Kalimpong road?" Biju asked, bewildered.
"We have to drop some men off first… Detour."
Hours passed… The ninth landslide and the tenth.
"But when will we reach Kalimpong?" asked Biju. "Will we reach it by night?"
"Calm down, bhai." They didn’t seem worried, although the sun was sinking fast and a cool damp darkness spilled from the jungle.
It was late evening by the time they reached a few small huts along a dirt track of churned mud and deep puddles of water. The men got out and took down all their belongings, including Biju’s boxes and cases.