The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

  But profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other. They were damning the third world to being third-world. They were forcing Bose and his son into an inferior position—thus far and no further—and he couldn’t take it. Not after believing he was their friend. He thought of how the English government and its civil servants had sailed away throwing their topis overboard, leaving behind only those ridiculous Indians who couldn’t rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn.

  Again they went to court and again they would go to court with their unshakable belief in the system of justice. Again they lost. Again they would lose.

  The man with the white curly wig and a dark face covered in powder, bringing down his hammer, always against the native, in a world that was still colonial.

  ______

  In England they had a great good laugh, no doubt, but in India, too, everyone laughed with the joy of seeing people like Bose cheated. There they had thought they were superior, putting on airs, and they were just the same—weren’t they?—as the rest.

  The more the judge’s mouth tightened, the more Bose seemed determined to drive the conversation until it broke.

  “Best days of my life,” he said. “Remember? Punting by King’s, Trinity, what a view, my God, and then what was it? Ah yes, Corpus Christi…. No, I’m getting it wrong, aren’t I? First Trinity, then St. John’s. No. First Clare, then Trinity, then some ladies’ thing, Primrose… Primrose?”

  “No, that’s not the order at all,” the judge heard himself saying in tight-wound offended tones like an adolescent. “It was Trinity then Clare.”

  “No, no, what are you saying. King’s, Corpus Christi, Clare, then St. John. Memory going, old chap….”

  “I think your memory may be failing you!”

  Bose was drinking peg after peg, desperate to wrangle something—a common memory, an establishment of truth that had, at least, a commitment from two people—

  “No, no. King’s! Trinity!” he pounded his glass on the table. “Jesus! Clare! Gonville! And then on to tea at Granchester!”

  The judge could no longer bear it, he raised his hand into the air, counted fingers:

  1. St. John’s!

  2. Trinity!

  3. Clare!

  4. King’s!

  Bose fell silent. He seemed relieved by the challenge.

  “Should we order some dinner?” asked the judge.

  ______

  But Bose swung rapidly to another position—satisfaction either way—but depth, resolution. Still a question for Bose: should he damn the past or find some sense in it? Drunk, eyes aswim with tears, “Bastards!” he said with such bitterness. “What bastards they were!” raising his voice as if attempting to grant himself conviction. “Goras—get away with everything don’t they? Bloody white people. They’re responsible for all the crimes of the century!”

  Silence.

  “Well,” he said then, to the disapproving silence, trying to reconcile with it, “one thing we’re lucky for, baap re, is that they didn’t stay, thank God. At least they left….”

  Still nothing from the judge.

  “Not like in Africa—still making trouble over there….”

  Silence.

  “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much—now they can just do their dirty work from far away….”

  Jaw clenched unclenched hands clenched unclenched clenched.

  “Oh, they weren’t all bad, I suppose…. Not all….”

  Jaw clenched unclenched hands clenched unclenched clenched unclenched—

  ______

  Then the judge burst out, despite himself:

  “YES! YES! YES! They were bad. They were part of it. And we were part of the problem, Bose, exactly as much as you could argue that we were part of the solution.”

  And:

  “Waiter!

  “Waiter!

  “Waiter?

  “Waiter!!

  “WAITER!!!” shouted the judge, in utter desperation. “Probably gone chasing the hen,” said Bose weakly. “I don’t think they were expecting anyone.”

  ______

  The judge walked into the kitchen and found two green chilis looking ridiculous in a tin cup on a wooden stand that read “Best Potato Exhibit 1933.”

  Nothing else.

  He went to the front desk. “Nobody in the kitchen.”

  The man at the reception was half asleep. “It is very late, sir. Go next door to Glenary’s. They have a full restaurant and bar.”

  “We have come here for dinner. Should I report you to the management?” Resentfully the man went around to the back, and eventually a reluctant waiter arrived at their table; dried lentil scabs on his blue jacket made yellow dabs. He had been having a snooze in an empty room—ubiquitous old-fashioned waiter that he was, functioning like a communist employee, existing comfortably away from horrible capitalist ideas of serving monied people politely.

  “Roast mutton with mint sauce. Is the mutton tender?” asked the judge imperiously.

  The waiter remained unintimidated: “Who can get tender mutton?” he said scornfully.

  “Tomato soup?”

  He considered this option but lacked the conviction to break free of the considering. After several undecided minutes had passed, Bose broke the spell by asking, “Rissoles?” That might salvage the evening.

  “Oh no,” the waiter said, shaking his head and smiling insolently. “No, that you cannot get.”

  “Well, what do you have then?”

  “Muttoncurrymuttonpulaovegetablecurryvegetablepulao….”

  “But you said the mutton wasn’t tender.”

  “Yes, I already told you, didn’t I?”

  ______

  The food arrived. Bose made a valiant effort to retract and start over: “Just found a new cook myself,” he said. “That Sheru kicked the bucket after thirty years of service. The new one is untrained, but he came cheap because of that. I got out the recipe books and read them aloud as he copied it all down in Bengali. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘keep it basic, nothing fancy. Just learn a brown sauce and a white sauce—shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton.’”

