Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

He told the monks playing football outside the gompa, hitching up their robes. He told Uncle Potty and Father Booty. They were dancing on the veranda, Uncle Potty at the light switch turning it on off on off on off. "What did you say?" they said, turning down the music to listen. "Good for him!" They raised their glasses and turned up the music again: "Jam-balaya… pumpkin pie-a… mio maio… ."

Then the cook stopped at the last stall for potatoes. He always bought them here so he didn’t have to carry them all the way, and he found the daughter of the owner at the counter dressed in a long nightie, as had become the fashion. You saw women everywhere in nighties, daughters, wives, grandmothers, nieces, walking to the shops, collecting water in broad daylight as if on their way to bed, long hair, ruffly garments, making a beautiful dream scene in daylight.

She was a lovely girl, small and plump, a glimpse through the nightie placket of breasts so buttery that even women who saw them were captivated. And she seemed sensible in the shop. Surely Biju would like her? The girl’s father was making money, so they said…

"Three kilos potatoes," he told the girl in a voice unusually gentle for him. "What about rice? Is it clean?"

"No, Uncle," she said. "What we have is very dirty. It’s so full of little stones you’ll crack your teeth if you eat it."

"What about the atta?

"The atta is better."

Anyway, he said to himself, money wasn’t everything. There was that simple happiness of looking after someone and having someone look after you.

When Sai became interested in love, she became interested in other people’s love affairs, and she pestered the cook about the judge and his wife.

The cook said: "When I joined the household, all the old servants told me that the death of your grandmother made a cruel man out of your grandfather. She was a great lady, never raised her voice to the servants. How much he loved her! In fact, it was such a deep attachment, it turned one’s stomach, for it was too much for anybody else to look upon."

"Did he really love her so very much?" Sai was astonished.

"Must have," said the cook. "But they said he didn’t show it."

"Maybe he didn’t?" she then suggested.

"Bite your tongue, you evil girl. Take your words back!" shouted the cook. "Of course he loved her."

"How did the servants know, then?"

The cook thought a bit, thought of his own wife. "True," he said.

Nobody really knew, but no one said anything in those days, for there are many ways of showing love, not just the way of the movies – which is all you know. You are a very foolish girl. The greatest love is love that’s never shown."

"You say anything that suits you."

"Yes, I’ve found it’s the best way," said the cook after thinking some more.

"So? Did he or didn’t he?"

The cook and Sai were sitting with Mutt on the steps leading to the garden, picking the ticks off her, and this was always an hour of contentment for them. The large khaki-bag ones were easy to dispatch, but the tiny brown ticks were hard to kill; they flattened against the depressions in the rock, so when you hit them with a stone, they didn’t die but in a flash were up and running.

Sai chased them up and down. "Don’t run away, don’t you dare climb back on Mutt."

Then they tried to drown them in a can of water, but they were tough, swam about, climbed on one another’s backs and crawled out. Sai chased them down again, put them back in the can, rushed to the toilet, and flushed them, but even then they resurfaced, doing a mad-scrabble swim in the toilet bowl.

Remembrance, now authentic, shone from the cook’s eyes.

"Oh no," said the cook. "He didn’t like her at all. She went mad."

"She did?!"

"Yes, they said she was a very mad lady."

"Who was she?"

"I’ve forgotten the name, but she was the daughter of a rich man and the family was of much higher standing than your grandfather, of a particular branch of a caste that in itself was not high, of course, as you know, but within this group, they had distinguished themselves. You could tell from her features, which were delicate; her toes, nose, ears, and fingers were all very fine and small, and she was very fair – just like milk. Complexion-wise, they said, you could have mistaken her for a foreigner. Her family only married among fifteen families, but an exception was made for your grandfather because he was in the ICS. But more than that I do not know."

"Who was my grandmother?" Sai then asked the judge sitting poised like a heron over his chessboard. "Did she come from a very fancy family?"

He said: "I’m playing chess, can’t you see?"

He looked back at the board, and then he got up and walked into the garden. Flying squirrels chased one another through the circination of ferns and mist; the mountains were like ibex horns piercing through. He returned to his chessboard and made his move, but it felt like an old move in an old game.

He didn’t want to think of her, but the picture that came to mind was surprisingly gentle.

The Patels had been dreaming of sending their son to England, but there wasn’t enough money no matter how much Jemu’s father worked, so they visited the moneylenders, who surveyed father and son with the sleepiness of crocodiles and then pounced with an offer of ten thousand rupees. At 22 percent interest.

There still wasn’t enough, though, and they began to search for a bride.

Jemu would be the first boy of their community to go to an English university. The dowry bids poured in and his father began an exhilarated weighing and tallying: ugly face – a little more gold, a pale skin – a little less. A dark and ugly daughter of a rich man seemed their best bet.

On the other side of Piphit, by the military cantonment, lived a short man with a rhinocerous-like nose that seemed to travel up, not down, who carried a malacca cane, wore a long coat of brocade, and lived in a haveli carved so delicately it seemed weightless. This was Bomanbhai Patel. It was his father who had discreetly helped the right side in a certain skirmish between the English and the Gaekwads, and he was repaid by the regimental quartermaster with a contract to be the official supplier of horse feed to the British military encampment at Piphit. Eventually, the family had monopolized the delivery of all dry goods to the army, and when Bomanbhai succeeded his father, he saw the way to greater profit yet by extending his business seamlessly into another. He offered soldiers unauthorized women in an unauthorized part of town on whom they might spend their aggrandizement of manhood; returned them to their barracks strewn about with black hairs, and smelling like rabbits from a rabbit hutch.

Bomanbhai’s own wife and daughters, however, were kept carefully locked up behind the high walls of the haveli outside which a plaque read:

"Residence of Bomanbhai Patel, Military Purveyor, Financier, Merchant." Here they lived an idle existence inside the women’s quarters, the strictness of this purdah enforcement increasing Bomanbhai’s honor in the community, and he began to acquire little fancies and foibles, to cultivate certain eccentricities that, just as he plotted, reiterated the security of his wealth and reinforced his honor all over again. He displayed his purchases, his habits casually but planned them with exactitude – acquired his trademark coat of brocade, his polished cane and kept a pet pangolin, since he had an affinity with all big-nosed creatures. He ordered a set of stained-glass panes that flooded the haveli with luscious multi-fruit-colored light under which the children played, entertained by how they might look orange or purple or half orange and half green.