Now and then, she recalled certain delicate observations she had made during her own explorations before the mirror that had been overlooked by Gyan, on account of the newness of landscape between them. It was, she knew herself, a matter of education to learn how to look at a woman, and worried that Gyan wasn’t entirely aware of how lucky he was.
Ear lobes downy as tobacco leaves, the tender substance of her hair, the transparent skin of the inner wrist. . . .
She brought up the omissions at his next visit, proffered her hair with the zeal of a shawl merchant: "See—feel. Like silk?"
"Like silk," he confirmed.
Her ears she displayed like items taken from under the counter and put before a discerning customer in one of the town’s curio shops, but when he tried to test the depth of her eyes with his, her glance proved too slippery to hold; he picked it up and dropped it, retrieved it, dropped it again until it slid away and hid.
So they played the game of courtship, reaching, retreating, teasing, fleeing—
how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours. But as they eliminated the easily revealable and exhausted propriety, the unexamined portions of their anatomies exerted a more severely distilled potential, and once again the situation was driven to the same desperate pitch of the days when they sat forcing geometry.
Up the bones of the spine.
Stomach and belly button—
________
"
Kiss me!
" he pleaded.
"No," she said, delighted and terrified.
She would hold herself ransom.
Oh, but she had never been able to stand suspense.
A fine drizzle spelled an ellipsis on the tin roof. . . .
Moments clocked by precisely, and finally she couldn’t bear it—she closed her eyes and felt the terrified measure of his lips on hers, trying to match one shape with the other.
________
Just a week or two later, they were shameless as beggars, pleading for more.
"Nose?" He kissed it. "Eyes?" Eyes. "Ears?" Ears. "Cheek?" Cheek.
"Fingers." One, two, three, four, five. "The other hand, please." Ten kisses. "Toes?"
They linked word, object, and affection in a recovery of childhood, a confirmation of wholeness, as at the beginning—
Arms legs heart—
All their parts, they reassured each other, were where they should be.
________
Gyan was twenty and Sai sixteen, and at the beginning they had not paid very much attention to the events on the hillside, the new posters in the market referring to old discontents, the slogans scratched and painted on the side of government offices and shops. "We are stateless," they read. "It is better to die than live as slaves," "We are constitutionally tortured. Return our land from Bengal." Down the other way, the slogans persisted and multiplied along the landslide reinforcements, jostled for place between the "Better late than never"
slogans, the "If married don’t flirt with speed," "Drinking whisky is risky," that flashed by as you drove toward the Teesta.
The call was repeated along the road to the army cantonment area; began to pop up in less obvious places; the big rocks along thin paths that veined the mountains, the trunks of trees amid huts made of bamboo and mud, corn drying in bunches under the veranda roofs, prayer flags flying overhead, pigs snorting in pens behind. Climbing perpendicular to the sky, arriving breathless at the top of Ringkingpong hill, you’d see "LIBERATION!" scrawled across the waterworks.
Still, for a while nobody knew which way it would go, and it was dismissed as nothing more serious than the usual handful of students and agitators. But then one day fifty boys, members of the youth wing of the GNLF, gathered to swear an oath at Mahakaldara to fight to the death for the formation of a homeland, Gorkhaland. Then they marched down the streets of Darjeeling, took a turn around the market and the mall. "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army." They were watched by the pony men and their ponies, by the proprietors of souvenir shops, by the waiters of Glenary’s, the Planter’s Club, the Gymkhana, and the Windamere as they waved their unsheathed kukris, sliced the fierce blades through the tender mist under the watery sun. Quite suddenly, everyone was using the word
insurgency.
Twenty-one
"
They have a point,
" said Noni, "maybe not their whole point, but I’d say half to three-quarters of their point."
"Nonsense." Lola waved her sister’s opinion away. "Those Neps will be after all outsiders now, but especially us Bongs. They’ve been plotting this a long while. Dream come true. All kinds of atrocities will go on—then they can skip merrily over the border to hide in Nepal. Very convenient."
