Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

The judge and Nimi traveled two days by train and by car, and when they arrived in Bonda, the judge rented a bungalow at the edge of the civil lines for thirty-five rupees a month, without water or electricity. He could afford nothing better until he repaid his debts, but still, he kept money aside to hire a companion for Nimi. A Miss Enid Pott who looked like a bulldog with a hat on top. Her previous employment had been governess to the children of Mr. Singh, the commissioner, and she had brought up her charges to call their mother Mam, their father Fa, had given them cod-liver oil for their collywobbles, and taught them to recite "Nellie Bly." A photograph in her purse showed her with two dark little girls in sailor frocks; their socks were sharp but their faces drooped.

Nimi learned no English, and it was out of stubbornness, the judge thought.

"What is this?" he questioned her angrily, holding aloft a pear.

"What is this?" – pointing at the gravy boat bought in a secondhand shop, sold by a family whose monogram had happily matched, JPP , in an extravagance of flourishes. He had bought it secretly and hidden it within another bag, so his painful pretension and his thrift would not be detected. James Peter Peterson or Jemubhai Popatlal Patel. IF you please.

"What is this?" he asked holding up the bread roll.

Silence.

"If you can’t say the word, you can’t eat it."

More silence.

He removed it from her plate.

Later that evening, he snatched the Ovaltine from her tentative sipping: "And if you don’t like it, don’t drink it."

He couldn’t take her anywhere and squirmed when Mrs. Singh waggled her finger at him and said, "Where is your wife, Mr. Patel? None of that purdah business, I hope?" In playing her part in her husband’s career, Mrs. Singh had attempted to mimic what she considered a typical Englishwoman’s balance between briskly pleasant and firmly no-nonsense, and had thus succeeded in quashing the spirits of so many of the locals who prided themselves on being mostly nonsense.

Nimi did not accompany her husband on tour, unlike the other wives, who went along on horseback or elephantback or camelback or in palkis upheld by porters (all of whom would, because of the ladies’ fat bottoms, die young), as rattling behind came the pots and pans and the bottle of whiskey and the bottle of port, Geiger counter and Scintillometre, the tuna fish tin and the mad-with-anxiety live chicken. Nobody had ever told it, but it knew; it was in its soul, that anticipation of the hatchet.

Nimi was left to sit alone in Bonda; three weeks out of four, she paced the house, the garden. She had spent nineteen years within the confines of her father’s compound and she was still unable to contemplate the idea of walking through the gate. The way it stood open for her to come and go – the sight filled her with loneliness. She was uncared for, her freedom useless, her husband disregarded his duty.

She climbed up the stairs to the flat roof in the slow civility of summer dusks, and watched the Jamuna flowing through a scene tenderly co-cooned in dust. Cows were on their way home; bells were ringing in the temple; she could see birds testing first one tree as a roost for the night, then another, all the while making an overexcited noise like women in a sari shop. Across the river, in the distance, she could see the ruins of a hunting lodge that dated to the Mughal emperor Jehangir: just a few pale arches still upholding carvings of irises. The Mughals had descended from the mountains to invade India but, despite their talent in waging war, were softhearted enough to weep for the loss of this flower in the heat; the persistent dream of the iris was carved everywhere, by craftsman who felt the nostalgia, saw the beauty of what they had made and never known.

The sight of this scene, of history passing and continuing, touched Nimi in a desolate way. She had fallen out of life altogether. Weeks went by and she spoke to nobody, the servants thumped their own leftovers on the table for her to eat, stole the supplies without fear, allowed the house to grow filthy without guilt until the day before Jemubhai’s arrival when suddenly it was brought to luster again, the clock set to a timetable, water to a twenty-minute boil, fruit soaked for the prescribed number of minutes in solutions of potassium permanganate. Finally Jemubhai’s new secondhand car – that looked more like a friendly stout cow than an automobile – would come belching through the gate.

He entered the house briskly, and when he found his wife rudely contradicting his ambition -

Well, his irritation was too much to bear.

Even her expressions annoyed him, but as they were gradually replaced by a blankness, he became upset by their absence.

What would he do with her? She without enterprise, unable to entertain herself, made of nothing, yet with a disruptive presence.

She had been abandoned by Miss Enid Pott who said, "Nimi seems to have made up her mind not to learn. You have a swaraji right under your nose, Mr. Patel. She will not argue – that way one might respond and have a dialogue – she just goes limp."

Then there was her typically Indian bum – lazy, wide as a buffalo. The pungency of her red hair oil that he experienced as a physical touch.

"Take those absurd trinkets off," he instructed her, riled by the tinkle-tonk of her bangles.

"Why do you have to dress in such a gaudy manner? Yellow and pink? Are you mad?" He threw the hair oil bottles away and her long hairs escaped no matter how tidily she made her bun. The judge found them winging their way across the room, treading air; he found one strangling a mushroom in his cream of mushroom soup.

One day he found footprints on the toilet seat – she was squatting on it, she was squatting on it! – he could barely contain his outrage, took her head and pushed it into the toilet bowl, and after a point, Nimi, made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. She peered out at the world but could not focus on it, never went to the mirror, because she couldn’t see herself in it, and anyway she couldn’t bear to spend a moment in dressing and combing, activities that were only for the happy and the loved.

When Jemubhai saw her, cheeks erupting in pustules, he took her fallen beauty as a further affront and felt concerned the skin disease would infect him as well. He instructed the servants to wipe everything with Dettol to kill germs. He powdered himself extra carefully with his new puff, each time remembering the one that had been cushioned between his wife’s obscene, clown-nosed breasts.

"Don’t show your face outside," he said to her. "People might run from you screaming." By year’s end the dread they had for each other was so severe it was as if they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.

" Christmas!’ ’said Gyan. "You little fool!"

As he left he could hear Sai beginning to sob. "You dirty bastard," she shouted through her weeping, "you get back here. Behave so badly and then run away??"

The sight of the wreck they’d made was alarming and his anger began to scare him as he saw her face through the bars of distorting emotion. He realized Sai could not be the cause of what he felt, but as he left he slammed the gate shut.

Christmas had never bothered him before -

She was defining his hatred, he thought. Through her, he caught sight of it – oh – and then he couldn’t resist sharpening it, if only for clarity’s sake.