The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

  “The priest has said the balli must be done at amavas, darkest no-moon night of the month. You must sacrifice a chicken.”

  The judge refused to let the cook go. “Superstition. You fool! Why aren’t there ghosts here? Wouldn’t they be here as well as in your village?”

  “Because there is electricity here,” said the cook. “They get a scare from electricity and in our village there is no electricity, that’s why….”

  “What has your life been for?” said the judge, “You live with me, go to a proper doctor, you have even learned to read and write a little, sometimes you read the newspaper, and all to no purpose! Still the priests make a fool of you, rob you of your money.”

  All the other servants set up a chorus advising the cook to disregard their employer’s opinions and save his son instead, for there certainly were ghosts: “Hota hai hota hai, you have to do it.”

  The cook went to the judge with a made-up story of the roof of his village hut having blown off again in the latest storm. The judge gave up and the cook traveled to the village.

  He became worried now, all these years later, that the sacrifice hadn’t really worked, that its effect had been undone by the lie he told the judge, that his wife’s spirit hadn’t actually been appeased, that the offering hadn’t been properly recorded, or wasn’t big enough. He had sacrificed a goat and a chicken, but what if the spirit still had a hunger for Biju?

  ______

  The cook had first made the effort to send his son abroad four years ago when a recruiting agent for a cruise ship line appeared in Kalimpong to solicit applications for waiters, vegetable choppers, toilet cleaners—basic drudge staff, all of whom would appear at the final gala dinner in suits and bow ties, skating on ice, standing on one another’s shoulders, with pineapples on their heads, and flambéing crepes.

  “Will procure legal employment in the USA!!!!” said the advertisements that appeared in the local paper and were pasted on the walls in various locations around town.

  The man set up a temporary office in his room at Sinclair’s Hotel.

  The line that formed outside circled the hotel and came all the way back around, at which point the head of the line got mixed up with the tail and there was some foul play.

  Pleased to get in sooner than he had expected was Biju, who had been summoned from their home to Kalimpong for this interview, despite the judge’s objection. Why couldn’t Biju plan to work for him when the cook retired?

  Biju took some of the cook’s fake recommendations with him to the interview to prove he came from an honest family, and a letter from Father Booty to say he was of sound moral character and one from Uncle Potty to say he made the best damn roast bar none, though Uncle Potty had never eaten anything cooked by this boy who had also never eaten anything cooked by himself, since he had simply never cooked. His grandmother had fed and spoiled him all his life, though they were one of the poorest families in a poor village.

  Nevertheless—the interview was a success.

  “I can make any kind of pudding. Continental or Indian.”

  “But that is excellent. We have a buffet of seventeen sweets each night.”

  In a wonderful moment Biju was accepted and he signed on the dotted line of the proffered form.

  The cook was so proud: “It was because of all the puddings I told the boy about…. They have a big buffet in the ship every night, the ship is like a hotel, you see, run just like the clubs in the past. The interviewer asked him what he could make and he said, ‘I can make this and that, anything you require. Baked Alaska, floating island, brandy snap.’”

  “Are you sure he seemed legitimate?” asked the MetalBox watchman.

  “Completely legitimate,” the cook said, defending the man who had so appreciated his son.

  They went back to the hotel the next evening with a completed medical form and a bank draft of eight thousand rupees to cover his processing fee and the cost of the training camp that was to be held in Kathmandu, since it made sense to them all to pay to get a job. The recruiter made out a receipt for the bank draft, checked the medical forms that had been completed free by the bazaar doctor, who had been kind enough to show Biju’s blood pressure as being lower than it was, his weight as greater, and she had filled up the inoculations column with dates that would have been the correct time to have inoculations had he had them.

  “Have to look perfect or the embassy people will make trouble and then what will you do?” She knew this because she’d sent her own son off on this journey some years ago. In return for the favor, Biju promised to take a packet of dried churbi cheese to the U.S. and mail it to her son doing a medical residency in Ohio, for the boy had been a boarder in a Darjeeling school and acquired the habit of chewing it as he studied.

  Two weeks later, Biju traveled to Kathmandu by bus for a week of training at the recruiting agency’s main office.

  Kathmandu was a carved wooden city of temples and palaces, caught in a disintegrating tangle of modern concrete that stretched into the dust and climbed into the sky.

  He looked in vain for the mountains; Mt. Everest—where was it? He traversed along flat main roads into a knot of medieval passages full of the sounds of long ago, a street of metal workers, a street of potters melding clay, straw, sand, with their bare feet; rats in a Ganesh temple eating sweets. At one point a crooked shutter etched with stars opened and a face from a fairy tale looked out, pure among the muck, but when he looked back the young girl was gone; a wrinkled old crone had taken her place to talk to another old crone on her way with a puja tray of offerings; and then he was back out among the blocks of concrete, scooters, and buses. A billboard was painted with an underwear advertisement showing a giant, bulging underwear placket; across the bulge was a black crisscross. “No Pickpocket,” it warned. Some laughing foreigners were having their picture taken in front of it. Down a lane, around a corner, behind a cinema, there was a small butcher’s shop, with a row of yellow chicken feet in a decorative fringe over the door. A man stood outside, his hands dripping with meat juices over a basin of water tinged rust with blood, and the number inscribed on the side of the door matched the address Biju had in his pocket: 223 A block, ground floor, behind Pun Cinema House.

