Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

"What evidence are you going to find in the toilet?" asked Sai, following him around, feeling ashamed.

The house had been built long ago by a Scotsman, passionate reader of the accounts of that period: The Indian Alps and How We Crossed Them, by A Lady Pioneer. Land of the Lama. The Phantom Rickshaw. My Mer-cara Home. Black Panther of Singrauli. His true spirit had called to him, then, informed him that it, too, was wild and brave, and refused to be denied the right to adventure. As always, the price for such romance had been high and paid for by others. Porters had carried boulders from the riverbed – legs growing bandy, ribs curving into caves, backs into U’s, faces being bent slowly to look always at the ground – up to this site chosen for a view that could raise the human heart to spiritual heights. Then the piping arrived, the tiling and tubing, the fancy wrought-iron gates to hang like lace between the banks, the dressmaker’s dummy, which the police now stomped up to the attic and discovered – bom bom, the vigor of their movements causing the last remaining Meissen cup to gnash like a tooth on its saucer. A thousand deceased spiders lay scattered like dead blossoms on the attic floor, and above them, on the underside of the tin sieve roof, dodging drips, their offspring stared at the police as they did at their own ancestors – with a giant, saucer-sized lack of sympathy.

The police collected their umbrellas and went tramping across to the cook’s hut, extra careful, extra suspicious. Everyone knew it was the servants when it came to robbery, more often than not.

They walked past the garage, car sunk low, nose to the ground, grass through the floor, its last groaning journey made to Darjeeling for the judge to see his only friend, Bose, long forgotten. They passed an oddly well maintained patch behind the water tank, where a saucer of milk and a pile of mithai had been spilled and pocked by the sleet. This weedless corner dated to the time when the cook, defeated by a rotten egg and made desperate, had defecated behind the house instead of at his usual place at the far end of the garden, thereby angering two snakes, mia-bibi, husband and wife, who lived in a hole nearby.

The cook told the policeman of the drama. "I wasn’t bitten, but mysteriously my body swelled up to ten times my size. I went to the temple and they told me that I must ask forgiveness of the snakes. So I made a clay cobra and put it behind the water tank, made the area around it clean with cow dung, and did puja. Immediately the swelling went down."

The policemen approved of this. "Pray to them and they will always protect you, they will never bite you."

"Yes," the cook agreed, "they don’t bite, the two of them, and they never steal chickens or eggs. In the winter you don’t see them much, but otherwise they come out all the time and check if everything is all right. Do a round of the property. We were going to make this part a garden, but we left it to them. They go along the fence all around Cho Oyu and back to their home."

"What kind of snake?"

"Black cobras, thick as that," he said and pointed at the melamine biscuit jar that a policeman was carrying in a plastic bag. "Husband and wife."

But they had not protected them from the robbery… a policeman banished this irreligious thought from his mind, and they skirted the area respectfully, in case the snakes or their offended relatives came after them.

The respect on the policemen’s faces collapsed instantly when they arrived at the cook’s hut buried under a ferocious tangle of nightshade. Here they felt comfortable unleashing their scorn, and they overturned his narrow bed, left his few belongings in a heap.

It pained Sai’s heart to see how little he had: a few clothes hung over a string, a single razor blade and a sliver of cheap brown soap, a Kulu blanket that had once been hers, a cardboard case with metal clasps that had belonged to the judge and now contained the cook’s papers, the recommendations that had helped him procure his job with the judge, Biju’s letters, papers from a court case fought in his village all the way in Uttar Pradesh over the matter of five mango trees that he had lost to his brother. And, in the sateen elastic pocket inside the case, there was a broken watch that would cost too much to mend, but was still too precious to throw away – he might be able to pawn the parts. They were collected in an envelope and the little wind-up knob skittered out into the grass when the police tore open the seal.

Two photographs hung on the wall – one of himself and his wife on their wedding day, one of Biju dressed to leave home. They were poor-people photographs, of those unable to risk wasting a picture, for while all over the world people were now posing with an abandon never experienced by the human race before, here they were still standing X-ray stiff.

Once, Sai had taken a picture of the cook with Uncle Potty’s camera, snuck up on him as he minced an onion, and she had been surprised to see that he felt deeply betrayed. He ran to change into his best clothes, a clean shirt and trousers, then positioned himself before the National Geographics bound in leather, a backdrop he found suitable.

Sai wondered if he had loved his wife.

She had.died seventeen years ago, when Biju was five, slipping from a tree while gathering leaves to feed the goat. An accident, they said, and there was nobody to blame – it was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed. Biju was their only child.

"What a naughty boy," the cook would always exclaim with joy. "But basically his nature was always good. In our village, most of the dogs bite, and some of them have teeth the size of sticks, but when Biju went by no animal would attack him. And no snake would bite him when he’d go out to cut grass for the cow. He has that personality," the cook said, brimming with pride. "He isn’t scared of anything at all. Even when he was very small he would pick up mice by the tail, lift frogs by the neck…" Biju in this picture did not look fearless but appeared frozen, like his parents. He stood between props of a tape player and a Campa Cola bottle, against a painted backdrop of a lake, and on the sides, beyond the painted screen, were brown fields and slivers of the neighbors, an arm and a toe, hair and a grin, a chicken tail frill, though the photographer had tried to shoo the extras out of the frame.

The police spilled all the letters from the case and began to read one of them that dated to three years ago. Biju had just arrived in New York. "Respected Pitaji, no need to worry. Everything is fine. The manager has offered me a full-time waiter position. Uniform and food will be given by them. Angrezi khana only, no Indian food, and the owner is not from India. He is from America itself."

"He works for the Americans," the cook had reported the contents of the letter to everyone in the market.

All the way in America, Biju had spent his early days standing at a counter along with a row of men.

"Would you like a big one?" asked Biju’s fellow server, Romy, lifting a sausage with his tongs, waving it full and fleshy, boing-boinging it against the side of the metal pan, whacking it up and down, elastic, before a sweet-faced girl, brought up to treat dark people like anyone else.

Gray’s Papaya. Hot dogs, hot dogs, two and a soda for $1.95.

The spirit of these men he worked with amazed Biju, terrified him, overjoyed him, then terrified him again.

"Onions, mustard, pickles, ketchup?"

Dull thump thump.