  But he couldn’t manage to keep this up.

  He now pleaded directly with the judge: “We’re friends, aren’t we?

  “Aren’t we? Aren’t we friends?”

  “Time passes, things change,” said the judge, feeling claustrophobia and embarrassment.

  “But what is in the past remains unchanged, doesn’t it?”

  “I think it does change. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind, Bose.”

  The judge knew that he would never communicate with Bose again. He wanted neither to pretend he had been the Englishman’s friend (all those pathetic Indians who glorified a friendship that was later proclaimed by the other [white] party to be nonexistent!), nor did he wish to allow himself to be dragged through the dirt. He had kept up an immaculate silence and he wasn’t about to have Bose destroy it. He wouldn’t tumble his pride to melodrama at the end of his life and he knew the danger of confession—it would cancel any hope of dignity forever. People pounced on what you gave them like a raw heart and gobbled it up.

  The judge called for the bill, once, twice, but even the bill was unimportant to the waiter. He was forced to walk back into the kitchen.

  Bose and the judge shook a soggy handshake, and the judge wiped his hands on his pants when they were done, but still, Bose’s eye on him was like mucous.

  “Good night. Good-bye. So long”—not Indian sentences. English sentences. Perhaps that’s why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place: the self-consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.

  ______

  The mist was hooked tightly into the tea bushes on either side of the road as he left Darjeeling, an
d the judge could barely see. He drove slowly, no other cars, nothing around, and then, damn it—

  A memory of—

  Six little boys at a bus stop.

  “Why is the Chinaman yellow? He pees against the wind, HA HA. Why is the Indian brown? He shits upside down, HA HA HA.”

  Taunting him in the street, throwing stones, jeering, making monkey faces. How strange it was: he had feared children, been scared of these human beings half his size.

  Then he remembered a worse incident. Another Indian, a boy he didn’t know, but no doubt someone just like himself, just like Bose, was being kicked and beaten behind the pub at the corner. One of the boy’s attackers had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a crowd of jeering red-faced men. And the future judge, walking by, on his way home with a pork pie for his dinner—what had he done? He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t called for help. He’d turned and fled, run up to his rented room and sat there.

  ______

  Without thinking, the judge made the calibrated gestures, the familiar turns back to Cho Oyu, instead of over the edge of the mountainside.

  Close to home, he almost ran into an army jeep parked by the side of the road, lights off. The cook and a couple of soldiers were hiding boxes of liquor in the bushes. The judge swore but continued on. He knew about this side business of the cook’s and ignored it. It was his habit to be a master and the cook’s to be a servant, but something had changed in their relationship within a system that kept servant and master both under an illusion of security.

  Mutt was waiting for him at the gate, and the judge’s expression softened—he blew his horn to signal his arrival. In a second she went from being the unhappiest dog in the world to the happiest and Jemubhai’s heart grew young with pleasure.

  The cook opened the gate, Mutt jumped into the seat next to him, and they rode together from the gate to the garage—this was her treat and even when he stopped driving anywhere, he gave her rides about the property to entertain her. As soon as she’d get in, she would acquire a regal air, angling her expression and smiling graciously right and left.

  On the table, when the judge got in, he found the telegram waiting. “To Justice Patel from St. Augustine’s: regarding your granddaughter, Sai Mistry.”

  The judge had considered the convent’s request in the brief interlude of weakness he experienced after Bose’s visit, when he was forced to confront the fact that he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. He couldn’t knock down the lies or else the past would crumble, and therefore the present…. But he now acquiesced to something in the past that had survived, returned, that might, without his paying too much attention, redeem him—

  ______

  Sai could look after Mutt, he reasoned. The cook was growing decrepit. It would be good to have an unpaid somebody in the house to help with things as the years went by. Sai arrived, and he was worried that she would incite a dormant hatred in his nature, that he would wish to rid himself of her or treat her as he had her mother, her grandmother. But Sai, it had turned out, was more his kin than he had thought imaginable. There was something familiar about her; she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India. The journey he had started so long ago had continued in his descendants. Perhaps he had made a mistake in cutting off his daughter… he’d condemned her before he knew her. Despite himself, he felt, in the backwaters of his unconscious, an imbalance in his deeds balancing itself out.

  This granddaughter whom he didn’t hate was perhaps the only miracle fate had thrown his way.

  Thirty-three

  Six months after Sai, Lola and Noni, Uncle Potty and Father Booty made a library trip to the Gymkhana Club, it was taken over by the Gorkha National Liberation Front, who camped out in the ballroom and the skating rink, ridiculing even further whatever pretensions the club might still harbor despite having already been brought low by the staff.

  Men with guns rested in the ladies’ powder room, enjoyed the spacious plumbing that was still stamped BARHEAD SCOTLAND, PATENTEES in mulberry letters and dawdled before the long mirror, because like most of the towns’ residents, they rarely had the opportunity to see themselves from top to bottom.

