Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

At Mon Ami, Lola, fiddling the knob of the radio, had to relinquish proof that her daughter Pixie still prevailed in a dry place amid news of bursting rivers, cholera, crocodile attacks, and Bangladeshis up in their trees again. "Oh well," Lola sighed, "perhaps it will wash out the hooligans in the bazaar."

Recently a series of strikes and processions had indicated growing political discontent. And now a three-day strike and a raasta roko roadblock endeavor were postponed because of the weather. What was the point of preventing rations from getting through if they weren’t getting through anyway? How to force offices to close when they were going to remain closed? How to shut down streets when the streets had gone? Even the main road into Kalimpong from Teesta Bazaar had simply slipped off the incline and lay in pieces down in the gorge below.

Between storms, a grub-white sun appeared and everything began to sour and steam as people rushed to market.

Gyan, though, walked in the other direction, to Cho Oyu.

He was worried about the tuition and worried his payment might be denied him, that he and Sai had fallen far behind in the syllabus. So he told himself, slipping about the slopes, clutching onto plants.

Really, though, he walked in this direction because the rain’s pause had brought forth, once again, that unbearable feeling of anticipation, and under its influence he couldn’t sit still. He found Sai among the newspapers that had arrived on the Siliguri bus, two weeks’ worth bunched together. Each leaf had been ironed dry separately by the cook. Several species of ferns were bushy about the veranda, frilled with drops; elephant ears held trembling clutches of rain spawn; and all the hundreds of invisible spiderwebs in the bushes around the house had become visible, lined in silver, caught with trailing tissues of cloud. Sai was wearing her kimono, a present from Uncle Potty, who had found it in a chest of his mother’s, a souvenir of her voyage to Japan to see the cherry blossoms. It was made of scarlet silk, gilded with dragons, and thus Sai sat, mysterious and highlighted in gold, an empress of a wild kingdom, glowing against its lush scene.

The country, Sai noted, was coming apart at the seams: police unearthing militants in Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram; Punjab on fire with Indira Gandhi dead and gone in October of last year; and those Sikhs with their Kanga, Kachha, etc., still wishing to add a sixth K, Khalistan, their own country in which to live with the other five Ks.

In Delhi the government had unveiled its new financial plan after much secrecy and debate. It had seen fit to reduce taxes on condensed milk and ladies’ undergarments, and raise them on wheat, rice, and kerosene.

"Our darling Piu," an obituary outlined in black had a photo of a smiling child – "seven years have passed since you left for your heavenly abode, and the pain has not gone. Why were you so cruelly snatched away before your time? Mummy keeps crying to think of your sweet smile. We cannot make sense of our lives. Anxiously awaiting your reincarnation."

"Good afternoon," said Gyan.

She looked up and he felt a deep pang.

Back at the dining table, the mathematics books between them, tortured by graphs, by decimal points of perfect measurement, Gyan was conscious of the fact that a being so splendid should not be seated before a shabby textbook; it was wrong of him to have forced this ordinariness upon her – the bisection and rebisection of the bisection of an angle. Then, as if to reiterate the fact that he should have remained at home, it began to pour again and he was forced to shout over the sound of rain on the tin roof, which imparted an epic quality to geometry that was clearly ridiculous.

An hour later, it was still hammering down. "I had better go," he said desperately.

"Don’t," she squeaked, "you might get killed by lightning."

It began to hail.

"I really must," he said.

"Don’t," warned the cook, "In my village a man stuck his head out of the door in a hailstorm, a big goli fell on him and he died right away."

The storm’s grip intensified, then weakened as night fell, but it was far too dark by this time for Gyan to pick his way home through a hillside of ice eggs.

The judge looked irritably across the chops at Gyan. His presence, he felt, was an insolence, a liberty driven if not by intent then certainly by foolishness. "What made you come out in such weather, Charlie?" he said. "You might be adept at mathematics, but common sense appears to have eluded you."

No answer. Gyan seemed ensnared by his own thoughts.

The judge studied him.

He detected an obvious lack of familiarity, a hesitance with the cutlery and the food, yet he sensed Gyan was someone with plans. He carried an unmistakable whiff of journey, of ambition – and an old emotion came back to the judge, a recognition of weakness that was not merely a feeling, but also a taste, like fever. He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner. Bitterness flooded the judge’s mouth.

"So," he said, slicing the meat expertly off the bone, "so, what poets are you reading these days, young man?" He felt a sinister urge to catch the boy off guard.

"He is a science student," said Sai.

"So what of that? Scientists are not barred from poetry, or are they?

"Whatever happened to the well-rounded education?" he said into the continuing silence.

Gyan racked his brains. He never read any poets. "Tagore?" he answered uncertainly, sure that was safe and respectable.

"Tagore!" The judge speared a bit of meat with his fork, dunked it in the gravy, piled on a bit of potato and mashed on a few peas, put the whole thing into his mouth with the fork held in his left hand.

"Overrated," he said after he had chewed well and swallowed, but despite this dismissal, he gestured an order with his knife: "Recite us something, won’t you?"

"Where the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls… Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let me and my country awake." Every schoolchild in India knew at least this.

The judge began to laugh in a cheerless and horrible manner.

How he hated this dingy season. It angered him for reasons beyond Mutt’s unhappiness; it made a mockery of him, his ideals. When he looked about he saw he was not in charge: mold in his toothbrush, snakes slithering unafraid right over the patio, furniture gaining weight, and Cho Oyu also soaking up water, crumbling like a mealy loaf. With each storm’s bashing, less of it was habitable.

The judge felt old, very old, and as the house crumbled about him, his mind, too, seemed to be giving way, doors he had kept firmly closed between one thought and the next, dissolving. It was now forty years since he had been a student of poetry.

The library had never been open long enough.

He arrived as it opened, departed when it closed, for it was the rescuer of foreign students, proffered privacy and a lack of thugs.

He read a book entitled Expedition to Goozerat : "The Malabar coast undulates in the shape of a wave up the western flank of India, and then, in a graceful motion, gestures toward the Arabian sea. This is Goozerat. At the river deltas and along the malarial coasts lie towns configured for trade…"

What on earth was all of this? It had nothing to do with what he remembered of his home, of the Patels and their life in the Patel warren, and yet, when he unfolded the map, he found Piphit. There it was – a mosquito speck by the side of a sulky river.