The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

  His guilt hooked unawares, rose in his eye, disappeared reappeared. Wriggling leaping trying to get away like a caught fish. “You’re crazy.”

  “ I saw that,” pounced Sai. Jumped to seize it from his eyes. But he caught her before she reached him and then threw her aside into the lantana bushes and beat about with a stick.

  ______

  “Gyan bhaiya?” His sister’s tentative voice as Sai managed to stand.

  They both turned in horror. It had all been observed. He dropped the stick and told his sister: “Don’t stick your nose here. Go back. Or I’ll smack you hard.”

  And he shouted at Sai, “Never come here again.” Oh, and now it would all be reported to his parents.

  Sai screamed at the sister: “Good you saw, good that you heard. Go and tell your parents what your brother has been up to, telling me he loves me, making all kinds of promises and then sending robbers to our house. I’ll go to the police and then let’s see what happens to your family. Gyan will get his eyes pulled out, his head cut off, and then let’s see when you all come crying to beg…. Hah!”

  The sister was trying to hear but Gyan had her by the braids and was pulling her home. Sai had betrayed him, led him to betray others, his own people, his family. She had enticed him, sneaked up on him, spied on him, ruined him, caused him to behave badly. He couldn’t wait for the day his mother would show him the photograph of the girl he was to marry, a charming girl, he hoped, with cheeks like two Simla apples, who hadn’t allowed her mind to traverse the gutters and gray areas, and he would adore her for the miracle she was.

  Sai was not miraculous; she was an uninspiring person, a reflection of all the contradictions around her, a mirror that showed him himself far too clearly for comfort.

  ______

  Sai began to follow brother and sister but then stopped. Shame caught up with her. What had she done? It would be her they would laugh at, a desperate girl who had walked all this way for unrequited love. Gyan would be slapped on the back and cheered for his conquest. She would be humiliated. He had hit on the age-old trick that remade him into a hero, “the desired male”…. The more he insulted her behind her back—”Oh, that crazy girl is following me…”—the more the men would cheer, the more his status would grow at Thapa’s Canteen, the more Sai would be remade behind her back into a lunatic female, the more Gyan would fatten with pride…. She felt her own dignity departing, watched it from far away as Gyan and his sister walked down the path. As they turned into their house, it vanished as well.

  ______

  She walked home very slowly, sick, sick. The mist was thickening, smoke adding to the dusk and the vapor. The smell of potatoes cooking came from busti houses all along the way, a smell that would surely connote comfort to souls across the world, but that couldn’t comfort her. She felt none of the pity she’d felt earlier while contemplating this scene; even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her…

  ______

  When she arrived home she saw two people on the veranda talking to the cook and the judge.

  A woman was pleading: “Who do you go to when you’re poor? People like us have to suffer. All the goondas come out and the police go hand in hand with them.”

  “Who are you?”

  It was the wife, begging for mercy, of the drunk the police had caught and questioned about the gun robbery and on whom they had practiced their new torture strategy. They, at Cho Oyu, had forgotten about this man, but the man’s wife had traced the connection and she’d come with her father-in-law to see the judge, walking half a day from a village across the Relli River.

  “What will we do?” she begged. “We are not even Nepalis, we are Lepchas…. He was innocent and the police have blinded him. He knew nothing about you, he was in the market as usual, everyone knows,” sobbed the wife, looking to her father-in-law for help.

  What use is it for a woman to protest and cry?

  But her father-in-law was too scared. He said nothing at all, just stood there; his expression couldn’t be told apart from his wrinkles. His son, when he was not drinking, had worked to rebuild the roads in the district, filling stones from the Teesta riverbed into contractors’ trucks, unloading them at building sites, clearing landslides that tumbled over and over in the same eternal motion as the river coming down. His son’s wife worked on the highways as well, but no work was being done now that the GNLF had closed down the roads.

  “Why come to me? Go to the police. They are the ones who caught your husband, not I. It’s not my fault,” said the judge, alarmed into eloquence. “You had better leave from here.”

  “You can’t send this woman to the police,” said the cook, “they’ll probably assault her.”

  The woman looked raped and beaten already. Her clothes were very soiled and her teeth resembled a row of rotten corn kernels, some of them missing, some blackened, and she was quite bent from carrying stone—common sight, this sort of woman in the hills. Some foreigners had actually photographed her as proof of horror…

  “George!…! George!” said a shocked wife to her husband with a camera.

  And he had leaned out of the car: Click! “Got it, babe…!”

  “Help us,” she begged.

  The judge seemed suddenly to remember his personality, stiffened, and said nothing, set his mouth in a mask, would look neither left nor right, went back to his game of chess.

  In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. He was embarrassed by the attention that was being drawn to his humiliation yet again, the setting of the table with the tablecloth, the laughter, the robbery of the rifles that had never contributed to a fast-forward death ballet come duck season.

  Now, typically, the mess had grown.