  “Another one!” the man in front shouted to the back room. Several other men were there wrestling with an unwilling goat that had caught sight of a fellow grazer’s heart lying discarded on the floor.

  “You’ve been cheated,” the butcher laughed. “So many people have been asking to go the USA.”

  The men trussed up the goat and came out grinning, all with bloody vests. “Ah, idiot. Who goes and gives money like that? Where do you come from? What do you think the world is made of? Criminals! Criminals! Go file a report at the police station. Not that they will do anything….”

  Before the butcher slit the goat’s throat, Biju could hear him working up his disdain, yelling “Bitch, whore, cunt, sali,” at her, dragging her forward then, and killing her.

  You have to swear at a creature to be able to destroy it.

  As Biju stood dazed outside, wondering what to do, they skinned her, slung her upside down to drain.

  ______

  His second attempt at America was a simple, straightforward application for a tourist visa.

  A man from his village had made fifteen tries and recently, on the sixteenth, he got the visa.

  “Never give up,” he’d advised the boys in the village, “at some point your lucky day will come.”

  “Is this the Amriken embassy?” Biju asked a watchman outside the formidable exterior.

  “Amreeka nehi, bephkuph. This is U.S. embassy!”

  He walked on: “Where is the Amriken embassy?”

  “It is there.” The man pointed back at the same building.

  “That is U.S.”

  “It is the same thing,” said the man impatiently. “Better get it straight before you get on the plane, bhai.”

  Outside, a crowd of shabby people had been
camping, it appeared, for days on end. Whole families that had traveled from distant villages, eating food packed and brought with them; some individuals with no shoes, some with cracked plastic ones; all smelling already of the ancient sweat of a never-ending journey. Once you got inside, it was air-conditioned and you could wait in rows of orange bucket chairs that shook if anyone along the length began to bop their knees up and down.

  ______

  First name: Balwinder

  Last name: Singh

  Other names:––––

  What would those be??

  Pet names, someone said, and trustfully they wrote: “Guddu, Dumpy, Plumpy, Cherry, Ruby, Pinky, Chicky, Micky, Vicky, Dicky, Sunny, Bunny, Honey, Lucky….”

  After thinking a bit, Biju wrote “Baba.”

  “Demand draft? Demand draft?” said the touts going by in the auto rickshaws. “Passport photo chahiye? Passport photo? Campa Cola chahiye, Campa Cola?”

  Sometimes every single paper the applicants brought with them was fake: birth certificates, vaccination records from doctors, offers of monetary support. There was a lovely place you could go, clerks by the hundreds sitting cross-legged before typewriters, ready to help with stamps and the correct legal language for every conceivable requirement….

  “How do you find so much money?” Someone in the line was worried he would be refused for the small size of his bank account.

  “Ooph, you cannot show so little,” laughed another, looking over his shoulder with frank appraisal. “Don’t you know how to do it?”

  “How?”

  “My whole family,” he explained, “uncles from all over, Dubai–New Zealand–Singapore, wired money into my cousin’s account in Tulsa, the bank printed the statement, my cousin sent a notarized letter of support, and then he sent the money back to where it had come from. How else can you find enough to please them!”

  An announcement was made from the invisible loudspeaker: “Will all visa applicants line up at window number seven to collect a number for visa processing.”

  “What what, what did they say?” Biju, like half the room, didn’t understand, but he saw from the ones who did, who were running, pleased to be given a head start, what they should do. Stink and spit and scream and charge; they jumped toward the window, tried to splat themselves against it hard enough that they would just stick and not scrape off; young men mowing through, tossing aside toothless grannies, trampling babies underfoot. This was no place for manners and this is how the line was formed: wolf-faced single men first, men with families second, women on their own and Biju, and last, the decrepit. Biggest pusher, first place; how self-contented and smiling he was; he dusted himself off, presenting himself with the exquisite manners of a cat. I’m civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I’m civilized, mam. Biju noticed that his eyes, so alive to the foreigners, looked back at his own countrymen and women, immediately glazed over, and went dead.

  Some would be chosen, others refused, and there was no question of fair or not. What would make the decision? It was a whim; it was not liking your face, forty-five degrees centigrade outside and impatience with all Indians, therefore; or perhaps merely the fact that you were in line after a yes, so you were likely to be the no. He trembled to think of what might make these people unsympathetic. Presumably, though, they would start off kind and relaxed, and then, faced with all the fools and annoying people, with their lies and crazy stories, and their desire to stay barely concealed under fervent promises to return, they would respond with an indiscriminate machine-gun-fire of NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!

  On the other hand, it occurred to those who now stood in the front, that at the beginning, fresh and alert, they might be more inclined to check their papers more carefully and find gaps in their arguments…. Or perversely start out by refusing, as if for practice.

