The Inheritance Of Loss Part 17

An aging uncle, wizened bird man in dhoti and spectacles, watching through a crack in the wall outside, felt his own l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+t mixed up with the smell of s.e.x; 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. James Peter Peterson or Jemubhai Popatlal Patel. IF you please. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 quas.h.i.+ng 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 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. n.o.body had ever told it, but it knew; it was in its soul, that antic.i.p.ation of the hatchet. 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. n.o.body had ever told it, but it knew; it was in its soul, that antic.i.p.ation 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-c.o.o.ned 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 pa.s.sing and continuing, touched Nimi in a desolate way. She had fallen out of life altogether. Weeks went by and she spoke to n.o.body, 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 l.u.s.ter again, the clock set to a timetable, water to a twenty-minute boil, fruit soaked for the prescribed number of minutes in solutions of pota.s.sium 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 entered 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 swaraji right under your nose, Mr. Patel. She will not argue-that way one might respond and have a dialogue-she just goes limp." 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 b.u.m-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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 cus.h.i.+oned between his wife's obscene, clown-nosed b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"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!" said Gyan. "You little fool!"

As he left he could hear Sai beginning to sob. "You dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d," 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 h.e.l.l that traps us: rooster-snake-pig; l.u.s.t-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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d," 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 paan and had not tried most sweets in the and had not tried most sweets in the mithaishop, 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- 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 and the local saag saag in the market. in the market.

Eating together they had always felt embarra.s.sed-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, parathas, with knife and fork. Insisted that Sai, in his presence, do the same. 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 t.i.tillation 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 n.o.body 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 gra.s.s 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. 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s," he sang in a high voice, although he neither knew nor cared that she was long gone.

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

The judge refused to let the cook go. "Superst.i.tion. 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, "Hota hai hota hai, you have to do it." 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 s.h.i.+p 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 flambeing crepes.

"Will procure legal employment in the USA!!!!" said the advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+p every night, the s.h.i.+p 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.'"