So he swore allegiance to the Crown, and off he went, the beginning of over a hundred years of family commitment to the wars of the English.
At the beginning, the promise had held true – all Gyan’s greatgrandfather did was march for many prosperous years, and he acquired a wife and three sons. But then they sent him to Mesopotamia where Turkish bullets made a sieve of his heart and he leaked to death on the battlefield. As a kindness to the family, that they might not lose their income, the army employed his eldest son, although the famous buffalo, by now, was dead, and the new recruit was spindly. Indian soldiers fought in Burma, in Gibraltar, in Egypt, in Italy.
Two months short of his twenty-third birthday, in 1943, the spindly soldier was killed in Burma, shakily defending the British against the Japanese. His brother was offered a job and this boy died, too, in Italy, outside Florence, not fighting at all, but making jam from apricots for the major of the battalion in a villa housing British troops. Six lemons, he had been instructed, and four cups of sugar. He stirred the pot in the un-threatening Italian countryside, pheasants whirring over the olives and the vines, the resistance army unearthing truffles in the woods. It was a particularly bountiful spring, and then, they were bombed -
When Gyan was quite small, the last family recruit had one day climbed off the bus in Kalimpong’s bus station and arrived missing a toe. There was nobody who could remember him, but finally, their father’s childhood memories were resurrected and the man was recognized as an uncle. He had lived with Gyan’s family until he died, but they never discovered where he traveled to, or which countries he had fought against. He came of a generation, all over the world, for whom it was easier to forget than to remember, and the more their children pressed, the more their memory dissipated. Once Gyan had asked: "Uncle, but what is England like?"
And he said: "I don’t know…"
"How can you not know???"
"But I have never been."
All these years in the British army and he had never been to England! How could this be? They thought he had prospered and forgotten them, living like a London lord…
Where had he been, then?
The uncle wouldn’t say. Once every four weeks he went to the post office to collect his seven-pound-a-month pension. Mostly he sat on a folding chair, silently moving an expressionless face like a sunflower, a blank handicapped insistence following the sun, the only goal left in his life to match the two, the orb of his face and the orb of light.
The family had since invested their fortunes in schoolteaching and Gyan’s father taught in a tea plantation school beyond Darjeeling.
Then the story stopped. "What about your father? What is he like?" Sai asked, but she didn’t press him. After all, she knew about stories having to stop.
The nights were turning chilly already, and it grew dark earlier. Sai, returning late and fumbling for the road beneath her feet, stopped at Uncle Potty’s for a torch. "Where’s that handsome fellow…?" Uncle Potty and Father Booty teased her. "Goodness. Those Nepali boys, high cheekbones, arm muscles, broad shoulders. Men who can do things, Sai, cut down trees, build fences, carry heavy boxes… mmm mmm."
The cook was waiting at the gate with a lantern when she finally reached Cho Oyu. His bad-tempered wrinkled face peered from an assortment of mufflers and sweaters. "I’ve been waiting, waiting… In this darkness you have not come home!" he complained, waddling in front of her along the path from gate to house, looking round and womanish.
"Why don’t you leave me alone?" she said, conscious for the first time of the unbearable stickiness of family and friends when she had found freedom and space in love.
The cook felt hurt to his chutney core. "I’ll give you one smack," he shouted. "From childhood I have brought you up! With so much love! Is this any way to talk? Soon I’ll die and then who will you turn to? Yes, yes, soon I’ll be dead. Maybe then you’ll be happy. Here I am, so worried, and there you are, having fun, don’t care…"
"Ohhoho." As usual she ended by attempting to placate him. He wouldn’t be placated and then he was, just a little.
Twenty-four
In the Gandhi Café, the lights were kept low, the better to hide the stains. It was a long journey from here to the fusion trend, the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita. This was the real thing, generic Indian, and it could be ordered complete, one stop on the subway line or even on the phone: gilt and red chairs, plastic roses on the table with synthetic dewdrops, cloth paintings portraying -
Oh no, not again -
Yes again -
Krishna and the gopis, village belle at the well…
And the menu -
Oh no, not again -
Yes, again -
Tikka masala, tandoori grill, navrattan vegetable curry, dal makhni, pappadum. Said Harish-Harry: "Find your market. Study your market. Cater to your market." Demand-supply. Indian-American point of agreement. This is why we make good immigrants. Perfect match. (In fact, dear sirs, madams, we were practicing a highly evolved form of capitalism long before America was America; yes, you may think it’s your success, but all civilization comes from India, yes).
But was he underestimating his market? He didn’t care.
The customers – poor students, untenured professors – filled up at the lunch buffet, "ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $5.99," tottered out overcome by the tipsy snake charmer music and the heaviness of the meal.
To add up the new numbers that came clinking in, Harish-Harry’s wife arrived on Sunday mornings after she had washed her hair. A horsetail of sopping tresses, bound loosely in a gold ribbon from a Diwali fruit-and-nut box, dripped onto the floor behind.
"Arre, Biju… to sunao kahani," she always said, "batao… what’s the story?"
But it didn’t matter that he had no story to tell, because she went immediately to the ledgers kept under a row of gods and incense sticks.
"Hae hae," her husband laughed with pleasure, diamond and gold glints coming forth on the black velvet of his pupils, "You can’t make a fool of Malini. She get on the phone, she get the best deal of anybody."