  There was no way to fathom the minds and hearts of these great Americans, and Biju watched the windows carefully, trying to uncover a pattern he might learn from. Some officers seemed more amiable than others, some scornful, some thorough, some were certain misfortune, turning everyone away empty-handed.

  He would have to approach his fate soon enough. He stood there telling himself, Look unafraid as if you have nothing to hide. Be clear and firm when answering questions and look straight into the eyes of the officer to show you are honest. But when you are on the verge of hysteria, so full of anxiety and pent-up violence, you could only appear honest and calm by being dishonest. So, whether honest or dishonest, dishonestly honest-looking, he would have to stand before the bulletproof glass, still rehearsing answers to the questions he knew were coming up, questions to which he had to have perfectly made-up replies.

  “How much money do you have?”

  “Can you prove to us you won’t stay?”

  Biju watched as the words were put forward to others with complete bluntness, with a fixed and unembarrassed eye—odd when asking such rude questions. Standing there, feeling the enormous measure of just how despised he was, he would have to reply in a smart yet humble manner. If he bumbled, tried too hard, seemed too cocky, became confused, if they didn’t get what they wanted quickly and easily, he would be out. In this room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their heads and yet they would be begging to come crawling in….

  ______

  “And what is the purpose of your visit?”

  “What should we say, what should we say?” they discussed in the line. “We’ll say a hubshi broke into the shop and killed our sister-in-law and now we have to go to the funeral.”

  “Don’t say that.” An engineering student who was already studying at the University of North Carolina, here for the renewal of his visa, knew this would not sound right.

  But he was shouted down. He was unpopular.

  “Why not?”

  “You are going too far. It’s a stereotype. They’ll suspect.”

  But they insisted. It was a fact known to all mankind: “It’s black men who do all of this.”

  “Yes, yes,” several others in the line agreed. “Yes, yes.” Black people, living like monkeys in the trees, not like us, so civilized….

  They were, then, shocked to see the African-American lady behind the counter. (God, if the Americans accepted them, surely they would welcome Indians with open arms? Won’t they be happy to see us!)

  But… already some ahead were being turned away. Biju’s worry grew as he saw a woman begin to shriek and throw herself about in an epilepsy of grief. “These people won’t let me go, my daughter has just had a baby, these people won’t let me go, I can’t even look at my own grandchild, these people…. I am ready to die… they won’t even let me see the face of my grandchild….” And the security guards came rushing forward to drag her away down the sanitized corridor rinsed with germ killers.

  ______

  The man with the hubshi story of murder—he was sent to the window of the hubshi. Hubshi hubshi bandar bandar, trying to do some quick thinking—oh no, normal Indian prejudice would not work here, distaste and rudeness—story falling to pieces in his head.

  “Mexican, say Mexican,” hissed someone else.

  “Mexican?”

  He arrived at the window, retreating under threat, to his best behavior. “Good morning, ma’am.” (Better not make that hubshi angry, yaar—so much he wished to immigrate to the U.S. of A., he could even be polite to black people.) “Yes ma’am, something like this, Mexican-Texican, I don’t know exactly,” he said to the woman who pinned him with a lepi-dopterist’s gaze. (Mexican-Texican??) “I don’t know, madam,” squirming, “something or the other like this my brother was saying, but he is so upset, you know, don’t want to ask all the details.”

  “No, we cannot give you a visa.”

  “Why ma’am, please ma’am, I already have bought the ticket ma’am….”

  And those who waited for visas who had spacious homes, ease-filled lives, jeans, English, dr
iver-driven cars waiting outside to convey them back to shady streets, and cooks missing their naps to wait late with lunch (something light—cheese macaroni…), all this time they had been trying to separate themselves from the vast shabby crowd. By their manner, dress, and accent, they tried to convey to the officials that they were a pre-selected, numerically restricted, perfect-for-foreign-travel group, skilled in the use of knife and fork, no loud burping, no getting up on the toilet seat to squat as many of the village women were doing at just this moment never having seen the sight of such a toilet before, pouring water from on high to clean their bottoms and flooding the floor with bits of soggy shit.

  “I have been abroad before and I have always returned. You can see from my passport.” England. Switzerland. America. Even New Zealand. Looking forward, when in New York, to the latest movie, to pizza, to Californian wine, also Chilean—very good, you know, and reasonably priced. If you were lucky already you would be lucky again.

  Biju approached his assigned window that framed a clean young man with glasses. White people looked clean because they were whiter; the darker you were, Biju thought, the dirtier you looked.

  “Why are you going?”

  “I would like to go as a tourist.”

  “How do we know you will come back?”

  “My family, wife, and son are here. And my shop.”

  “What shop?”

  “Camera shop.” Could the man really believe this?

  “Where are you going to stay?”

  “With my friend in New York. Nandu is his name and here is his address if you would like to see.”

  “How long?”

  “Two weeks, if that is suitable to you.” (Oh, please, just a day, a day. That will be enough to serve my purpose….)

  “Do you have funds to cover your trip?”

  He showed a fake bank statement procured by the cook from a corrupt state bank clerk in exchange for two bottles of Black Label.