  The dining room was filled with men in khaki, posing for pictures, feet on the stuffed head of a leopard, whiskey in hand, fire in the fireplace still with rosette tiles. They drank up the entire bar, and on chilly nights they took down the skins from the walls and slept in the musty folds.

  Later evidence proved they also stockpiled guns, drew maps, plotted the bombing of bridges, hatched plans that grew in daring as managers fled from the tea plantations that stretched in waves over the Singalila Mountains all around the Gymkhana, from Happy Valley, Makaibari, Chonglu, Pershok.

  Then, when it was all over, and the men had signed a peace treaty and moved out—here at this very spot in the Gymkhana Club, on these dining tables placed side by side in a row—they had staged a public surrender of arms.

  On October 2, 1988, Gandhi Jayanti Day, seven thousand men surrendered more than five thousand pipe guns, country-made revolvers, pistols, double and single-barrel guns, Sten guns. They gave up thousands of rounds of ammunition, thirty-five hundred bombs, gelatine sticks, detonators and land mines, kilograms of explosives, mortar shells, cannons. Ghising’s men alone had more than twenty-four thousand pieces. In the pile was the judge’s BSA pump gun, the Springfield rifle, the double-barreled Holland & Holland with which he had roamed, after teatime, in the countryside surrounding Bonda.

  ______

  But when Lola, Noni, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, and Sai were turned away from the Gymkhana dining room, they didn’t expect things to go so badly with the club. They mistook the gloom for present trouble, just as the manager had suggested, and not for a premonition of the dining hall’s future.

  Where should they lunch, then?

  “That new place, Let’s B Veg?” asked Father Booty.

  “No ghas phoos, no twigs and leaves!” said Uncle Potty firmly. He never ate anything green if he could help it.

  “Lung Fung?” It was a shabby Chinese establishment with slain-looking paper dragons dangling from the ceiling.

  “Not very nice to sit in.”

  “Windamere?”

  “Too expensive, only for foreigners. Anyway, it’s their tea that’s good, lunch is the missionary boardinghouse type of thing… thunda khitchri… blubbery collar of mutton… salt and pepper, if you’re very lucky….

  In the end it was Glenary’s, as usual.

  “Lots of options, at least—everybody can get what they want.”

  So they trooped across. At a table in the corner sat Father Peter Lingdamoo, Father Pius Marcus, and Father Bonniface D’Souza eating apple strudel. “Good afternoon, Monsignor,” they said to Father Booty, bringing a whiff of Europe to them. So elegant: Monsignor…

  As always, the room was mostly crowded with schoolchildren squirming with joy on their lunch out, boarding schools being one of Darjeeling’s great economic ventures along with tea. There were older children celebrating birthdays on their own without supervision, younger ones accompanied by parents visiting from Calcutta or even Bhutan and Sikkim, or Bangladesh, Nepal, or from the surrounding tea gardens. Several patriarchs in a generous mood were also questioning their children about their studies, but the mothers were protesting, “Let them be for once, baba,” piling up plates and stroking hair, looking at their children in the way their children were looking at the food, trying to stuff in all they could.

  They knew the menu by heart from years of special meals at Glenary’s. Indian, Continental, or Chinese; sizzlers, chicken and sweet corn soup, ice cream with hot chocolate sauce. Taking swift advantage of parents’ melting eyes—almost time to say good-bye—another ice cream with hot chocolate sauce? “Please, Ma, please,
Ammi, please, Mummy,” mother’s eyes turned toward father, “Priti, no, it is quite enough, don’t spoil him now,” then giving in, knowing Ma, Ammi, or Mummy would be weeping all the lonely road back to the plantation or airport or train station. Had her mother been like this? And her father? Sai felt suddenly bereft and jealous of these children. There was one Tibetan woman so intensely pretty in her sky-colored baku and apron with those disjointed bands of jolly color that made one feel cozy and loved right away. “Oh, such sweet sweet cheeks,” the family were all saying, laughing as they pretended to eat the baby, somehow kindly and gently, and the baby was laughing hardest of all. Why couldn’t she be part of that family? Rent a room in someone else’s life?

  The ladies polished their cutlery on the paper napkins, wiped their plates and glasses, returned one that looked cloudy.

  “How about a wee drink, ladies?” said Uncle Potty.

  “Oh Potty, starting so early.”

  “Suit yourselves. Gin tonic,” he ordered and dipped his bread stick directly into the butter dish. Came up with a cheerful golden berg. “I do like a bit of bread with my butter,” he proclaimed.

  “They do a good fish and chips with tartar sauce,” said Father Booty with a flutter of hope, thinking of river fish in crisp gold uniforms of bread crumbs.

  “Is the fish fresh?” Lola demanded of the waiter. “From the Teesta?”

  “Why not?” said the waiter.

  “Why not???!! I don’t know! You know WHY if NOT!!!”

  “Better not risk it. How about chicken in cheese sauce?”

  “What cheese?” asked Father Booty.

  Everyone froze… chilled silence.