There was no electricity, because the electricity department had been burned to protest arrests made at the roadblocks.
When the fridge shuddered silent the sisters were forced to cook all the perishable food at once. It was Kesang’s day off.
Outside, rain was falling and it was almost time for curfew; drawn by the poignant smell of mutton cooking, a group of passing GNLF boys searching for shelter climbed through the kitchen window.
"Why your front door is locked, Aunty?"
The enormous locks that were usually on the tin trunks containing valuables had been moved to the front and back doors as extra precaution. Above their heads, in the attic, several objects of worth had been left vulnerable. Family
puja
silver from their preaetheist days; Bond Street baby cups with trowellike utensils that had once gathered and packed Farex into their own guppy mouths; a telescope made in Germany; their great-grandmother’s pearly nose ring; bat eyeglasses from the sixties; silver marrow spoons (they had always been a great family for eating their marrow); damask napkins with a pocket sewn in to enfold triangles of cucumber sandwich—"Just a sprinkle of water, remember, to dampen the cloth before you set off for the picnic. . . ." Magpie things gleaned from a romantic version of the West and a fanciful version of the East that contained power enough to maintain dignity across the rotten offences between nations.
"What do you want?" Lola asked the boys and her face showed them that she had something to protect.
"We are selling calendars, Aunty, and cassettes for the movement."
"What calendars, cassettes?"
Balanced against the forced entry and their rebel camouflage attire was their disconcerting politeness.
The cassettes were recorded with the favorite washing-bloody-kukris-in-the-mother-waters-of-the-Teesta speech.
"Don’t give them anything," hissed Lola in English, feeling faint, thinking they wouldn’t understand. "Once you start, they’ll keep coming back."
But they did understand. They understood her English and she didn’t understand their Nepali.
"Any contribution to the effort for Gorkhaland is all right."
"All right for you, not all right for us."
"
Shhh,
"Noni shushed her sister. "Don’t be reckless," she gasped.
"We will issue you a receipt," said the boys, eyes on the food lying on the counter—intestinal-looking Essex Farm sausages; frozen salami with a furze of permafrost melting away.
"Nothing doing," said Lola.
"
Shhhh,
"Noni said again. "Give us a calendar then."
"Only one, Aunty?"
"All right, well, two."
"But you know how we need money. . . ."
They invested in three calendars and two cassettes. Still the boys did not leave.
"Can we sleep on the floor? The police will never search for us here."
"No," said Lola.
"Fine, but please don’t make any noise or trouble," said Noni.
The boys ate all the food before they slept.
________
Lola and Noni barricaded the door to their bedroom by moving the chest of drawers in front of it as quietly as they could. The boys heard and laughed loudly: "Don’t worry. You are too old for us, you know."
The sisters spent the night awake, eyes aching against the dark. Mustafa sat rigid in Noni’s arms, feeling his self-respect assaulted, the hole of his bottom a tight exclamation point of anger, his tail a straight and uncompromising line above it.
And Budhoo, their watchman?
They waited for him to arrive with his gun and scare the boys away, but Budhoo did not arrive.
"I told you. . . ." Lola said in a scorched whisper, "these Neps! Hand in hand. . . ."
"Maybe the boys threatened him," spat Noni.
"Oh, come on. He’s probably uncle to one of them! We should have told them to go and now you’ve started this, Noni, they’ll come all the time."
"What choice did we have? If we had said no, we would have paid for it.
Don’t be naïve."
"You’re the one who is naïve: ‘They have a point, they have poiii-intt, three-fourths of their point if not the whole poiiintt,’ now look . . .
you stupid woman!
"
________
"Are you worried you’ll be caught by the police," one of them asked with a smirk next morning, "for sheltering us? Is that what you’re worried about? The police won’t touch rich people, only people like us, but if you say anything we will be forced to take action against you."
"What action?"
"You’ll find out, Aunty."
Still, their exquisite politeness.
They left with the rice and the soap, the oil, and the garden’s annual output of five jars of tomato chutney, and as they climbed down the steps, they noticed what they hadn’t seen in the darkness of their arrival—how nicely the property stretched into a lawn, then dropped into tiers below. There was quite enough land to accommodate a thin line of huts. Overhead, a grim leathern bobble of electrocuted bats hanging on wires strung between the trees indicated a powerful supply of electricity during peaceful times. The market was close; a beautiful tarred road was right in front; so they might walk to shops and schools in twenty minutes instead of two hours, three hours, each way. . . .
Not a month had passed before the sisters woke one morning to find that, under cover of night, a hut had come up like a mushroom on a newly cut gash at the bottom of the Mon Ami vegetable patch. They watched with horror as two boys calmly chopped down a bamboo from their property and carried it off right in front of their noses, a long taut drumstick, still cloudy and shivering with the push and pull, the contradiction between flexibility and contrariness, long enough to span an entire home of not-so-modest a size.
They rushed out: "This is our land!"
"It is not your land. It is free land," they countered, putting down the sentence, flatly, rudely.
"It is our land."
"It is unoccupied land."
"We’ll call the police."
They shrugged, turned back, and kept on working.
Thirty-eight
It didn’t come from nothing,
even Lola knew, but from an old feeling of anger that couldn’t be divorced from Kalimpong. It was part of every breath. It was in the eyes that waited, attached themselves to you as you approached, rode on your back as you walked on, with a muttered remark you couldn’t catch in the moment of passing; it was in the snickering of those gathered at Thapa’s Canteen, at Gompu’s, at every unnamed roadside shack that sold eggs and matches.
