"There must be a problem with the line." Yes, yes, yes.
As always, the problem with the line.
"He will come back fat. I have heard they all come back fat," said the watchman’s sister-in-law abruptly, trying to comfort the cook.
The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced. He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other’s lives except for the hope that they would be relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual Fuck-ShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse – the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart.
If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.
They all grow fat there…
The cook knew about them all growing fat there. It was one of the things everyone knew:
"Are you growing fat, beta, like everyone in America?" he had written to his son long ago, in a departure from their usual format.
"Yes, growing fat," Biju had written back, "when you see me next, I will be myself times ten." He laughed as he wrote the lines and the cook laughed very hard when he read them; he lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air like a cockroach.
"Yes," Biju had said, "I am growing fat – ten times myself," and was shocked when he went to the ninety-nine-cent store and found he had to buy his shirts at the children’s rack. The shopkeeper, a man from Lahore, sat on a high ladder in the center and watched to make sure nobody stole anything, and his eyes clutched onto Biju as soon as he entered, making Biju sting with a feeling of culpability. But he had done nothing. Everyone could tell that he had, though, for his guilty look was there for all to see.
He missed Saeed. He wanted to look, once again, if briefly, at the country through the sanguine lens of his eyes.
Biju returned to the Gandhi Café where they had not noticed his absence. "You all come and watch the cricket match, OK?" Harish-Harry had brought in a photo album to show his staff pictures of the New Jersey condominium for which he had just made a down payment. He had already mounted a giant satellite dish smack-bang in the middle of the front lawn despite the fact that the management of this select community insisted it be placed subtly to the side like a discreet ear; he had prevailed in his endeavor, having cleverly cried, "Racism! Racism! I am not getting good reception of Indian channels."
That left just his daughter to worry about. Their friend and competitor, Mr. Shah’s wife, had hooked a bridegroom by making Galawati kebabs and Fed-Exing them overnight all the way to Oklahoma. "Some dehati family in the middle of the cornfield," Harish-Harry told his wife. "And you should see this fellow they are showing off about – what a lutoo. American size – he looks like something you would use to break down the door."
He told his daughter: "It used to be a matter of pride for a girl to have a pleasant personality. Act like a stupid now and you can regret later on for the rest of your life… Then don’t come crying to us, OK?"
Thirty-seven
The situation will improve, the SDO had said, but though they had begun to torture random people all over town, it didn’t.
A series of strikes kept businesses closed.
A one-day strike.
A three-day strike.
Then a seven day.
When Lark’s General Store opened briefly one morning, Lola fought a victorious battle with the Afghan princesses over the last jars and cans. Later that month the princesses could think of nothing but jam, furious about it, in the midst of murder and burning properties: "That thoroughly nasty woman!"
Lola gloated each day as she spread the Druk’s marmalade thin so it would last.
A thirteen-day strike.
A twenty-one-day strike.
More strike than no strike.
More moisture in the air than air. It was hard to breathe and there was a feeling of being stifled in a place that was, after all, generous with space if nothing else.
Finally, the shops and offices didn’t open at all – the Snow Lion Travel Agency and the STD booth, the shawl shop, the deaf tailors, Kan-shi Nath amp; Sons Newsagents – everyone terrorized to keep their shutters down and not even poke their noses out of the windows. Roadblocks stopped traffic, prevented timber and stone trucks from leaving, halted tea from being transported. Nails were scattered on the road, Mobil oil spilled all about. The GNLF boys charged large sums of money if they let you through at all and coerced you to buy GNLF speeches on cassette tapes and Gorkhaland calendars.
Men arrived in trucks from Tindharia and Mahanadi, gathered outside the police station, and threw bricks and bottles. Tear gas didn’t scatter them; neither did the lathi charge.
"Well, how much land do they want?" asked Lola gloomily.
Noni: "The subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong, and extending to the foothills, parts of Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar districts, from Bengal into Assam."
"No peace for the wicked," said Mrs, Sen, knitting needles going, for she was making a sweater for the prime minister out of sympathy for his troubles. Even in Delhi it gets cold… especially in those drafty bungalows in which they house top government officials. But she was not an accomplished knitter. Very slow. Unlike her mother, who, in the course of watching a movie, could knit a whole baby blanket.
"Who’s wicked?" said Lola. "Not us. It’s they who are wicked. And we are the ones who have no peace. No peace for the not wicked."
What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.
They were done with their library books, but of course there was no question of returning them. One morning when the trim major who ran the Gymkhana Club arrived, he found the GNLF had scuttled out the librarians and desk clerks and were enjoying the most space and privacy they’d ever had in their lives, sleeping between the bookshelves, cavorting in the ladies’ cloakroom, where, not so long ago, Lola had blown on her puff and delicately powdered her nose.
No tourists arrived from Calcutta in hilarious layers as if preparing for the Antarctic, weaving the cauterizing smell of mothballs through the town. No visitors came, with their rich city fat, to burden scabied nags on pony rides. This year the ponies were free.