Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

"Shorts!" said a young uncle.

"Underwear," the ladies insisted.

Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?

She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed.

The afternoons in Piphit lasted so long, the Patels were resting, trying to efface the fear that time would never move again, all except for Jemubhai who had grown unused to such surrender.

He sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner – a foreigner – every bit of him screamed. Only his digestion dissented and told him he was home: squatting painfully in that cramped outhouse, his gentleman’s knees creaking, swearing "Bloody hell," he felt his digestion work as super efficient as – as Western transportation.

Idly deciding to check on his belongings, he uncovered the loss.

"Where is my powder puff?" shouted Jemubhai at the Patel ladies spread-eagled on mats in the veranda shade.

"What?" they asked, raising their heads, shielding their eyes against the detonating light.

"Someone has been through my belongings."

Actually, by then, almost everyone in the house had been through his belongings and they failed to see why this was a problem. His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable; why did he mind and how did this coincide with stealing?

"But what is missing?"

"My puff."

"What is that?"

He tried to explain.

"But what on earth is it for, baba? " They looked at him bemused.

"Pink and white what? That you put on your skin? Why?"

"Pink?"

His mother began to worry. "Is anything wrong with your skin?" she asked, concerned.

But, "Ha ha," laughed a sister who was listening carefully, "we sent you abroad to become a gentleman, and instead you have become a lady!"

The excitement spread, and from farther houses in the Patel clan, relatives began to arrive. The kakas kakis masas masis phuas phois. Children horrible all together, a clump that could not be separated child into child, for they resembled a composite monster with multiple arms and legs that came cartwheeling in, raising the dust, screaming; hundreds of hands were held over the monster’s hundreds of giggling mouths. Who had stolen what?

"His powder puff is missing," said Jemubhai’s father, who seemed to think this thing must be crucial to his son’s work.

They all said powder puff in English, for, naturally, there was no Gujarati word for this invention. Their very accents rankled the judge. "Pauvdar Paaf," sounding like some Parsi dish.

They pulled out all the items in the cupboard, turned them upside down, exclaiming over and examining each one, his suits, his underwear, his opera glasses, through which he had viewed the tutus of ballerinas dancing a delicate sideways scuttle in Giselle, unfolding in pastry patterns and cake decorations.

But no, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the kitchen either, or in the veranda. It wasn’t anywhere.

His mother questioned the naughtiest cousins.

"Did you see it?"

"What?"

"The paudar paaf."

"What is a paudur poff? Paudaar paaf?"

"To protect the skin."

"To protect the skin from what?"

And the entire embarrassment of explaining had to be gone through again.

"Pink and white? What for?"

"What the hell do all of you know?" said Jemubhai. Thieving, ignorant people.

He had thought they would have the good taste to be impressed and even a little awed by what he had become, but instead they were laughing.

"You must know something," the judge finally accused Nimi.

"I haven’t seen it. Why should I pay it any attention?" she said. Her heart pounded beneath her two lavender-powdered pink and white breasts, beneath her husband’s England-returned puff.

He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty, dismissed it. Once it had been a terrifying beckoning thing that had made his heart turn to water, but now it seemed beside the point. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one.

Just then, as he was turning away, he saw it -

Sticking out between the hooks, a few thin and tender filaments.

"You filth!" he shouted and, from between her sad breasts, pulled forth, like a ridiculous flower, or else a bursting ruined heart -

His dandy puff.

"Break the bed," shouted an ancient aunt, hearing the scuffle inside the room, and they all began to giggle and nod in satisfaction.

"Now she will settle down," said another medicine-voiced hag. "That girl has too much spirit."

Inside the room, specially vacated of all who normally slept there, Jemubhai, his face apuff with anger, grabbed at his wife.

She slipped from his grasp and his anger flew.

She who had stolen. She who had made them laugh at him. This illiterate village girl. He grabbed at her again.

She was running and he was chasing her.

She ran to the door.

But the door was locked.

She tried again.

It didn’t budge.

The aunt had locked it – just in case. All the stories of brides trying to escape – now and then even an account of a husband sidling out. Shameshameshameshame to the family.

He came at her with a look of murder.

She ran for the window.

He blocked her.

Without thinking, she picked up the powder container from the table near the door and threw it at his face, terrified of what she was doing, but the terror had joined irreversibly with the gesture, and in a second it was done -

The container broke apart, the powder lurched up filtered down.

Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury – penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of – he stuffed his way ungracefully into her.

An aging uncle, wizened bird man in dhoti and spectacles, watching through a crack in the wall outside, felt his own lust ripen and – pop – it sent him hopping about the courtyard.

Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury – this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas – but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevo-lency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run – it turned his civilized stomach.

Yet he repeated the gutter act again and again. Even in tedium, on and on, a habit he could not stand in himself. This distaste and his persistence made him angrier than ever and any cruelty to her became irresistible. He would teach her the same lessons of loneliness and shame he had learned himself. In public, he never spoke to or looked in her direction.

She grew accustomed to his detached expression as he pushed into her, that gaze off into middle distance, entirely involved with itself, the same blank look of a dog or monkey humping in the bazaar; until all of a sudden he seemed to skid from control and his expression slid right off his face. A moment later, before anything was revealed, it settled back again and he withdrew to spend a long fiddly time in the bathroom with soap, hot water, and Dettol. He followed his ablutions with a clinical measure of whiskey, as if consuming a disinfectant.