These people could name them, recognize them—the few rich—but Lola and Noni could barely distinguish between the individuals making up the crowd of poor.
Only before, the sisters had never paid much attention for the simple reason that they didn’t have to. It was natural they would incite envy, they supposed, and the laws of probability favored their slipping through life without anything more than muttered comments, but every now and then, somebody suffered the rotten luck of being in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time when it all caught up—and generations worth of trouble settled on them. Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past—Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at
Christmas—all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong.
It
did
matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country; it
did
matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the evening, even one that sparked and shocked; it
did
matter to fly to London and return with chocolates filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not. They had pretended it didn’t, or had nothing to do with them, and suddenly it had everything to do with them. The wealth that seemed to protect them like a blanket was the very thing that left them exposed. They, amid extreme poverty, were baldly richer, and the statistics of difference were being broadcast over loudspeakers, written loudly across the walls. The anger had solidified into slogans and guns, and it turned out that they,
they,
Lola and Noni, were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations.
________
Lola went to pay a visit to Pradhan, the flamboyant head of the Kalim-pong wing of the GNLF, so as to complain about the illegal huts being built by his followers on Mon Ami property.
Pradhan said: "But I have to accommodate my men." He looked like a bandit teddy bear, with a great beard and a bandana around his head, gold earrings. Lola didn’t know much about him, merely that he had been called the "maverick of Kalimpong" in the newspapers, renegade, fiery, unpredictable, a rebel, not a negotiator, who ran his wing of the GNLF like a king his kingdom, a robber his band. He was wilder, people said, and angrier than Ghising, the leader of the Darjeeling wing, who was the better politician and whose men were now occupying the Gymkhana Club. Ghising’s resume had appeared in the last
Indian
Express
to get through the roadblocks: "Born on Manju tea estate; education, Singbuli tea estate; Ex-army Eighth Gorkha Rifles, action in Nagaland; actor in plays; author of prose works and poems [fifty-two books—could it be?]; bantamweight boxer; union man."
Behind Pradhan stood a soldier with a wooden stock rifle pointed out into the room. He looked, to Lola’s eyes, like Budhoo’s brother with Budhoo’s gun.
"Side of road, my land." Lola, dressed in the widow’s sari she had worn to the electric crematorium when Joydeep died, mumbled weakly in broken English, as if to pretend it was English she couldn’t speak properly rather than illuminate the fact that it was Nepali she had never learned.
Pradhan’s home was in a part of Kalimpong she had never visited before. On the outside walls, lengths of bamboo split in half had been filled with earth and planted with succulents. Porcupine and bearded cacti grew in Dalda tins and plastic bags lining the steps to the small rectangular house with a tin roof. The room was full of staring men, some standing, some seated on folding chairs, all crowded in as if at a doctor’s waiting room. She could feel their intense desire to rid themselves of her as of an affliction. Another man with a favor had preceded Lola, a Marwari shopkeeper trying to bring a shipment of prayer lamps past the roadblocks. Strangely, Marwaris controlled the business of selling Tibetan objects of worship—lamps and bells, thunderbolts, the monks’ plum robes and turmeric undershirts, buttons of brass each embossed with a lotus flower.
When the man was ushered in front of Pradhan, he began such a bending, bowing, writhing, that he would not even raise his eyes. He spewed flowery honorifics: "Respected Sir and
Huzoor
and Your Gracious Presence and Your Wish my Pleasure, Please Grant, Your Blessing Requested, Your Honorable Self, Your Beneficence, May the Blessings of God Rain upon You and Yours, Might Your Respected Gracious Self Prosper and Might You Grant Prosperity to Respectful Supplicants. . . ." He made an overabundant flower garden of speech, but to no avail, and finally, he backed out still scattering roses and pleas, prayers and blessings. . . .
Pradhan dismissed him: "No exceptions."
Then it had been Lola’s turn.
"Sir, property is being encroached on."
"Name of property?"
"Mon Ami."
"What kind of name?"
"French name."
"I didn’t know we live in France. Do we? Tell me, why don’t I speak in French, then?"
He tried to send her away immediately, waving away the surveyor’s plan and the property documents showing the measurements of the plot that she tried to unroll before him.
"My men must be accommodated," Pradhan stated.
"But our land. . . ."
"Along all roads, to a certain depth, it’s government land, and that’s the land we are taking."
The huts that had sprung up overnight were being populated by women, men, children, pigs, goats, dogs, chickens, cats, and cows. In a year, Lola could foresee, they would no longer be made of mud and bamboo but concrete and tiles.
"But it’s our land. . .
" Do you use it?
"For vegetables."
"You can grow them elsewhere. Put them on the side of your house."
"Have cut into the hill, land weak, landslide may occur," she muttered. "Very dangerous for your men. Landslides on road. . . ." She was trembling like a whisker from terror, although she insisted to herself that it was from rage.
"Landslide? They aren’t building big houses like yours, Aunty, just little huts of bamboo. In fact, it’s your house that might cause a landslide. Too heavy, no?
Too big? Walls many feet wide? Stone, concrete? You are a rich woman? House-garden-servants!"
Here he began to smile.
"In fact," he said, "as you can see," he gestured out, "I am the raja of Kalimpong. A raja must have many queens." He jerked his head back to the sounds of the kitchen that came through the curtained door. "I have four, but would you," he looked Lola up and down, tipped his chair back, head at a comical angle, a coy naughty expression catching his face, "dear Aunty, would you like to be the fifth?"
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.