In her mind she pictured their watchman, Budhoo, with her BBC radio and her silver cake knife, living it up in Kathmandu along with various other Kanchas and Kanchis with their respective loot.
________
They were sitting in the Mon Ami drawing room having tea after Sai’s lesson.
An opaque scene through the window resembled something from folk art: flat gray mountain and sky, flat white row of Father Booty’s cows on the crest of the hill, sky showing through their legs in squarish shapes. Indoors, the lamp was on, and a plate of cream horns lay in the tawny
light and there were tuberoses in a vase. Mustafa climbed onto Sai’s lap and she thought of how, since her romance with Gyan, she had a new understanding of cats. Uncaring of the troubles in the market, Mustafa was wringing forth ecstasies, pushing against her ribs to find a bone to ribble his chin against.
"This state-making," Lola continued, "biggest mistake that fool Nehru made.
Under his rules any group of idiots can stand up demanding a new state and get it, too. How many new ones keep appearing? From fifteen we went to sixteen, sixteen to seventeen, seventeen to twenty-two. . . ." Lola made a line with a finger from above her ear and drew noodles in the air to demonstrate her opinion of such madness.
"And here, if you ask me," she said, "it all started with Sikkim. The Neps played such a dirty trick and began to get grand ideas—now they think they can do the same thing again—you know, Sai?"
Mustafa’s bones seemed to be dissolving under Sai’s stroking, and he twirled on her knees in a trance, eyes closed, a mystic knowing neither one religion nor another, neither one country nor another, just
this feeling.
"Yes," she said absentmindedly, she had heard the story so many times before: Indira Gandhi had maneuvered a plebiscite and all the Nepalis who had flooded Sikkim voted against the king. India had swallowed the jewel-colored kingdom, whose blue hills they could see in the distance, where the wonderful oranges came from and the Black Cat rum that was smuggled to them by Major Aloo. Where monasteries dangled like spiders before Kanchenjunga, so close you’d think the monks could reach out and touch the snow. The country had seemed unreal—so full of fairy tales, of travelers seeking Shangri-la—it had proved all the easier to destroy, therefore.
"But you have to take it from their point of view," said Noni. "First the Neps were thrown out of Assam and then Meghalaya, then there’s the king of Bhutan growling against—"
"Illegal immigration," said Lola. She reached for a cream horn. "
Naughty
girl," she said to herself, her voice replete with gloating.
"Obviously the Nepalis are worried," said Noni. "They’ve been here, most of them, several generations. Why shouldn’t Nepali be taught in schools?"
"Because on that basis they can start statehood demands. Separatist movement here, separatist movement there, terrorists, guerillas, insurgents, rebels, agitators, instigators, and they all learn from one another, of course—the Neps have been encouraged by the Sikhs and their Khalistan, by ULFA, NEFA, PLA; Jharkhand, Bodoland, Gorkhaland; Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Kashmir, Punjab, Assam. . . ."
Sai thought of how she turned to water under Gyan’s hands, her skin catching the movement of his fingers up her and down, until finally she couldn’t tell the difference between her skin and his touch.
The nasal whine of the gate:
"Hello, hello," said Mrs. Sen, hooking her beaky nose around the open door.
"Hope I’m not disturbing—was just going by, heard your voices—oh look, pastries and all—" In her happiness she made small bird and mouse sounds.
Lola: "You saw that letter they sent to the queen of England? Gorbachev and Reagan? Apartheid, genocide, looking after Pakistan, forgetting us, colonial subjugation, vivisected Nepal. . . . When did Darjeeling and Kalimpong belong to Nepal? Darjeeling, in fact, was annexed from Sikkim and Kalimpong from Bhutan."
Noni: "Very unskilled at drawing borders, those bloody Brits."
Mrs. Sen, diving right into the conversation: "No practice, na, water all around them, ha ha."
