"George!…! George!" said a shocked wife to her husband with a camera.
And he had leaned out of the car: Click! "Got it, babe…!"
"Help us," she begged.
The judge seemed suddenly to remember his personality, stiffened, and said nothing, set his mouth in a mask, would look neither left nor right, went back to his game of chess.
In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. He was embarrassed by the attention that was being drawn to his humiliation yet again, the setting of the table with the tablecloth, the laughter, the robbery of the rifles that had never contributed to a fast-forward death ballet come duck season.
Now, typically, the mess had grown.
This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority. He had done his duty as far as it was any citizen’s duty to report problems to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a bit and one could find oneself supporting the whole family forever after, a constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food, the husband might be blind and with broken legs, and the woman might be anemic and bent, but they’d still pop out an infant every nine months. If you let such people get an inch, they’d take everything you had – the families yoked together because of guilt on one side, and an unending greed and capacity for dependance on the other – and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.
The cook looked at the man and woman and sighed.
They looked at Sai. "Didi…, "the woman said. Her eyes were too devastated to look at directly.
Sai turned away and told herself she didn’t care.
She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favored her she would, perhaps, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth in their own image, a perfect devilish student to the devil gods…
It took a while for them to leave. They went and sat outside the gate, the cook forced to herd them out like cows, and then for a long while they squatted down on their haunches and didn’t move, just stared emotionless, as if drained of hope and initiative.
They watched the judge taking Mutt for her walk and feeding her. He was angry and embarrassed that they were watching. Why didn’t they GO!
"Tell them to leave or else we’ll call the police," he told the cook.
"Jao, jao," the cook said, "jao jao," through the gate, but they only retreated up the hill, behind the bushes and settled back down with the same blank look on their faces.
Sai climbed to her room, slammed the door, and flung herself at her reflection in the mirror:
What will happen to me?!
Gyan would find adulthood and purity in a quest for a homeland and she would be left forever adolescent, trapped in shameful dramatics. This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot…
She cried for a while, tears taking on their own momentum, but despite herself the image of the begging woman came back. She went downstairs and asked the cook: "Did you give them anything?"
"No," said the cook, also miserable. "What can you do," he said flatly, as if giving an answer, not asking a question.
Then he went back out with a sack of rice. "Hss sss hsss? " he hissed.
But by this time the pair had vanished.
Forty-one
The sky over Manhattan was messy, lots of stuff in it, branches and pigeons and choppy clouds lit with weird yellow light. The wind blew strongly and the pink pom-poms of the cherry trees in Riverside Park swished against the unsettled mix.
The unease that had followed Biju’s phone call to Kalimpong was no longer something in the pit of his stomach; it had grown so big, he was in its stomach.
He had tried to telephone again the next day and the day after, but the line was quite dead now.
"More trouble," said Mr. Iype. "It will go on for a while. Very violent people. All those army types…"
Along the Hudson, great waves of water were torn up and ripped forward, the wind propelling the gusts upriver.
"Look at that. It’s getting fucking Biblical," said someone next to him at the rails. "Fucking Job. Why? Why?"
Biju moved farther down the rails, but the man shifted down as well.
"You know what the name of this river really is?" Face fat from McDonald’s, scant hair, he was like so many in this city, a mad and intelligent person camping out at the Barnes amp; Noble bookstore. The gale took his words and whipped them away; they reached Biju’s ears strangely clipped, on their way to somewhere else. The man turned his face in toward Biju to save the wind from thus slicing their conversation. "Muhheakunnuk, Muh-heakunnuk – the river that flows both ways," he added with significant eyebrows, "both ways. That is the real fucking name." Sentences spilled out of the face along with juicy saliva. He was smiling and slavering over his information, gobbling and dispelling at the same time.
But what was the false name then? Biju possessed no name at all for this black water. It was not his history.
And then came fucking Moby Dick. The river full of dead fucking whales. The fucking carcasses were hauled up the river, fucking pulverised in the factories.
"Oil, you know," he said with intense internal frustration. "It’s always been fucking oil. And underwear."
Eyebrows and saliva spray.
"Corsets!!" he said suddenly.
"No speak English," said Biju through a tunnel made from his hands and began to walk quickly away.
"No speak English," he always said to mad people starting up conversations in this city, to the irascible ornery bums and Bible folk dressed in ornate bargain-basement suits and hats, waiting on street corners, getting their moral and physical exercise chasing after infidels. Devotees of the Church of Christ and the Holy Zion, born-agains handing out pamphlets that gave him up-to-date million-dollar news of the devil’s activities: "SATAN IS WAITING TO BURN YOU ALIVE," screamed the headlines. "YOU DON’T HAVE A MOMENT TO LOSE."
Once, he had been accosted by a Lithuanian Hare Krishna, New York via Vilnius and Vrindavan. A reproachful veggie look accompanied the brochure to the former beef cook. Biju looked at him and had to avert his gaze as if from an obscenity. In its own way it was like a prostitute – it showed too much. The book in his hand had a cover of Krishna on the battlefield in lurid colors, the same ones used in movie posters.
What was India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?
What was he doing and why?