  This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority. He had done his duty as far as it was any citizen’s duty to report problems to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a bit and one could find oneself supporting the whole family forever after, a constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food, the husband might be blind and with broken legs, and the woman might be anemic and bent, but they’d still pop out an infant every nine months. If you let such people get an inch, they’d take everything you had—the families yoked together because of guilt on one side, and an unending greed and capacity for dependance on the other—and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.

  ______

  The cook looked at the man and woman and sighed.

  They looked at Sai. “Didi…,” the woman said. Her eyes were too devastated to look at directly.

  Sai turned away and told herself she didn’t care.

  She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favored her she would, perhaps, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth in their own image, a perfect devilish student to the devil gods….

  It took a while for them to leave. They went and sat outside the gate, the cook forced to herd them out like cows, and then for a long while they squatted down on their haunches and didn’t move, just stared emotionless, as if drained of hope and initiative.

  They watched the judge taking Mutt for her walk and feeding her. He was angry and embarrassed that they were watching. Why didn’t they GO!

  “ Tell them to leave or else we’ll call the police,” he told the cook.

  “Jao, jao,” the cook said, “jao jao,” through the gate, but they only retreated up the hill, behind the bushes and settled back down with the same blank look on their faces.

  Sai climbed to her room, slammed the door, and flung herself at her reflection in the mirror:

  What will happen to me?!

  Gyan would find adulthood and purit
y in a quest for a homeland and she would be left forever adolescent, trapped in shameful dramatics. This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot….

  She cried for a while, tears taking on their own momentum, but despite herself the image of the begging woman came back. She went downstairs and asked the cook: “Did you give them anything?”

  “No,” said the cook, also miserable. “What can you do,” he said flatly, as if giving an answer, not asking a question.

  Then he went back out with a sack of rice. “Hss sss hsss?” he hissed.

  But by this time the pair had vanished.

  Forty-one

  The sky over Manhattan was messy, lots of stuff in it, branches and pigeons and choppy clouds lit with weird yellow light. The wind blew strongly and the pink pom-poms of the cherry trees in Riverside Park swished against the unsettled mix.

  The unease that had followed Biju’s phone call to Kalimpong was no longer something in the pit of his stomach; it had grown so big, he was in its stomach.

  He had tried to telephone again the next day and the day after, but the line was quite dead now.

  “More trouble,” said Mr. Iype. “It will go on for a while. Very violent people. All those army types….”

  Along the Hudson, great waves of water were torn up and ripped forward, the wind propelling the gusts upriver.

  “Look at that. It’s getting fucking Biblical,” said someone next to him at the rails. “Fucking Job. Why? Why?”

  Biju moved farther down the rails, but the man shifted down as well.

  “You know what the name of this river really is?” Face fat from McDonald’s, scant hair, he was like so many in this city, a mad and intelligent person camping out at the Barnes & Noble bookstore. The gale took his words and whipped them away; they reached Biju’s ears strangely clipped, on their way to somewhere else. The man turned his face in toward Biju to save the wind from thus slicing their conversation. “Muhheakunnuk, Muh-heakunnuk—the river that flows both ways,” he added with significant eyebrows, “both ways. That is the real fucking name.” Sentences spilled out of the face along with juicy saliva. He was smiling and slavering over his information, gobbling and dispelling at the same time.

  But what was the false name then? Biju possessed no name at all for this black water. It was not his history.

  And then came fucking Moby Dick. The river full of dead fucking whales. The fucking carcasses were hauled up the river, fucking pulverized in the factories.

  “Oil, you know,” he said with intense internal frustration. “It’s always been fucking oil. And underwear.”

  Eyebrows and saliva spray.

  “Corsets!!” he said suddenly.

  “No speak English,” said Biju through a tunnel made from his hands and began to walk quickly away.

  ______

  “No speak English,” he always said to mad people starting up conversations in this city, to the irascible ornery bums and Bible folk dressed in ornate bargain-basement suits and hats, waiting on street corners, getting their moral and physical exercise chasing after infidels. Devotees of the Church of Christ and the Holy Zion, born-agains handing out pamphlets that gave him up-to-date million-dollar news of the devil’s activities: “SATAN IS WAITING TO BURN YOU ALIVE,” screamed the headlines. “YOU DON’T HAVE A MOMENT TO LOSE.”

  Once, he had been accosted by a Lithuanian Hare Krishna, New York via Vilnius and Vrindavan. A reproachful veggie look accompanied the brochure to the former beef cook. Biju looked at him and had to avert his gaze as if from an obscenity. In its own way it was like a prostitute—it showed too much. The book in his hand had a cover of Krishna on the battlefield in lurid colors, the same ones used in movie posters.

  What was India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?

  What was he doing and why?

  It hadn’t even been a question before he left. Of course, if you could go, you went. And if you went, of course, if you could, you stayed….

  The park lamps had come on by the time Biju climbed the urine-stinking stone steps to the street, and the lights were dissolving in the gloaming—to look at them made everyone feel like they were crying. In front of the stage-set night-light of the city, he saw the homeless man walking stiffly, as if on artificial legs, crossing with his grocery cart of rubbish to his plastic igloo where he would wait out the storm.

