Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

With amazement, he read on, of scurvied sailors arriving, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese. In their care the tomato traveled to India, and also the cashew nut. He read that the East India Company had rented Bombay at ten pounds a year from Charles II who came by it, a jujube in his dowry bag upon his wedding to Catherine of Braganza, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, he learned that mock turtle soup was being trawled on ships through the Suez to feed those who might be pining for it in rice and dal country. An Englishman might sit against a tropical background, yellow yolk of sun, shine spun into the palms, and consume a Yarmouth herring, a Breton oyster. This was all news to him and he felt greedy for a country that was already his.

Mid morning he rose from his books, went to the lavatory for the daily trial of his digestion, where he sat straining upon the pot with pained and prolonged effort. As he heard others shuffling outside, waiting for their turn, he stuck a finger up the hole and excavated within, allowing a backed up load of scropulated goat pellets to rattle down loudly. Had they heard him outside? He tried to catch them before they bulleted the water. His finger emerged covered in excrement and blood, and he washed his hands repeatedly, but the smell persisted, faintly trailing him through his studies. As time went on, Jemubhai worked harder. He measured out a reading calendar, listed each book, each chapter in a complex chart. Topham’s Law of Property, Aristotle, Indian Criminal Procedure, the Penal Code and the Evidence Act.

He worked late into the night back in his rented room, still tailed by the persistent smell of shit, falling from his chair directly into bed, rising in terror a few hours later, and rolling up onto the chair again. He worked eighteen hours a day, over a hundred hours a week, sometimes stopping to feed his landlady’s dog when she begged for a share of pork pie dinner, drooling damp patches onto his lap, raking an insistent paw across his knees and wrecking the pleat of his corduroys. This was his first friendship with an animal, for in Piphit the personalities of dogs were not investigated or encouraged. Three nights before the Probation Finals, he did not sleep at all, but read aloud to himself, rocking back and forth to the rhythm, repeating, repeating.

A journey once begun, has no end. The memory of his ocean trip shone between the words. Below and beyond, the monsters of his unconscious prowled, awaiting the time when they would rise and be proven real and he wondered if he’d dreamt of the drowning power of the sea before his first sight of it.

His landlady brought his dinner tray right to his door. A treat: a quadruplet of handsome oily sausages, confident, gleaming, whizzing with life. Ready already for the age when food would sing on television to advertise itself.

"Don’t work too hard."

"One must, Mrs. Rice."

He had learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay, to keep even himself away from himself like the Queen.

Open Competitive Examination, June 1942

He sat before a row of twelve examiners and the first question was put to him by a professor of London University – Could he tell them how a steam train worked?

Jemubhai’s mind drew a blank.

"Not interested in trains?" The man looked personally disappointed.

"A fascinating field, sir, but one’s been too busy studying the recommended subjects."

"No idea of how a train works?"

Jemu stretched his brain as far as he could – what powered what? – but he had never seen the inside of a railway engine.

"No, sir."

Could he describe then, the burial customs of the ancient Chinese.

He was from the same part of the country as Gandhi. What of the noncooperation movement? What was his opinion of the Congress?

The room was silent. BUY BRITISH – Jemubahi had seen the posters the day of his arrival in England, and it had struck him that if he’d yelled BUY INDIAN in the streets of India, he would be clapped into jail. And all the way back in 1930, when Jemubhai was still a child, Gandhi had marched from Sabarmati ashram to Dandi where, at the ocean’s maw, he had performed the subversive activity of harvesting salt.

" – Where will that get him? Phtoo! His heart may be in the right place but his brain has fallen out of his head " – Jemu’s father had said although the jails were full of Gandhi’s supporters. On the SS Strathnaver, the sea spray had come flying at Jemubhai and dried in taunting dots of salt upon his face and arms… It did seem ridiculous to tax it…

"If one was not committed to the current administration, sir, there would be no question of appearing here today."

Lastly, who was his favorite writer?

A bit nervously for he had none, he replied that one was fond of Sir Walter Scott.

"What have you read?"

"All the printed works, sir."

"Can you recite one of your favorite poems for us?" asked a professor of social anthropology.

Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best

By the time they stood for the ICS, most of the candidates had crisp-ironed their speech, but Jemubhai had barely opened his mouth for whole years and his English still had the rhythm and the form of Gujerati.

But ere he alighted at Netherby gate

The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

For a laggard in love and a dastard in war

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar…

When he looked up, he saw they were all chuckling.

While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,

And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume…

The judge shook himself. "Damn fool," he said out loud, pushed his chair back, stood up, brought his fork and knife down in devastating judgment upon himself and left the table. His strength, that mental steel, was weakening. His memory seemed triggered by the tiniest thing – Gyan’s unease, his reciting that absurd poem… Soon all the judge had worked so hard to separate would soften and envelop him in its nightmare, and the barrier between this life and eternity would in the end, no doubt, be just another such failing construct.

Mutt followed him to his room. As he sat brooding, she leaned against him with the ease that children have when leaning against their parents.

"I am sorry," said Sai, hot with shame. "It’s impossible to tell how my grandfather will behave."

Gyan didn’t appear to hear her.

"Sorry," said Sai again, mortified, but again he didn’t appear to have heard. For the first time his eyes rested directly upon her as if he were eating her alive in an orgy of the imagination – aha! At last the proof.

The cook cleared away the dirty dishes and shut the quarter cup of leftover peas into the cupboard. The cupboard looked like a coop, with its wire netting around a wooden frame and its four feet standing in bowls of water to deter ants and other vermin. He topped the water in these bowls from one of the buckets placed under the leaks, emptied the other buckets out of the window, and returned them to their appointed spots.

He made up the bed in an extra room, which was actually filled with rubbish but contained a bed placed in the very center, and he fixed pale virginal candles into saucers for Sai and Gyan to take to their rooms. "Your bed is ready for you, masterji, " he said and sniffed:

Was there a strange atmosphere in the room?

But Sai and Gyan seemed immersed in the newspapers again, and he confused their sense of ripening anticipation with his own, because that morning, two letters from Biju had arrived in the post. They were lying under an empty tuna fish tin by his bed, saved for the end of the day, and all evening he’d been savoring the thought of them. He rolled up his pants and departed with an umbrella as it had begun to pour again.