Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

Lola: "Oh, Mrs. Sen, again you are derailing the conversation. We aren’t talking about that!"

Mrs. Sen: "Ah-hah-ha," she sang airily, putting another cream horn on her plate with a flourish.

Noni: "How is Mun Mun?" But as soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t, for this would rile Lola and she would have to spend all evening undoing the harm.

Mrs. Sen: "Oh, they keep begging her and begging her to take a green card. She says, ‘No, no.’ I told her, ‘Don’t be silly, take it, what harm is there? If they’re offering it, pushing it on you…’ How many people would kill for one… Silly goose, isn’t it so? What a bee-oo-tee-ful country and so well organized."

The sisters had always looked down on Mrs. Sen as a low-caliber person. Her inferiority was clear to them long before her daughter settled in a country where the jam said Smuckers instead of "By appointment to Her Majesty the queen," and before she got a job with CNN placing her in direct opposition to Pixie at BBC. This was because Mrs. Sen pronounced potato " POEtatto, " and tomato " TOEmatto " and because of the rumor that she had once made a living going door to door in a scooter selling confiscated items from the customs at Dum Dum Airport, peddling the goods to mothers collecting dowries of black-market items, the better to increase their daughters’ chances.

Lola: "But don’t you find them very simple people?"

Mrs. Sen: "No hang-ups, na, very friendly."

"But a fake friendliness I’ve heard, hi-bye and no meaning to it."

"Better than England, ji, where they laugh at you behind your back – "

Perhaps England and America didn’t know they were in a fight to the death, but it was being fought on their behalf, anyway, by these two spirited widows of Kalimpong.

"Mun Mun has no hassles in America, nobody cares where you’re from – "

"Well, if you’re going to call ignorance freedom! And don’t tell me that nobody cares. Everybody knows," Lola said bitterly as if it actually mattered to her, "how they treat the Negroes."

"At least they believe you can be happy, baba. "

"And the kind of patriotism they go in for turns monkey into donkey phata-phat – just give them a hot dog on a stick, they begin to wave it at the flag and – "

"So, what’s wrong with enjoying yourself – "

"Tell us your news, Sai," pleaded Noni, desperate to change the topic again. "Come on, cheer us up, that much you young people should be good for."

"No news," Sai lied and went red thinking of herself and Gyan. Companionship had increased the sensation of fluidity she’d felt before the mirror, that reduction to malleable form, the endless possibility for reinvention.

The three ladies gave her a hard look. She seemed out of focus, they couldn’t read her expression clearly, and she was squirming oddly in her chair.

"So," said Lola, redirecting her frustration with Mrs. Sen, "no boyfriends yet? Why not, why not? We used to be so adventurous in the old days. Always giving Mummy-Daddy the slip."

"Let her be. She’s a good girl," said Noni.

"Better do it now," said Mrs. Sen, making a mysterious expression. "Wait too long and the craze will go. That’s what I told Mun Mun."

"Perhaps you have worms," said Lola.

Noni rummaged in a jumble-filled bowl and came up with a strip of medicine. "Here – take a deworming pill. We got some for Mustafa. Caught him rubbing his bottom on the floor. Sure sign."

Mrs. Sen looked at the tuberoses on the table. "You know," she said, "just put a few drops of food coloring and you can make your flowers any color you like, red, blue, orange. Years ago we used to have fun in parties like that."

Sai stopped petting Mustafa and that spiteful cat bit her.

"Mustafa!" Lola warned, "if you don’t behave yourself, we’ll turn you into katty kebabs!"

Brigitte’s, in New York’s financial district, was a restaurant all of mirrors so the diners might observe exactly how enviable they were as they ate. It was named for the owners’ dog, the tallest, flattest creature you ever saw; like paper, you could see her properly only from the side.

In the morning, as Biju and the rest of the staff began bustling about, the owners, Odessa and Baz, drank Tailors of Harrowgate darjeeling at a corner table. Colonial India, free India – the tea was the same, but the romance was gone, and it was best sold on the word of the past. They drank tea and diligently they read the New York Times together, including the international news. It was overwhelming.

Former slaves and natives. Eskimos and Hiroshima people, Amazonian Indians and Chiapas Indians and Chilean Indians and American Indians and Indian Indians. Australian aborigines, Guatemalans and Colombians and Brazilians and Argentineans, Nigerians, Burmese, Angolans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Afghans, Cambodians, Rwan-dans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Liberians, Borneoans, Papua New Guineans, South Africans, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, Palestinians, French Guyanese, Dutch Guyanese, Surinamese, Sierra Leonese, Malagasys, Senegalese, Maldivians, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Kenyans, Panamanians, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, Costa Ricans, Congoans, Mauritanians, Marshall Islanders, Tahitians, Gabonese, Beninese, Malians, Jamaicans, Botswanans, Burundians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Uruguayans, Nicaraguans, Ugandans, Ivory Coastians, Zambians, Guinea-Bissauans, Cameroonians, Laotians, Zaireans coming at you screaming colonialism, screaming slavery, screaming mining companies screaming banana companies oil companies screaming CIA spy among the missionaries screaming it was Kissinger who killed their father and why don’t you forgive third-world debt; Lumumba, they shouted, and Allende; on the other side, Pinochet, they said, Mobutu; contaminated milk from Nestle, they said; Agent Orange; dirty dealings by Xerox. World Bank, UN, IMF, everything run by white people. Every day in the papers another thing!

Nestle and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills?

Enough was enough.

Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.

"Rule of nature," said Odessa to Baz. "Imagine if we were sitting around saying, ‘So-and-so-score years ago, Neanderthals came out of the woods, attacked my family with a big dinosaur bone, and now you give back.’ Two of the very first iron pots, my friend, and one toothsome toothy daughter from the first days of agriculture, when humans had larger molars, and four samples of an early version of the potato claimed, incidentally, by both Chile and Peru."

She was very witty, Odessa. Baz was proud of her cosmopolitan style, loved the sight of her in her little wire-rimmed glasses. Once he had been shocked to overhear some of their friends say she was black-hearted, but he had put it out of his mind.

"These white people!" said Achootan, a fellow dishwasher, to Biju in the kitchen. "Shit! But at least this country is better than England," he said. "At least they have some hypocrisy here. They believe they are good people and you get some relief. There they shout at you openly on the street, ‘Go back to where you came from.’" He had spent eight years in Canterbury, and he had responded by shouting a line Biju was to hear many times over, for he repeated it several times a week: "Your father came to my country and took my bread and now I have come to your country to get my bread back."