  Biju walked back to the Gandhi Café, thinking he was emptying out. Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air. And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity—oh the tediousness of it. Clumsy in America, a giant-sized midget, a bigfat-sized helping of small…. Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

  And if he continued on here? What would happen? Would he, like Harish-Harry, manufacture a fake version of himself and using what he had created as clues, understand himself backward? Life was not about life for him anymore, and death—what would even that mean to him? It would have nothing to do with death.

  ______

  The proprietor of the newly opened Shangri-la Travel in the same block as the Gandhi Café ordered a “nonveg” lunch special each day: lamb curry, dal, vegetable pilau, and kheer. Mr. Kakkar was his name.

  “Arre, Biju,” he greeted him, for Biju had just been given the task of delivering his food. “Again you saved me from my wife’s cooking, ha ha. We will throw her food down the toilet!”

  “Why don’t you give it to that dirty bum,” said Biju trying to help the homeless man and insult him at the same time.

  “Oh no,” he said, “bitch-witch, she is the type, she will coming walking down the road on a surprise visit and catch him eating it, that kind of coincidence is always happening to her, and that will be the end of yours truly.”

  A minute later, “You are sure you want to go back??” he said alarmed, eyes popping. “You’re making a big mistake. Thirty years in this country, hassle-free except for the bitch-witch, of course, and I have never gone back. Just even see the plumbing,” he indicated the sound of the gurgling toilet behind him. “They should put their plumbing on their flag, just like we have the spinning wheel—top-class facility in this country.

  “Going back?” he continued, “don’t be completely crazy—all those relatives asking for money! Even strangers are asking for money—maybe they just try, you know, maybe you shit and dollars come out. I’m telling you, my friend, they will get you; if they won’t, the robbers will; if the robbers won’t, some disease will; if not some disease, the heat will; if not the heat, those mad Sardarjis will bring down your plane before you even arrive.”

  While Biju had been away, Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by the Sikhs in the name of their homeland; Rajiv Gandhi had taken over—

  ______

  “Only a matter of time. Someone will get him, too,” said Mr. Kakkar.

  But Biju said: “I have to go. My father….”

  “Ah, soft feelings, they will get you nowhere. My father, so long as he was alive, he always told me, ‘Good, stay away, don’t come back to this shitty place.’”

  Mr. Kakkar gnashed ice cubes with his teeth, lifting them from his Diet Coke with the help of his ballpoint pen, which had a plane modeled at its rear end.

  Nevertheless, he sold Biju a ticket on Gulf Air: New York—London-Frankfurt—Abu Dhabi—Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta. The cheapest they could find. It was like a bus in the sky.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Then he grew more thoughtful. “You know,” he said, “America is in the
process of buying up the world. Go back, you’ll find they own the businesses. One day, you’ll be working for an American company there or here. Think of your children. If you stay here, your son will earn a hundred thousand dollars for the same company he could be working for in India but making one thousand dollars. How, then, can you send your children to the best international college? You are making a big mistake. Still a world, my friend, where one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king. You want your son to be on this side or that side?

  “Ah,” he said, waggling his pen, “the minute you arrive, Biju, you will start to think of how to get the bloody hell out.”

  ______

  But Biju went to Jackson Heights, and from a store like a hangar he bought: a TV and VCR, a camera, sunglasses, baseball caps that said “NYC” and “Yankees” and “I Like My Beer Cold and My Women Hot,” a digital two-time clock and radio and cassette player, waterproof watches, calculators, an electric razor, a toaster oven, a winter coat, nylon sweaters, polyester-cotton-blend shirts, a polyurethane quilt, a rain jacket, a folding umbrella, suede shoes, a leather wallet, a Japanese-made heater, a set of sharp knives, a hot water bottle, Fixodent, saffron, cashews and raisins, aftershave, T-shirts with “I love NY” and “Born in the USA” picked out in shiny stones, whiskey, and, after a moment of hesitation, a bottle of perfume called Windsong… who was that for? He didn’t yet know her face.

  ______

  While he shopped, he remembered that as a child he’d been part of a pack of boys who played so hard they’d come home exhausted. They’d thrown stones and slippers into trees to bring down b er and jamun; chased lizards until their tails fell off and tossed the leaping bits on little girls; they’d stolen chooran pellets from the shop, that looked like goat droppings but were so, so tasty with a bit of sandy crunch. He remembered bathing in the river, feeling his body against the cool firm river muscle, and sitting on a rock with his feet in the water, gnawing on sugarcane, working out the sweetness no matter how his jaw hurt, completely absorbed. He had played cricket cricket cricket. Biju found himself smiling at the memory of the time the whole village had watched India win a test match against Australia on a television running off a car battery because the transformer in the village had burned out. All over India the crops had been rotting in the fields, the nation’s prostitutes complaining about lack of business because every male in the country had his eyes glued to the screen. He thought of samosas adjoining a spill of chutney coming by on a leaf plate. A place where he could never be the only one in a photograph.