The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

  Just then, as he was turning away, he saw it—

  Sticking out between the hooks, a few thin and tender filaments.

  “You filth!” he shouted and, from between her sad breasts, pulled forth, like a ridiculous flower, or else a bursting ruined heart—

  His dandy puff.

  ______

  “Break the bed,” shouted an ancient aunt, hearing the scuffle inside the room, and they all began to giggle and nod in satisfaction.

  “Now she will settle down,” said another medicine-voiced hag. “That girl has too much spirit.”

  Inside the room, specially vacated of all who normally slept there, Jemubhai, his face apuff with anger, grabbed at his wife.

  She slipped from his grasp and his anger flew.

  She who had stolen. She who had made them laugh at him. This illiterate village girl. He grabbed at her again.

  She was running and he was chasing her.

  She ran to the door.

  But the door was locked.

  She tried again.

  It didn’t budge.

  The aunt had locked it—just in case. All the stories of brides trying to escape—now and then even an account of a husband sidling out. Shameshameshameshame to the family.

  He came at her with a look of murder.

  She ran for the window.

  He blocked her.

  Without thinking, she picked up the powder container from the table near the door and threw it at his face, terrified of what she was doing, but the terror had joined irreversibly with the gesture, and in a second it was done—

  The container broke apart, the powder lurched up

  filtered down.

  Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury—penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of—he stuffed his way ungracefully into her.

  An aging uncle, wizened bird man in dhoti and spectacles, watching through a crack in the wall outside, felt his own lust ripen and—pop—it sent him hopping about the courtyard.

  ______

  Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury—this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas—but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevolency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run—it turned his civilized stomach.

  Yet he repeated the gutter act again and again. Even in tedium, on and on, a habit he could not stand in himself. This distaste and his persistence made him angrier than ever and any cruelty to her became irresistible. He would teach her the same lessons of loneliness and shame he had learned himself. In public, he never spoke to or looked in her direction.

  She grew accustomed to his detached expression as he pushed into her, that gaze off into middle distance, entirely involved with itself, the same blank look of a dog or monkey humping in the bazaar; until all of a sudden he seemed to skid from control and his expression slid right off his face. A moment later, before anything was revealed, it settled back again and he withdrew to spend a long fiddly time in the bathroom with soap, hot water, and Dettol. He followed his ablutions with a clinical measure of whiskey, as if consuming a disinfectant.

  ______

  The judge and Nimi traveled two days by train and by car, and when they arrived in Bonda, the judge rented a bungalow at the edge of the civil lines for thirty-five rupees a month, without water or electricity. He could afford nothing better until he repaid his debts, but still, he kept money aside to hire a companion for Nimi. A Miss Enid Pott who looked like a bulldog with a hat on top. Her previous employment had been governess to the children of Mr. Singh, the commissioner, and she had brought up her charges to call their mother Mam, their father Fa, had given them cod-liver oil for their collywobbles, and taught them to recite “Nellie Bly.” A photograph in her purse showed her with two dark little girls in sailor frocks; their socks were sharp but their faces drooped.

  Nimi learned no English, and it was out of stubbornness, the judge thought.

  “What is this?” he questioned her angrily, holding aloft a pear.

  “What is this?”—pointing at the gravy boat bought in a secondhand shop, sold by a family whose monogram had happily matched, JPP, in an extravagance of flourishes. He had bought it secretly and hidden it within another bag, so his painful pretension and his thrift would not be detected. James Peter Peterson or Jemubhai Popatlal Patel. IF you please.

  ______

  “What is this?” he asked holding up the bread roll.

  Silence.

  “If you can’t say the word, you can’t eat it.”

  More silence.

  He removed it from her plate.

  Later that evening, he snatched the Ovaltine from her tentative sipping: “And if you don’t like it, don’t drink it.”

  He couldn’t take her anywhere and squirmed when Mrs. Singh waggled her finger at him and said, “Where is your wife, Mr. Patel? None of that purdah business, I hope?” In playing her part in her husband’s career, Mrs. Singh had attempted to mimic what she considered a typical Englishwoman’s balance between briskly pleasant and firmly no-nonsense, and had thus succeeded in quashing the spirits of so many of the locals who prided themselves on being mostly nonsense.

  ______

  Nimi did not accompany her husband on tour, unlike the other wives, who went along on horseback or elephantback or camelback or in palkis upheld by porters (all of whom would, because of the ladies’ fat bottoms, die young), as rattling behind came the pots and pans and the bottle of whiskey and the bottle of port, Geiger counter and Scintillometre, the tuna fish tin and the mad-with-anxiety live chicken. Nobody had ever told it, but it knew; it was in its soul, that anticipation of the hatchet.

