Lying on his basement shelf that night, he thought of his village where he had lived with his grandmother on the money his father sent each month. The village was buried in silver grasses that were taller than a man and made a sound, shuu shuuuu, shu shuuu, as the wind turned them this way and that. Down a dry gully through the grasses, you reached a tributary of the Jamuna where you could watch men traveling downstream on inflated buffalo skins, the creatures’ very dead legs, all four, sticking straight up as they sailed along, and where the river scalloped shallow over the stones, they got out and dragged their buffalo skin boats over. Here, at this shallow place, Biju and his grandmother would cross on market trips into town and back, his grandmother with her sari tucked up, sometimes a sack of rice on her head. Fishing eagles hovered above the water, changed their horizontal glide within a single moment, plunged, rose sometimes with a thrashing muscle of silver. A hermit also lived on this bank, positioned like a stork, waiting, oh waiting, for the glint of another, an elusive mystical fish; when it surfaced he must pounce lest it be lost again and never return… On Diwali the holy man lit lamps and put them in the branches of the peepul tree and sent them down the river on rafts with marigolds – how beautiful the sight of those lights bobbing in that young dark. When he had visited his father in Kalimpong, they had sat outside in the evenings and his father had reminisced: "How peaceful our village is. How good the roti tastes there! It is because the atta is ground by hand, not by machine… and because it is made on a choolah, better than anything cooked on a gas or a kerosene stove… Fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk still warm from the buffalo…" They had stayed up late. They hadn’t noticed Sai, then aged thirteen, staring from her bedroom window, jealous of the cook’s love for his son. Small red-mouthed bats drinking from the jhora had swept over again and again in a witch flap of black wings.
Eighteen
"Oh, bat, bat," said Lola, panicking, as one swooped by her ear with its high-pitched choo choo.
"What does it matter, just a bit of shoe leather flying about," said Noni, looking, in her pale summer sari, as if she were a blob of melting vanilla ice cream…
"Oh shut up," said Lola.
"It’s too hot and stuffy," Lola said then, by way of apology to her sister. The monsoon must be on its way.
It was just two months after Gyan had arrived to teach Sai, and Sai had at first confused the tension in the air with his presence.
But now everyone was complaining. Uncle Potty sat limply. "It’s building. Early this year. Better get me rum in, dolly, before the old boy is maroooooned."
Lola sipped a Disprin that fizzed and hopped in the water.
When the papers, too, reported the approach of storm clouds, she became quite merry: "I told you. I can always tell. I’ve always been very sensitive. You know how I am – the princess and the pea – my dear, what can I say – the princess and the pea."
At Cho Oyu, the judge and Sai sat out on the lawn. Mutt, catching sight of the shadow of her own tail, leapt and caught it, began to whizz around and around, confused as to whose tail it was. She would not let go, but her eyes expressed confusion and beseeching – how could she stop? what should she do? – she had caught a strange beast and didn’t know it was herself. She went skittering helplessly about the garden.
"Silly girl," said Sai.
"Little pearl," said the judge when Sai left, in case Mutt’s feelings had been bruised.
Then, in a flash, it was upon them. An anxious sound came from the banana trees as they began to flap their great ears for they were always the first to sound the alarm. The masts of bamboo were flung together and rang with the sound of an ancient martial art.
In the kitchen, the cook’s calendar of gods began to kick on the wall as if it were alive, a plethora of arms, legs, demonic heads, blazing eyes.
The cook clamped everything shut, doors and windows, but then Sai opened the door just as he was sifting the flour to get rid of the weevils, and up the flour gusted and covered them both.
"Ooof ho. Look what you’ve done." Little burrowing insects ran free and overexcitedly on the floor and walls. Looking at each other covered with white, they began to laugh.
"Angrez ke tarah. Like the English."
"Angrez ke tarah. Angrez jaise."
Sai put her head out. "Look," she said, feeling jolly, "just like English people."
The judge began to cough as an acrid mix of smoke and chili spread into the drawing room. "Stupid fool," he said to his granddaughter. "Shut the door!"
But the door shut itself along with all the doors in the house. Bang bang bang. The sky gaped, lit by flame; blue fire ensnared the pine tree that sizzled to an instant death leaving a charcoal stump, a singed smell, a Crosshatch of branches over the lawn. An unending rain broke on them and Mutt turned into a primitive life form, an amoebic creature, slithering about the floor.
A lightning conductor atop Cho Oyu ran a wire into an underground pit of salt, which would save them, but Mutt couldn’t understand. With renewed thunder and a blast upon the tin roof, she sought refuge behind the curtains, under the beds. But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds in the empty soda bottles: whoo hoooo hooo.
"Don’t be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It’s just rain."
She tried to smile, but her tail kept folding under and her eyes were those of a soldier in war, finished with caring for silly myths of courage. Her ears strained beyond the horizon, anticipating what didn’t fail to arrive, yet another wave of bombardment, the sound of civilization crumbling – she had never known it was so big – cities and monuments fell – and she fled again.
This aqueous season would last three months, four, maybe five. In Cho Oyu, a leak dripping into the toilet played a honky-tonk, until it was interrupted by Sai, who held an umbrella over herself when she went inside the bathroom. Condensation fogged the glass of clocks, and clothes hanging to dry in the attic remained wet for a week. A white scurf sifted down from the beams, a fungus spun a shaggy age over everything. Bits of color, though, defined this muffled scene: insects flew in carnival gear; bread, in a day, turned green as grass; Sai, pulling open her underwear drawer, found a bright pink jelly scalloping the layers of dreary cotton; and the bound volumes of National Geographic fell open to pages bruised with flamboyant disease, purple-yellow molds rivaling the bower birds of Papua New Guinea, the residents of New Orleans, and the advertisements – "It’s better in the Bahamas!" – that it showcased.
Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these months, the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense and she could experience the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible. She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail. Phones emitted a death rattle, televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour. And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing, chilly and solitary – not anything you could grasp. The world vanished, the gate opened onto nothing – no Gyan around the bend of the mountain – and that terrible feeling of waiting released its stranglehold. Even Uncle Potty was impossible to visit for the jhora had overflowed its banks and carried the bridge downstream.