Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

Noni had never had love at all.

She had never sat in a hushed room and talked about such things as might make your soul tremble like a candle. She had never launched herself coquettishly at Calcutta parties, sari wrapped tightly over her hips, ice tonkling madly in her lime soda. She had never flown the brief glorious flag of romance, bright red, over her existence, not even as an episode of theater, a bit of pretense to raise her above her life. What did she have? Not even terrible hatreds; not even bitterness, grief. Merely irritations over small things: the way someone would not blow her nose but went sur-sur-sur in the library, laddering up the snot again and again.

She found, to her shock, that she had actually felt jealous of Kesang. The lines had blurred, luck had been misassigned.

And who would love Sai?

When Sai had first arrived, Noni had seen herself in her, in Sai’s shyness. This was what came of committing a sensitive creature to a mean-spirited educational system, she thought. Noni, too, had been sent to such a school – you could only remain unsnared by going underground, remaining quiet when asked questions, expressing no opinion, hoping to be invisible – or they got you, ruined you.

Noni had recovered her confidence when it was too late. Life had passed her by and in those days things had to happen fast for a girl, or they didn’t happen at all.

"Don’t you want to meet people your own age?" she asked Sai.

But Sai was shy around her peers. Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.

Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest – she couldn’t stop. In this way she had read To Kill a Mockingbird, Cider with Rosie, and Life with Father from the Gymkhana Club library. And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow… – She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words – the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful. She remembered her parents, her father’s hope of space travel. She studied the photographs taken via satellite of a storm blowing a red cloud off the sun’s surface, felt a terrible desire for the father she did not know, and imagined that she, too, must surely have within her the same urge for something beyond the ordinary.

Cho Oyu and the judge’s habits seemed curtailments to her then.

"Now and again, I wish I lived by the sea," sighed Noni. "At least the waves are never still."

A long while ago, when she was a young woman, she had gone to Digha and learned what it was to be lifted by the mysterious ocean. She stared out at the mountains, at the perfection of their stillness.

"The Himalayas were once underwater," Sai said. She knew this from her reading. "There are ammonite fossils on Mt. Everest."

Noni and Sai picked up the physics book again. Then they put it down again.

"Listen to me," Noni told Sai, "if you get a chance in life, take it. Look at me, I should have thought about the future when I was young. Instead, only when it was too late did I realize what I should have done long ago. I used to dream about becoming an archaeologist. I’d go to the British Council and look at the books on King Tutankhamen… But my parents were not the kind to understand, you know, my father was the old-fashioned type, a man brought up and educated only to give orders… You must do it on your own, Sai."

Once more they tried physics, but Noni couldn’t find an answer to the problem.

"I am afraid I have exhausted my abilities in science and mathematics.

Sai will require a tutor more qualified in these areas," said the note she sent home with Sai for the judge.

"Bloody irresponsible woman," said the judge, grumpy because the heat reminded him of his nationality. Later that evening he dictated to Sai a letter for the principal of the local college.

"If there is a teacher or an older student who provides tutoring, please let them know that we are looking for a mathematics and science instructor."

Not even a few sunshiny weeks had passed before the principal replied that he could recommend a promising student who had finished his bachelor’s degree, but hadn’t yet been able to find a job.

The student was Gyan, a quiet student of accounting who had thought the act of ordering numbers would soothe him; however, it hadn’t turned out quite like that, and in fact, the more sums he did, the more columns of statistics he transcribed – well, it seemed simply to multiply the number of places at which solid knowledge took off and vanished to the moon. He enjoyed the walk to Cho Oyu and experienced a refreshing and simple happiness, although it took him two hours uphill, from Bong Busti where he lived, the light shining through thick bamboo in starry, jumping chinks, imparting the feeling of liquid shimmering.

Sai was unwilling at first to be forced from her immersion in National Geographics and be incarcerated in the dining room with Gyan. Before them, in a semicircle, were the instruments of study set out by the cook: ruler, pens, globe, graph paper, geometry set, pencil sharpener. The cook found they introduced a clinical atmosphere to the room similar to that which awed him at the chemist, at the clinic, and the path lab, where he enjoyed the hush guarded by the shelves of medicines, the weighing scale and thermometers, cupules, phials, pipettes, the tapeworm transformed into a specimen in formaldehyde, the measurements already inscribed on the bottle.

The cook would talk to the chemist, carefully, trying not to upset the delicate balances of the field, for he believed in superstition exactly as much as in science. "I see, yes, I understand," he said even if he didn’t, and in a reasonable tone recorded his symptoms, resisting melodrama, to the doctor whom he revered, who studied him through her glasses: "No potty for five days, evil taste in the mouth, a thun thun in the legs and arms and sometimes a chun chun."

"What is a chun chun and what is a thun thun?"

"Chun chun is a tingling. Thun thun is when there is a pain going on and off."

"What do you have now? Chun chun?"

"No, THUN THUN."

The next visit. "Are you better?"

"Better, but still – "

"Thun thun?"

"No, doctor," he would say very seriously, "chun chun."

He emerged with his medicines feeling virtuous. Oh yes, he awaited modernity and knew that if you invested in it, it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.

But outside the clinic he would run into Kesang or the cleaner at the hospital or the MetalBox watchman, who would begin to declaim, "Now there is no hope, now you’ll have to do puja, it will cost many thousands of rupees…"

Or: "I knew someone who had exactly what you are describing, never walked again…" By the time he had returned home he would have lost his faith in science and begun to howl: " Hai hai, hamara kya hoga, hai hai, hamara kya hoga? " And he’d have to go back to the clinic the next day to recover his good sense.

So, appreciating, desiring reasonableness, the cook brought in tea and fried cheese toast with chili pepper mixed into the cheese, and then sat on his stool just outside the door, keeping an eye on Sai and the new tutor, nodding approval at Gyan’s careful tone, the deliberate words that led, calculation by calculation, to an exact, tidy answer that could be confirmed by a list at the back of the text.