The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

  The judge began to laugh in a cheerless and horrible manner.

  How he hated this dingy season. It angered him for reasons beyond Mutt’s unhappiness; it made a mockery of him, his ideals. When he looked about he saw he was not in charge: mold in his toothbrush, snakes slithering unafraid right over the patio, furniture gaining weight, and Cho Oyu also soaking up water, crumbling like a mealy loaf. With each storm’s bashing, less of it was habitable.

  The judge felt old, very old, and as the house crumbled about him, his mind, too, seemed to be giving way, doors he had kept firmly closed between one thought and the next, dissolving. It was now forty years since he had been a student of poetry.

  ______

  The library had never been open long enough.

  He arrived as it opened, departed when it closed, for it was the rescuer of foreign students, proffered privacy and a lack of thugs.

  He read a book entitled Expedition to Goozerat: “The Malabar coast undulates in the shape of a wave up the western flank of India, and then, in a graceful motion, gestures toward the Arabian sea. This is Goozerat. At the river deltas and along the malarial coasts lie towns configured for trade….”

  What on earth was all of this? It had nothing to do with what he remembered of his home, of the Patels and their life in the Patel warren, and yet, when he unfolded the map, he found Piphit. There it was—a mosquito speck by the side of a sulky river.

  With amazement, he read on, of scurvied sailors arriving, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese. In their care the tomato traveled to India, and also the cashew nut. He read that the East India Company had rented Bombay at ten pounds a year from Charles II who came by it, a jujube in his dowry bag upon his wedding to Catherine of Braganza, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, he learned that mock turtle soup was being trawled on ships through the Suez to feed those who might be pining for it in rice and dal country. An Englishman might sit against a tropical background, yellow yolk of sun, shine spun into the palms, and consume a Yarmouth herring, a Breton oyster. This was all news to him and he felt greedy for a country that was already his.

  ______

  Mid morning he rose from his books, went to the lavatory for the daily trial of his digestion, where he sat straining upon the pot with pained and prolonged effort. As he heard others shuffling outside, waiting for their turn, he stuck a finger up the hole and excavated within, allowing a backed up load of scropulated goat pellets to rattle down loudly. Had they heard him outside? He tried to catch them before they bulleted the water. His finger emerged covered in excrement and blood, and he washed his hands repeatedly, but the smell persisted, faintly trailing him through his studies. As time went on, Jemubhai worked harder. He measured out a reading calendar, listed each book, each chapter in a complex chart. Topham’s Law of Property, Aristotle, Indian Criminal Procedure, the Penal Code and the Evidence Act.

  He worked late into the night back in his rented room, still tailed by the persistent smell of shit, falling from his chair directly into bed, rising in terror a few hours later, and rolling up onto the chair again. He worked eighteen hours a day, over a hundred hours a week, sometimes stopping to feed his landlady’s dog when she begged for a share of pork pie dinner, drooling damp patches onto his lap, raking an insistent paw across his knees and wrecking the pleat of his corduroys. This was his first friendship with an animal, for in Piphit the personalities of dogs were not investigated or encouraged. Three nights before the Probation Finals, he did not sleep at all, but read aloud to himself, rocking back and forth to the rhythm, repeating, repeating.

  A journey once begun, has no end. The memory of his ocean trip shone between the words. Below and beyond, the monsters of his unconscious prowled, awaiting the time when they would rise and be proven real and he wondered if he’d dreamt of the drowning power of the sea before his first sight of it.

  His landlady brought his dinner tray right to his door. A treat: a quadruplet of handsome oily sausages, confident, gleaming, whizzing with life. Ready already for the age when food would sing on television to advertise itself.

  “Don’t work too hard.”

  “One must, Mrs. Rice.”

  He had learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay, to keep even himself away from himself like the Queen.

  Open Competitive Examination, June 1942

  He sat before a row of twelve examiners and the first question was put to him by a professor of London University—Could he tell them how a steam train worked?

  Jemubhai’s mind drew a blank.

  “Not interested in trains?” The man looked personally disappointed.

  “A fascinating field, sir, but one’s been too busy studying the recommended subjects.”

  “No idea of how a train works?”

  Jemu stretched his brain as far as he could—what powered what?— but he had never seen the inside of a railway engine.

  “No, sir.”

  Could he describe then, the burial customs of the ancient Chinese.

  He was from the same part of the country as Gandhi. What of the noncooperation movement? What was his opinion of the Congress?

  The room was silent. BUY BRITISH—Jemubahi had seen the posters the day of his arrival in England, and it had struck him that if he’d yelled BUY INDIAN in the streets of India, he would be clapped into jail. And all the way back in 1930, when Jemubhai was still a child, Gandhi had marched from Sabarmati ashram to Dandi where, at the ocean’s maw, he had performed the subversive activity of harvesting salt.

  “—Where will that get him? Phtool His heart may be in the right place but his brain has fallen out of his head”—Jemu’s father had said although the jails were full of Gandhi’s supporters. On the SS Strathnaver, the sea spray had come flying at Jemubhai and dried in taunting dots of salt upon his face and arms…. It did seem ridiculous to tax it….

