"No! They spit on us."

Gyan recalled his last job interview well over a year ago, when he had traveled all the way to Calcutta by overnight bus to an office buried in the heart of a concrete block lit with the shudder of a fluorescent tube that had never resolved into steady light.

Everyone looked hopeless, the men in the room and the interviewer who had finally turned the shuddering light off – "Voltage low" – and conducted the interview in darkness. "Very good, we will let you know if you are successful." Gyan, feeling his way out through the maze and stepping into the unforgiving summer light, knew he would never be hired.

"Here we are eighty percent of the population, ninety tea gardens in the district, but is even one Nepali-owned?" asked the man.

"No."

"Can our children learn our language in school?"

"No."

"Can we compete for jobs when they have already been promised to others?"

"No."

"In our own country, the country we fight for, we are treated like slaves. Every day the lorries leave bearing away our forests, sold by foreigners to fill the pockets of foreigners. Every day our stones are carried from the riverbed of the Teesta to build their houses and cities. We are laborers working barefoot in all weather, thin as sticks, as they sit fat in managers’ houses with their fat wives, with their fat bank accounts and their fat children going abroad. Even their chairs are fat. We must fight, brothers and sisters, to manage our own affairs. We must unite under the banner of the GNLF, Gorkha National Liberation Front. We will build hospitals and schools. We will provide jobs for our sons. We will give dignity to our daughters carrying heavy loads, breaking stone on the roads. We will defend our own homeland. This is where we were born, where our parents were born, where our grandparents were born. We will run our own affairs in our own language. If necessary, we will wash our bloody kukris in the mother waters of the Teesta. Jai Gorkha." The speech giver waved his kukri and then pierced his thumb, raised the gory sight for all to see.

"Jai Gorkha! Jai Gorkha! Jai Gorkha!" the crowd screamed, their own blood thrumming, pulsing, surging forth at the sight of the speech giver’s hand. Thirty supporters stepped forward and also drew blood from their thumbs with their kukris to write a poster demanding Gorkha-land, in blood.

"Brave Gorkha soldiers protecting India – hear the call," said the leaflets flooding the hillsides. "Please quit the army at once. For when you will be retired then you may be treated as a foreigner."

The GNLF would offer jobs to its own, and a 40,000 strong Gorkha army, universities, and hospitals.

Later, Chhang, Bhang, Owl, Donkey, and many others sat in the cramped shack of Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen on Ringkingpong Road. A small handwritten sign painted on the side said "Broiler Chicken." A carom game board was balanced on an oil barrel outside and two creaky tattered soldiers, on bowlegs, originally of the Eighth Gurkha Rifles, played as the clouds shifted and billowed through their knees. The mountains sliced sharply and tumbled down at either side to bamboo thickets gray with distilled vapor.

The air grew colder and the evening progressed. Gyan, who had been gathered up accidentally in the procession, who had shouted half facetiously, half in earnest, who had half played, half lived a part, found the fervor had affected him. His sarcasm and his embarrassment were gone. Fired by alcohol, he finally submitted to the compelling pull of history and found his pulse leaping to something that felt entirely authentic.

He told the story of his great grandfather, his great uncles, "And do you think they got the same pension as the English of equal rank? They fought to death, but did they earn the same salary?"

All the other anger in the canteen greeted his, clapped his anger on the back. It suddenly became clear why he had no money and no real job had come his way, why he couldn’t fly to college in America, why he was ashamed to let anyone see his home. He thought of how he had kept Sai away the day she had suggested visiting his family. Most of all, he realized why his father’s meekness infuriated him, and why he found himself unable to speak of him, he who had so modest an idea of happiness that even the daily irritant of fifty-two screaming boys in his plantation schoolroom, even the distance of his own family, the loneliness of his work, didn’t upset him. Gyan wanted to shake him, but what satisfaction could be received from shaking a sock? To accost such a person – it just came back to frustrate you twice over…

For a moment all the different pretences he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him – all these things joined together to form a single truth.

The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.

And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor.

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk -

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement take the harshest route possible.

Moody and restless, Gyan arrived at Cho Oyu the next day, upset at having to undertake that long walk in the cold for the small amount of money the judge paid him. It maddened him that people lived here in this enormous house and property, taking hot baths, sleeping alone in spacious rooms, and he suddenly remembered the cutlets and boiled peas dinner with Sai and the judge, the judge’s "Common sense seems to have evaded you, young man."

"How late you are," said Sai when she saw him, and he was angry in a different way from the night before when, indignant in war paint, he had stuck his bottom out one way and his chest the other way and discovered a self-righteous posturing, a new way of talking. This was a petty anger that pulled him back, curtailed his spirit, made him feel peevish. The annoyance was different from any he’d felt with Sai before.

To cheer him up, Sai told him of the Christmas party -

You know, three times we tried to light the soup ladle full of brandy and pour it over the pudding -

Gyan ignored her, opened up the physics book. Oh, if only she would shut up – that bright silliness he had not noticed in her before – he was too irritated to stand it.

She turned reluctantly to its pages; it was a long time since they had properly looked at physics.

"If two objects, one weighing… and the other weighing… are dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa, at which time and at what speed will they fall to the ground?"

"You’re in an unpleasant mood," she said and yawned with luxury to indicate other, better, options.

He pretended he hadn’t heard her.

Then he yawned, too, despite himself.

She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward.

Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.