________
When they would finally attempt to rise from those indolent afternoons they spent together, Gyan and Sai would have melted into each other like pats of butter—how difficult it was to cool and compose themselves back into their individual beings.
"Pakistan! There is the problem," said Mrs. Sen, jumping to one of her favorite topics, her thoughts and opinions ready-made, polished over the years, rolled out wherever they might be stuffed somehow into a conversation. "First heart attack to our country, no, that has never been healed—"
Lola: "It’s an issue of a porous border is what. You can’t tell one from the other, Indian Nepali from Nepali Nepali. And then,
baba,
the way these Neps multiply."
Mrs. Sen: "Like Muslims."
Lola: "Not the Muslims
here
"
Mrs. Sen: "No self-control, those people. Disgusting."
Noni: "Everyone is multiplying. Everywhere. You cannot blame one group over another."
Lola: "Lepchas are not multiplying, they are disappearing. In fact, they have the first right to this land and nobody is even mentioning them." Then, reconsidering her support for Lepchas, she said, "Not that they are so wonderful either, of course. Look at those government loans to Lepchas to start piggeries—"Traditional Occupation Resurrection Plan"—and not a single piggery to be seen, although, of course, they all handed in beautifully written petitions, showing trough measurements and the cost of pig feed and antibiotics—collected the money all right, smart and prompt. . . ."
Mrs. Sen: "More Muslims in India than in Pakistan. They prefer to multiply over here. You know, that Jinnah, he ate bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and drank whiskey every evening. What sort of Muslim nation they have? And five times a day bums up to God. Mind you," she put her sticky finger in her mouth and then pulled it out with a pop, "With that Koran, who can be surprised? They have no option but to be two-faced."
The reasoning, they all knew from having heard this before, formed a central pillar of Hindu belief and it went like this: so strict was the Koran that its teachings were beyond human capability. Therefore Muslims were forced to pretend one thing, do another; they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it.
Unlike Hindus, who needn’t deny.
Lola was uneasy and drank her tea too hot. This complaining about Muslim birth rates was vulgar and incorrect among the class that reads Jane Austen, and she sensed Mrs. Sen’s talk revealed her own position on Nepalis, where there was not so easy a stereotype, to be not so very different a prejudice.
"It’s quite another matter with Muslims," she said stiffly. "They were already here. The Nepalis have come and taken over and it’s not a religious issue."
Mrs. Sen: "Same thing with the Muslim cultural issue. . . . They also came from somewhere else, Babar and all. . . . And stayed here to breed. Not that it’s the fault of the women—poor things—it’s the men—marrying three, four wives—no shame." She began to giggle. "They have nothing better to do, you know. Without TV and electricity, there will always be this problem—"
Lola: "Oh, Mrs. Sen, again you are derailing the conversation. We aren’t talking about that!"
Mrs. Sen: "Ah-hah-ha," she sang airily, putting another cream horn on her plate with a flourish.
Noni: "How is Mun Mun?" But as soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t, for this would rile Lola and she would have to spend all evening undoing the harm.
Mrs. Sen: "Oh, they keep begging her and
begging her
to take a green card.
She says, ‘No, no.’ I told her, ‘Don’t be silly, take it, what harm is there? If they’re
offering
it, pushing it on you. . . .’ How many people would kill for one. .
. . Silly goose, isn’t it so? What a bee-oo-tee-ful country and so well organized."
The sisters had always looked down on Mrs. Sen as a low-caliber person.
Her inferiority was clear to them long before her daughter settled in a country where the jam said Smuckers instead of "By appointment to Her Majesty the queen," and before she got a job with CNN placing her in direct opposition to Pixie at BBC. This was because Mrs. Sen pronounced potato "
POEtatto,
"
and tomato "
TOEmatto
"
and because of the rumor that she had once made a living going door to door in a scooter selling confiscated items from the customs at Dum Dum Airport, peddling the goods to mothers collecting dowries of black-market items, the better to increase their daughters’ chances.