  “If one was not committed to the current administration, sir, there would be no question of appearing here today.”

  Lastly, who was his favorite writer?

  A bit nervously for he had none, he replied that one was fond of Sir Walter Scott.

  “What have you read?”

  “All the printed works, sir.”

  “Can you recite one of your favorite poems for us?” asked a professor of social anthropology.

  Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

  Through all the wide Border his steed was the best

  By the time they stood for the ICS, most of the candidates had crisp-ironed their speech, but Jemubhai had barely opened his mouth for whole years and his English still had the rhythm and the form of Gujerati.

  But ere he alighted at Netherby gate

  The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

  For a laggard in love and a dastard in war

  Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar….

  When he looked up, he saw they were all chuckling.

  While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,

  And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume….

  ______

  The judge shook himself. “Damn fool,” he said out loud, pushed his chair back, stood up, brought his fork and knife down in devastating judgment upon himself and left the table. His strength, that mental steel, was weakening. His memory seemed triggered by the tiniest thing—Gyan’s unease, his reciting that absurd poem…. Soon all the judge had worked so hard to separate would soften and envelop him in its nightmare, and the barrier between this life and eternity would in the end, no doubt, be just another such failing construct.

  Mutt followed him to his room. As he sat brooding, she leaned against him with the ease that children have when leaning against their parents.

  ______

  “I am sorry,” said Sai, hot with shame. “It’s impossible to tell how my grandfather will behave.”

  Gyan didn’t appear to hear her.

  “Sorry,” said Sai again, mortified, but aga
in he didn’t appear to have heard. For the first time his eyes rested directly upon her as if he were eating her alive in an orgy of the imagination—aha! At last the proof.

  ______

  The cook cleared away the dirty dishes and shut the quarter cup of leftover peas into the cupboard. The cupboard looked like a coop, with its wire netting around a wooden frame and its four feet standing in bowls of water to deter ants and other vermin. He topped the water in these bowls from one of the buckets placed under the leaks, emptied the other buckets out of the window, and returned them to their appointed spots.

  He made up the bed in an extra room, which was actually filled with rubbish but contained a bed placed in the very center, and he fixed pale virginal candles into saucers for Sai and Gyan to take to their rooms. “Your bed is ready for you, masterji,” he said and sniffed:

  Was there a strange atmosphere in the room?

  But Sai and Gyan seemed immersed in the newspapers again, and he confused their sense of ripening anticipation with his own, because that morning, two letters from Biju had arrived in the post. They were lying under an empty tuna fish tin by his bed, saved for the end of the day, and all evening he’d been savoring the thought of them. He rolled up his pants and departed with an umbrella as it had begun to pour again.

  ______

  In the drawing room, sitting with the newspapers, Sai and Gyan were left alone, quite alone, for the first time.

  Kiki De Costa’s recipe column: marvels with potatoes. Tasty treat with meat. Noodles with doodles and doodles of sauce and oodles and oodles of cheese.

  Fleur Hussein’s beauty tips.

  The handsome baldy competition at the Calcutta Gymkhana Club had given out prizes to Mr. Sunshine, Mr. Moonshine, and Mr. Will Shine.

  Their eyes read on industriously, but their thoughts didn’t cleave to such discipline, and finally Gyan, unable to bear this any longer, this tightrope tension between them, put down his paper with a crashing sound, turned abruptly toward her, and blurted:

  “Do you put oil in your hair?”

  “No,” she said, startled. “I never do.”

  After a bit of silence, “Why?” she asked. Was there something wrong with her hair?

  “I can’t hear you—the rain is so loud,” he said, moving closer. “What?”

  “Why?”

  “It looks so shiny I thought you might.”

  “No.”

  “It looks very soft,” he observed. “Do you wash it with shampoo?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind?”

  “Sunsilk.”

  Oh, the unbearable intimacy of brand names, the boldness of the questions.

  “What soap?”

  “Lux.”

  “Beauty bar of the film stars?”

  But they were too scared to laugh.

  More silence.

  “You?”

  “Whatever is in the house. It doesn’t matter for boys.”

  He couldn’t admit that his mother bought the homemade brown soap that was sold in large rectangles in the market, blocks sliced off and sold cheap.

  The questions grew worse: “Let me see your hands. They are so small.”

  “Are they?”

  “Yes.” He held his own out by hers. “See?”

  Fingers. Nails.

  “Hm. What long fingers. Little nails. But look, you bite them.”

  He weighed her hand.

  “Light as a sparrow. The bones must be hollow.”

  These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the de-liberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.

  ______

  Rainy season beetles flew by in many colors. From each hole in the floor came a mouse as if tailored for size, tiny mice from the tiny holes, big mice from big holes, and the termites came teeming forth from the furniture, so many of them that when you looked, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, all seemed to be wobbling.

  But Gyan did not see them. His gaze itself was a mouse; it disappeared into the belladonna sleeve of Sai’s kimono and spotted her elbow.

