The men in the room laughed so hard, "Ha Ha Ha." He had their loyalty. He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation… Lola, for one of the few times in her life, was the butt of the joke, detested, ridiculous, in the wrong part of town.
"And you know, you won’t be bearing me any sons at your age so I will expect a big dowry. And you’re not much to look at, nothing up" – he patted the front of his khaki shirt – "nothing down" – he patted his behind, which he twisted out of the chair -
"In fact, I have more of both!"
She could hear them laughing as she left.
How did her feet manage to walk? She would thank them all her life.
"Ah, fool," she heard someone say as she made her way down the steps.
The women were laughing at her from the kitchen window. "Look at her expression," one of them said.
They were beautiful girls with hair in silky loops and nose rings in sweet wrinkling noses…
Mon Ami seemed like a supernatural dove of blue-white peace with a wreath of roses in its beak, Lola thought as she passed under the trellis over the gate.
"What happened, what did he say? Did you see him?" Noni asked.
But Lola couldn’t manage to talk to Noni, who had been waiting for her sister to return.
But Lola went into the bathroom and sat trembling on the closed lid of the toilet.
"Joydeep," she screamed silently to her husband, dead so long ago, "look at what you’ve done, you bloody fool!!!"
Her lips stretched out and her mouth was enormous with the extent of her shame.
"Look at what you’ve left me to! Do you know how I have suffered, do you have any idea??? Where are you?! You and your piddling little life, and look what I have to deal with, just look. I don’t even have my decency. "
She held on to her ridiculed old woman’s breasts and shook them. How could she and her sister leave now? If they left, the army would move in. Or squatters claiming squatters’ rights would instigate a court case. They would lose the home that the two of them, Joydeep and Lola, had bought with such false ideas of retirement, sweet peas and mist, cat and books.
The silence rang in the pipes, reached an unbearable pitch, subsided, rose. She wrenched the tap open – not a drop fell – then she twisted the tap viciously shut as if wringing its neck.
Bastard! Never a chink in his certainty, his poise. Never the brains to buy a house in Calcutta – no. No. Not that Joydeep, with his romantic notions of countryside living; with his Wellington boots, binoculars, and bird-watching book; with his Yeats, his Rilke (in German), his Mandelstam (in Russian); in the purply mountains of Kalimpong with his bloody Talisker and his Burberry socks (memento from Scottish holiday of golf+ smoked salmon+ distillery). Joydeep with his old-fashioned gentleman’s charm. He had always walked as if the world were firm beneath his feet and he never suffered a doubt. He was a cartoon. "You were a fool," she screamed at him.
But then, in a moment, quite suddenly, she went weak.
"Your eyes are lovely, dark and deep."
He used to kiss those glistening orbs when he departed to work on his files.
"But I have promises to keep," First one eye then the other -
"And miles to go before I sleep – " "And miles to go before you sleep?"
She would make a duet -
"And miles to go before I sleep."
He would echo.
To the end, and even beyond, he could resurrect the wit that had fired her love when they were not much more than children, after all. "Drink to me only with thine eyes," he had sung to her at their wedding reception, and then they had honeymooned in Europe.
Noni at the door: "Are you all right?"
Loudly, Lola said: "No, I’m not all right. Why don’t you go away?"
"Why don’t you open the door?"
"Go away I tell you, go join the boys in the street whom you are always defending."
"Lola, open the door."
"No."
"Open it."
"Bugger off," said Lola.
"Lola?" said Noni. "I made you a rum and nimboo."
"Bug off," Lola said.
"Well, sister, in any such situation atrocities are committed under cover of a legitimate cause – "
"Bosh."
"But if we forget there is some truth to what they are saying the problems will keep coming. Gorkhas have been used – "
"Cock and bull," she said crudely. "These people aren’t good people. Gorkhas are mercenaries, that’s what they are. Pay them and they are loyal to whatever. There’s no principle involved, Noni. And what is this with the GOrkha? It was always GUrkha. AND then there aren’t even many Gurkhas here – some of course, and some newly retired ones coming in from Hong Kong, but otherwise they are only sherpas, coolies – "
"Anglicized spelling. They’re just changing it to – "
"My left toe! Why are they writing in English if they want to have Nepali taught in schools? These people are just louts, and that’s the truth, Noni, you know it, we all know it."
"I don’t know it."
"Then go and join them like I said. Leave your house, leave your books and your Ovaltine and your long johns. HA! I’d like to see you, you liar and fake."
"I will."
"Go on, then. And after you are done with that, go end up in hell!"
"Hell?" Noni said, rattling the door on the other side of the bathroom door. "Why hell?"
"Because you’ll be committing CRIME, that’s why!" screeched Lola.
Noni returned to sit on the dragon cushions on the sofa. Oh, they had been wrong. The real place had evaded them. The two of them had been fools feeling they were doing something exciting just by occupying this picturesque cottage, by seducing themselves with those old travel books in the library, searching for a certain angled light with which to romance themselves, to locate what had been conjured only as a tale to tell before the Royal Geographic Society, when the author returned to give a talk accompanied by sherry and a scrolled certificate of honor spritzed with gold for an exploration of the far Himalayan kingdoms – but far from what? Exotic to whom? It was the center for the sisters, but they had never treated it as such.
Parallel lives were being led by those – Budhoo, Kesang – for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green. They maintained their camping supplies, their flashlights, mosquito netting, raincoats, hot water bottles, brandy, radio, first-aid kit, Swiss army knife, book on poisonous snakes. These objects were talismans imbued with the task of transforming reality into something otherwise, supplies manufactured by a world that equated them with courage. But, really, they were equivalent to cowardice.
Noni tried to rouse herself. Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.
Thirty-nine
In the end what Sai and Gyan had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn’t forget that.