  Nimi was left to sit alone in Bonda; three weeks out of four, she paced the house, the garden. She had spent nineteen years within the confines of her father’s compound and she was still unable to contemplate the idea of walking through the gate. The way it stood open for her to come and go—the sight filled her with loneliness. She was uncared for, her freedom useless, her husband disregarded his duty.

  She climbed up the stairs to the flat roof in the slow civility of summer dusks, and watched the Jamuna flowing through a scene tenderly co-cooned in dust. Cows were on their way home; bells were ringing in the temple; she could see birds testing first one tree as a roost for the night, then another, all the while making an overexcited noise like women in a sari shop. Across the river, in the distance, she could see the ruins of a hunting lodge that dated to the Mughal emperor Jehangir: just a few pale arches still upholding carvings of irises. The Mughals had descended from the mountains to invade India but, despite their talent in waging war, were softhearted enough to weep for the loss of this flower in the heat; the persistent dream of the iris was carved everywhere, by craftsman who felt the nostalgia, saw the beauty of what they had made and never known.

  The sight of this scene, of history passing and continuing, touched Nimi in a desolate way. She had fallen out of life altogether. Weeks went by and she spoke to nobody, the servants thumped their own leftovers on the table for her to eat, stole the supplies without fear, allowed the house to grow filthy without guilt until the day before Jemubhai’s arrival when suddenly it was brought to luster again, the clock set to a timetable, water to a twenty-minute boil, fruit soaked for the prescribed number of minutes in solutions of potassium permanganate. Finally Jemubhai’s new second-hand car—that looked more like a friendly stout cow than an automobile—would come belching through the gate.

  He ente
red the house briskly, and when he found his wife rudely contradicting his ambition—

  Well, his irritation was too much to bear.

  Even her expressions annoyed him, but as they were gradually replaced by a blankness, he became upset by their absence.

  What would he do with her? She without enterprise, unable to entertain herself, made of nothing, yet with a disruptive presence.

  She had been abandoned by Miss Enid Pott who said, “Nimi seems to have made up her mind not to learn. You have a swaraji right under your nose, Mr. Patel. She will not argue—that way one might respond and have a dialogue—she just goes limp.”

  Then there was her typically Indian bum—lazy, wide as a buffalo. The pungency of her red hair oil that he experienced as a physical touch.

  “Take those absurd trinkets off,” he instructed her, riled by the tinkle-tonk of her bangles.

  “Why do you have to dress in such a gaudy manner? Yellow and pink? Are you mad?” He threw the hair oil bottles away and her long hairs escaped no matter how tidily she made her bun. The judge found them winging their way across the room, treading air; he found one strangling a mushroom in his cream of mushroom soup.

  One day he found footprints on the toilet seat—she was squatting on it, she was squatting on it!—he could barely contain his outrage, took her head and pushed it into the toilet bowl, and after a point, Nimi, made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. She peered out at the world but could not focus on it, never went to the mirror, because she couldn’t see herself in it, and anyway she couldn’t bear to spend a moment in dressing and combing, activities that were only for the happy and the loved.

  When Jemubhai saw her, cheeks erupting in pustules, he took her fallen beauty as a further affront and felt concerned the skin disease would infect him as well. He instructed the servants to wipe everything with Dettol to kill germs. He powdered himself extra carefully with his new puff, each time remembering the one that had been cushioned between his wife’s obscene, clown-nosed breasts.

  “Don’t show your face outside,” he said to her. “People might run from you screaming.” By year’s end the dread they had for each other was so severe it was as if they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.

  Twenty-nine

  “Christmas!” said Gyan. “You little fool!”

  As he left he could hear Sai beginning to sob. “You dirty bastard,” she shouted through her weeping, “you get back here. Behave so badly and then run away??”

  The sight of the wreck they’d made was alarming and his anger began to scare him as he saw her face through the bars of distorting emotion. He realized Sai could not be the cause of what he felt, but as he left he slammed the gate shut.

  Christmas had never bothered him before—

  She was defining his hatred, he thought. Through her, he caught sight of it—oh—and then he couldn’t resist sharpening it, if only for clarity’s sake.

  Don’t you have any pride? Trying to be so Westernized. They don’t want you!!!! Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms. You will be trying to clean their toilets and even then they won’t want you.

  ______

  Gyan returned to Cho Oyu.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  It took some coaxing.

  “Behaving so badly!” said Sai.

  “Sorry.”

  But in the end she accepted his apology, because she was relieved to turn away from the realization that, for him, she was not the center of their romance. She had been mistaken—she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else’s story.

  She turned from this thought into his kisses.

  “I can’t resist you, that’s the problem….” Gyan said.

  She, the temptress, laughed.

  But human nature is what it is. The kisses were too soppy. A few moments more, the apology turned from sincere to insincere, and he was angry at himself for giving in.