  “A sharp point,” he commented. “You could do some harm with that.”

  Arms they measured and legs. Catching sight of her foot—

  “Let me see.”

  He took off his own shoe and then the threadbare sock of which he immediately felt ashamed and which he bundled into his pocket. They examined the nakedness side by side of those little tubers in the semidark.

  Her eyes, he noted, were extraordinarily glamorous: huge, wet, full of theater, capturing all the light in the room.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to mention them; it was easier to stick to what moved him less, to a more scientific approach.

  With the palm of his hand, he cupped her head….

  “Is it flat or is it curved?”

  With an unsteady finger, he embarked on the arch of an eyebrow….

  Oh, he could not believe his bravery; it drove him on and wouldn’t heed the fear that called him back; he was brave despite himself. His finger moved down her nose.

  The sound of water came from every direction: fat upon the window, a popgun off the bananas and the tin roof, lighter and messier on the patio stones, a low-throated gurgle in the gutter that surrounded the house like a moat. There was the sound of the jhora rushing and of water drowning itself in this water, of drainpipes disgorging into the rain barrels, the rain barrels brimming over, little sipping sounds from the moss.

  The growing impossibility of speech would make other intimacies easier.

  As his finger was about to leap from the tip of Sai’s nose to her perfectly arched lips—

  Up she jumped.

  “Owwaaa,” she shouted.

  He thought it was a mouse.

  It wasn’t. She was used to mice.

  “Ooopk,” she said. She couldn’t stand a moment longer, that peppery feeling of being traced by another’s finger and all that green romance burgeoning forth. Wiping her face bluntly with her hands, she shook out her kimono, as if to rid the evening of this trembling delicacy.

  “Well, good night,” she said formally, taking Gyan by surprise. Placing her feet one before the other with the deliberateness of a drunk, she made her way toward the door, reached the rectangle of the doorway, and dove into the merciful dark with Gyan’s bereft eyes following her.

  She didn’t return.

  But the mice did. It was quite extraordinary how tenacious they were—you’d think their fragile hearts would shatter, but their timidity was misleading; their fear was without memory.

  ______

  In his bed slung like a hammock on broken springs, leaks all around, the judge lay pinned by layers of fusty blankets. His underwear lay on top of the lamp to dry and his watch sat below so the mist under the dial might lift—a sad state for the civilized man. The air was spiked with pinpricks of moisture that made it feel as if it were raining indoors as well, yet this didn’t freshen it. It bore down thick enough to smother, an odiferous yeasty mix of spore and fungi, wood smoke and mice droppings, kerosene and chill. He got out of bed to search for a pair of socks and a woolen skull cap. As he was putting them on, he saw the unmistakable silhouette of a scorpion, bold against the dingy wall, and lurched at it with a fly swatter, but it sensed his presence, bristled, the tail went up, and it began to run. It vanished into the crack between the bottom of the wall and the floorboard. “Drat!” he said. His false teeth leered at him with a skeleton grin from a jar of water. He rummaged about for a Calmpose and swallowed it with a gulp of water from the top of the jar, so cold, always cold—the water in Kalimpong was directly from Himalayan snow—and it transformed his gums to pure pain. “Good night, my darling mutton chop,” he said to Mutt when he could manipulate his tongue again. She was already dreaming, but oh the weakness of an aged man, even the pill could not chase the unpleasant thoughts unleashed at dinner back into their holes.

  ______

  When the results of the viva voce
had been posted, he found his performance had earned him one hundred out of three hundred, the lowest qualifying mark. The written portion of the test had brought up his score and he was listed at forty-eight, but only the top forty-two had been included for admission to the ICS. Shaking, almost fainting, he was about to stumble away when a man came out with a supplementary announcement: a new list had been conceived in accordance with attempts to Indianize the service. The crowd of students rushed forward, and in between the lurching, he caught sight of the name, Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, at the very bottom of the page.

  Looking neither right nor left, the newest member, practically unwelcome, of the heaven-born, ran home with his arms folded and got immediately into bed, all his clothes on, even his shoes, and soaked his pillow with his weeping. Tears sheeted his cheeks, eddied about his nose, cascaded into his neck, and he found he was quite unable to control his tormented ragged nerves. He lay there crying for three days and three nights.

  “James,” rattled the landlady. “Are you all right?”

  “Just tired. Not to worry.”

  “James?”

  “Mrs. Rice,” he said. “One is done. One is finally through.”

  “Good for you, James,” she said generously, and told herself she was glad. How progressive, how bold and brave the world was. It would always surprise her.

  Not the first position, nor the second. But there he was. He sent a telegram home.

  “Result unequivocal.”

  “What,” asked everyone, “does that mean?” It sounded as if there was a problem, because “un” words were negative words, those basically competent in English agreed. But then, Jemubhai’s father consulted the assistant magistrate and they exploded with joy, his father transformed into a king holding court, as neighbors, acquaintances, even strangers, streamed by to eat syrup-soaked sweets and offer congratulations in envy-soaked voices.