Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

Jemubhai Popatlal Patel had, in fact, been born to a family of the peasant caste, in a tentative structure under a palm roof scuffling with rats, at the outskirts of Piphit where the town took on the aspect of a village again. The year was 1919 and the Patels could still remember the time when Piphit had seemed ageless. First it had been owned by the Gaekwad kings of Baroda and then the British, but though the revenue headed for one owner and then another, the landscape had remained unaffected; a temple stood at its heart, and by its side, a several-legged banyan tree; in its pillared shade, white-bearded men regurgitated their memories; cows mooed oo aaw, oo aaw; women walked through the cotton fields to collect water at the mud-muddled river, a slow river, practically asleep.

But then tracks had been laid across the salt pans to bring steam trains from the docks at Surat and Bombay to transport cotton from the interior. Broad homes had come up in the civil lines, a courthouse with a clock tower to maintain the new, quick-moving time, and on the streets thronged all manner of people: Hindu, Christian, Jain, Muslim, clerks, army boys, tribal women. In the market, shopkeepers from the cubbyhole shops in which they perched conducted business that arced between Kobe and Panama, Port-au-Prince, Shanghai, Manila, and also to tin-roofed stalls too small to enter, many days’ journey away by bullock cart. Here, in the market, upon a narrow parapet that jutted from a sweet-seller’s establishment, Jemubhai’s father owned a modest business procuring false witnesses to appear in court. (Who would think his son, so many years later, would become a judge?)

The usual stories: jealous husband cutting off wife’s nose or falsified record claiming death of a widow who was still alive so her property might be divided among greedy descendants.

He trained the poor, the desperate, the scoundrels, rehearsed them strictly:

"What do you know about Manubhai’s buffalo?"

"Manubhai, in fact, never had a buffalo at all."

He was proud of his ability to influence and corrupt the path of justice, exchange right for wrong or wrong for right; he felt no guilt. By the time a case of a stolen cow arrived at court, centuries of arguments had occurred between warring families, so many convolutions and tit-for-tats that there was no right or wrong anymore. Purity of answer was a false quest. How far back could you go, straightening things out?

The business succeeded. He bought a second-hand Hercules cycle for thirty-five rupees and became a familiar sight riding about town. When his first and only son was born his hopes were immediately buoyed. Baby Jemubhai wrapped five miniature fingers about a single one of his father’s; his clutch was determined and slightly grim, but his father took the grip as proof of good health and could not shut his mustache over his smile. When his son was big enough, he sent him to the mission school.

Each weekday morning, Jemubhai’s mother shook him awake in darkness so he might review his lessons.

"No, please no, little more time, little more." He wriggled from her grasp, eyes still closed, ready to drop back into sleep, for he had never grown used to this underground awakening, this time that belonged to dacoits and jackals, to strange sounds and shapes that weren’t meant, he was sure, to be heard or seen by him, a mere junior student at the Bishop Cotton School. There was nothing but black against his eyes, though he knew it was really a cluttered scene, rows of opinionated relatives asleep outside, kakas-kakis-masas-masis-phois-phuas, bundles in various colors dangling from the thatched roof of the veranda, buffaloes tethered to the trees by rings in their noses.

His mother was a phantom in the dark courtyard, pouring cold well water over his invisible self, scrubbing viciously with the thick wrists of a farm woman, rubbing oil through his hair, and though he knew it would encourage his brains, it felt as if she were rubbing, rubbing them out.

Fed he was, to surfeit. Each day, he was given a tumbler of fresh milk sequined with golden fat. His mother held the tumbler to his lips, lowering it only when empty, so he reemerged like a whale from the sea, heaving for breath. Stomach full of cream, mind full of study, camphor hung in a tiny bag about his neck to divert illness; the entire package was prayed over and thumb-printed red and yellow with tika marks. He was taken to school on the back of his father’s bicycle.

In the entrance to the school building was a portrait of Queen Victoria in a dress like a flouncy curtain, a fringed cape, and a peculiar hat with feathery arrows shooting out. Each morning as Jemubhai passed under, he found her froggy expression compelling and felt deeply impressed that a woman so plain could also have been so powerful. The more he pondered this oddity, the more his respect for her and the English grew.

It was there, under her warty presence, that he had finally risen to the promise of his gender. From their creaky Patel lineage appeared an intelligence that seemed modern in its alacrity. He could read a page, close the book, rat-a-tat it back, hold a dozen numbers in his head, work his mind like an unsnagging machine through a maze of calculations, roll forth the answer like a finished product shooting from a factory chute. Sometimes, when his father saw him, he forgot to recognize his son, so clearly in the X-ray flashes of his imagination did he see the fertile cauli-flowering within his son’s skull.

The daughters were promptly deprived to make sure he got the best of everything, from love to food. Years went by in a blur.

But Jemubhai’s hopes remained fuzzy and it was his father who first mentioned the civil service.

When Jemu, aged fourteen, matriculated at the top of the class, the principal, Mr. McCooe, summoned his father and suggested his son take the local pleader’s examination that would enable him to find employment in the courts of subordinate magistrates. "Bright boy… he might end up in the high court!"

The father walked out thinking, Well, if he could do that, he could do more. He could be the judge himself, couldn’t he?

His son might, might, could! occupy the seat faced by the father, proud disrupter of the system, lowest in the hierarchy of the court. He might be a district commissioner or a high court judge. He might wear a silly white wig atop a dark face in the burning heat of summer and bring down his hammer on those phony rigged cases. Father below, son above, they’d be in charge of justice, complete.

He shared his dream with Jemubhai. So fantastic was their dreaming, it thrilled them like a fairy tale, and perhaps because this dream sailed too high in the sky to be tackled by logic, it took form, began to exert palpable pressure. Without naïveté, father and son would have been defeated; had they aimed lower, according to the logic of probability, they would have failed.

The recommended number of Indians in the ICS was 50 percent and the quota wasn’t even close to being filled. Space at the top, space at the top. There certainly was no space at the bottom.

Jemubhai attended Bishop’s College on a scholarship, and after, he left for Cambridge on the SS Strathnaver. When he returned, member of the ICS, he was put to work in a district far from his home in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

"So many servants then," the cook told Sai. "Now, of course, I am the only one." He had begun working at ten years old, at a salary half his age, five rupees, as the lowest all-purpose chokra boy in the kitchen of a club where his father was pudding cook.