  ______

  Gyan went on to the canteen, sunset doing a mad Kali as he walked, and once again he felt the stir of purity. He would have to sacrifice silly kisses for his adulthood. A feeling of martyrdom crept over him, and with purity for a cause came ever more acute worries of pollution. He was sullied by the romance, unnerved by how easily she gave herself. It wasn’t the way one was supposed to do things. It was unsavory.

  He remembered the center of the Buddhist wheel of life clasped in a demon’s fangs and talons to indicate the hell that traps us: rooster-snake-pig; lust-anger-foolishness; each chasing, each feeding on, each consumed by the other.

  ______

  Sai at Cho Oyu also sat contemplating desire, fury, and stupidity. She tried to suppress her anger, but it kept bubbling up; she tried to compromise her own feelings, but they wouldn’t bend.

  What on earth was wrong with an excuse for a party? After all, one could then logically continue the argument and make a case against speaking English, as well, or eating a patty at the Hasty Tasty—all matters against which Gyan could hardly defend himself. She spent some time developing her thoughts against his to show up all the cracks.

  “You bastard,” she said to the emptiness. “My dignity is worth a thousand of you.”

  “Where did he go so soon?” asked the cook later that evening.

  “Who knows?” she said. “But you’re right about the fish and Nepalis. He isn’t very intelligent. The more we study, the less he seems to know, and the fact that he doesn’t know and that I can tell—it makes him furious.”

  “Yes,” said the cook sympathetically, having forecast the boy’s stupidity himself.

  ______

  At Thapa’s Canteen, Gyan told Chhang and Bhang, Owl and Donkey, of how he was forced to tutor in order to earn money. How glad he would be if he could get a proper job and leave that fussy pair, Sai and her grandfather with the fake English accent and the face powdered pink and white over dark brown. Everyone in the canteen laughed as he mimicked the accent: “What poets are they reading these days, young man?” And, encouraged by their “Ha ha,” tongue tingling and supple with alcohol, he leaped smoothly to a description of the house, the guns on the wall, and a certificate from Cambridge that they didn’t even know to be ashamed of.

  ______

  Why should he not betray Sai?

  She who could speak no language but English and pidgin Hindi, she who could not converse with anyone outside her tiny social stratum.

  She who could not eat with her hands; could not squat down on the ground on her haunches to wait for a bus; who had never been to a temple but for architectural interest; never chewed a paan and had not tried most sweets in the mithaishop, for they made her retch; she who left a Bollywood film so exhausted from emotional wear and tear that she walked home like a sick person and lay in pieces on the sofa; she who thought it vulgar to put oil in your hair and used paper to clean her bottom; felt happier with so-called English vegetables, snap peas, French beans, spring onions, and feared—feared—loki, tinda, kathal, kaddu, patrel, and the local saag in the market.

  Eating together they had always felt embarrassed—he, unsettled by her finickiness and her curbed enjoyment, and she, revolted by his energy and his fingers working the dal, his slurps and smacks. The judge ate even his chapatis, his puris and parathas, with knife and fork. Insisted that Sai, in his presence, do the same.

  ______

  Still, Gyan was absolutely sure that she was proud of her behavior; masqueraded it about as shame at her lack of Indianness, maybe, but it marked her status. Oh yes. It allowed her that perverse luxury, the titillation of putting yourself down, criticizing yourself and having the opposite happen—you did not fall, you mystically rose.
>
  So, in the excitement of the moment, he told. Of the guns and the well-stocked kitchen, the liquor in the cabinet, the lack of a phone and there being nobody to call for help.

  Next morning, when he woke, though, he felt guilty all over again. He thought of lying entangled in the garden last year, on the rough grass under high trees jigsawing the sky, spidery stars through the prehistoric ferns.

  But so fluid a thing was love. It wasn’t firm, he was learning, it wasn’t a scripture; it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal, taking the mold of whatever he poured it into. And in fact, it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels. It could be used for all kinds of purposes…. He wished it were a constraint. It was truly beginning to frighten him.

  Thirty

  Worried about growing problems in the market and the disruption of supplies due to strikes, the cook was putting some buffalo meat that was growing harder and harder to buy into Mutt’s stew. He unwrapped the flank from its newspaper wrapping soaked in blood, and suddenly he had the overwhelming thought that he held two kilos of his son’s body there, dead like that.

  Years ago when the cook’s wife had been killed falling from a tree while gathering leaves for their goat, everyone in his village had said her ghost was threatening to take Biju with her, since she had died violently. The priests claimed that a spirit passing on in such a way remained angry. His wife had been a mild person—in fact he had little memory of her speaking at all—but they had insisted it was true, that Biju had seen his mother, a transparent apparition in the night, trying to claw at him. The extended family walked all the way to the post office in the nearest town to send a barrage of telegrams to the judge’s address. The telegrams in those days had arrived via postal runner who ran shaking a spear from village to village. “In the name of Queen Victoria let me pass,” he sang in a high voice, although he neither knew nor cared that she was long gone.