Some days later, when they at Cho Oyu had again forgotten these two unimportant if upsetting people, they returned.
But they didn’t come to the gate; they secreted themselves immediately in the jhora ravine and waited for Mutt, that connoisseur of smells, to appear for her daily round of the property. Rediscovering scents and enhancing them was an ever evolving art form. She was involved with an old favorite, grown better with age, that brought forth certain depths and facets of her personality. She was wholly absorbed, didn’t notice the intruders who crept up to her and pounced!
Startled, she yelped, but immediately they clamped her muzzle with hands strong from physical labor.
The judge was having his bucket bath, the cook was churning butter, Sai was in her bed whispering venomously, "Gyan, you bastard, you think I’m going to cry over you?" They didn’t see or hear a thing.
The trespassers lifted Mutt up, bound her with rope, and put her in a sack. The man slung the sack over his shoulders, and they carried her through town without drawing any attention to themselves. They walked around the mountainside, then all the way down and across the Relli and over three ridges that billowed like blue-green ocean, to a small hamlet that was far from any paved road.
"You don’t think they’ll find us?" the father asked his daughter-in-law.
"They won’t walk so far and they can’t drive here. They don’t know our names, they don’t know our village, they asked us no questions."
She was right.
Even the police hadn’t bothered to find out the name of the man they had beaten and blinded. They would hardly bother to look for a dog.
Mutt was healthy, they noticed, when they pinched her through the sack; fat and ready to make them a little money. "Or maybe we can use her to breed and then we can sell the puppies…" (They didn’t know, of course, that she had been fixed long ago by a visiting vet when she was beginning to attract love from all kinds of scurrilous loafers on the hillside, wheedling strays, conniving gentleman dogs…)
"Should we take her out of the sack?"
"Better leave her in for now. She’ll just start barking…"
Forty-five
Like a failing bus laboring through the sky, the Gulf Air plane seemed barely to be managing, though most of the passengers felt immediately comfortable with this lack of oomph. Oh yes, they were going home, knees cramped, ceiling level at their heads, sweat-gluey, fate-resigned, but happy.
The first stop was Heathrow and they crawled out at the far end that hadn’t been renovated for the new days of globalization but lingered back in the old age of colonization.
All the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European – North American travelers came and went, making those brisk no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named The Milano.
Frankfurt. The planeload spent the night in a similar quarantined zone, a thousand souls stretched out as if occupying a morgue, even their faces covered to block the buzzing tube lights.
Like a bus, New York-London-Frankfurt-Abu Dhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta, the plane stopped again to allow men from the Gulf countries to clamber on. They came racing – Quick! Quick!… Quick!! – unzipping their carry-ons for the Scotch, drinking straight from the bottle’s mouth. Crooked little ice crystals formed on the plane window. Inside, it was hot. Biju ate his tray of chicken curry, spinach and rice, strawberry ice cream, rinsed his mouth into the empty ice-cream cup, then tried to get another dinner. "As it is we are short," the stewardesses said, harassed by the men, drunk and hooting, pinching them as they passed, calling them by name, "Sheila! Raveena! Kusum! Nandita!"
Added to the smell of sweat, there was now the thick odor of food and cigarettes, the recycled breathing of an entire plane, the growing fetor of the bathroom.
In the mirror of this bathroom, Biju saluted himself. Here he was, on his way home, without name or knowledge of the American president, without the name of the river on whose bank he had lingered, without even hearing about any of the tourist sights – no Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, Little Italy, Brooklyn Bridge, Museum of Immigration; no bialy at Barney Greengrass, soupy dumpling at Jimmy’s Shanghai, no gospel churches of Harlem tour. He returned over the lonely ocean and he thought that this kind of perspective could only make you sad. Now, he promised himself, he would forget the insight, begin anew. He would buy a taxi. His savings were small, collected in his shoe, his sock, his underwear, through all these years, but he thought he could manage it. He’d drive up and down the mountainside on market days, gold tinsel, gods above the dashboard, a comical horn, PAWpumPOMpaw or TWEE-deee-deee DEE-TWEE-deee-deee. And he’d build a house with solid walls, a roof that wouldn’t fly off every monsoon season. Biju played the scene of meeting his father again and again like a movie in his head, wept a bit at the thought of so much happiness and emotion. They’d sit out in the evenings, drink chhang, tell jokes of the kind he had overheard on the plane being exchanged by drunk men:
So one day Santa Singh and Banta Singh are doing nothing, passing the time, staring at the sky, and all of a sudden an airforce plane flies by, men parachute out of it, get into military jeeps waiting for them in the fields, and go home. ‘Arre, sala, this is the life,’ says Santa to Banta, ‘what a way to make your money.’ So off they go to the recruitment agency and a few months later, there they are in the plane. ‘Wahe Guruji Ka Khalsa, Wahe Guruji Ki Fateh, ‘says Santa and jumps. ‘Wahe Guruji Ka Khalsa, Wahe Guruji Ki Fateh,’ says Banta and jumps.
"‘Arre, Banta,’ says Santa, a second later, ‘this sala parachute is not opening.’
"‘Ai Santa," says Banta, "neither does mine. Typical government intezaam, just you wait and see, when we get to the bottom, the bhenchoot jeep won’t be there.’"
Forty-six
Sai looked out of her window and couldn’t tell what all the noise was about.
The judge was shouting: "Mutt, Mutt." It was her stew time and the cook had boiled soy Nutrinuggets with pumpkin and a Maggi soup cube. It worried the judge that she should have to eat like this, but she’d already had the last of the meat; the judge had barred himself and Sai from it, and the cook, of course, never had the luxury of eating meat in the first place. There was still some peanut butter, though, for Mutt’s chapatis, and powdered milk.
But Mutt wouldn’t answer.
"Mutty, Mutt, stew…" The judge walked around the garden, out of the gate, and walked up and down the road.
"Stew stew -
"Mutty Mutt? MUTT?" His voice became anxious.
The afternoon turned into evening, the mist swept down, but Mutt didn’t appear.
He remembered the boys in their guerilla outfits arriving for the guns. Mutt had barked, the boys had screamed like a bunch of schoolgirls, retreated down the steps to cower behind the bushes. But Mutt had been scared, too; she wasn’t the brave dog they imagined.