Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

Don’t you have any pride? Trying to be so Westernized. They don’t want you!!!! Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms. You will be trying to clean their toilets and even then they won’t want you.

Gyan returned to Cho Oyu.

"Look," he said, "I’m sorry."

It took some coaxing.

"Behaving so badly!" said Sai.

"Sorry."

But in the end she accepted his apology, because she was relieved to turn away from the realization that, for him, she was not the center of their romance. She had been mistaken – she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else’s story.

She turned from this thought into his kisses.

"I can’t resist you, that’s the problem…" Gyan said.

She, the temptress, laughed.

But human nature is what it is. The kisses were too soppy. A few moments more, the apology turned from sincere to insincere, and he was angry at himself for giving in.

Gyan went on to the canteen, sunset doing a mad Kali as he walked, and once again he felt the stir of purity. He would have to sacrifice silly kisses for his adulthood. A feeling of martyrdom crept over him, and with purity for a cause came ever more acute worries of pollution. He was sullied by the romance, unnerved by how easily she gave herself. It wasn’t the way one was supposed to do things. It was unsavory.

He remembered the center of the Buddhist wheel of life clasped in a demon’s fangs and talons to indicate the hell that traps us: rooster-snake-pig; lust-anger-foolishness; each chasing, each feeding on, each consumed by the other.

Sai at Cho Oyu also sat contemplating desire, fury, and stupidity. She tried to suppress her anger, but it kept bubbling up; she tried to compromise her own feelings, but they wouldn’t bend.

What on earth was wrong with an excuse for a party? After all, one could then logically continue the argument and make a case against speaking English, as well, or eating a patty at the Hasty Tasty – all matters against which Gyan could hardly defend himself. She spent some time developing her thoughts against his to show up all the cracks.

"You bastard," she said to the emptiness. "My dignity is worth a thousand of you."

"Where did he go so soon?" asked the cook later that evening.

"Who knows?" she said. "But you’re right about the fish and Nepalis.

He isn’t very intelligent. The more we study, the less he seems to know, and the fact that he doesn’t know and that I can tell – it makes him furious."

"Yes," said the cook sympathetically, having forecast the boy’s stupidity himself.

At Thapa’s Canteen, Gyan told Chhang and Bhang, Owl and Donkey, of how he was forced to tutor in order to earn money. How glad he would be if he could get a proper job and leave that fussy pair, Sai and her grandfather with the fake English accent and the face powdered pink and white over dark brown. Everyone in the canteen laughed as he mimicked the accent: "What poets are they reading these days, young man?" And, encouraged by their "Ha ha," tongue tingling and supple with alcohol, he leaped smoothly to a description of the house, the guns on the wall, and a certificate from Cambridge that they didn’t even know to be ashamed of.

Why should he not betray Sai?

She who could speak no language but English and pidgin Hindi, she who could not converse with anyone outside her tiny social stratum.

She who could not eat with her hands; could not squat down on the ground on her haunches to wait for a bus; who had never been to a temple but for architectural interest; never chewed a paan and had not tried most sweets in the mithaishop, for they made her retch; she who left a Bollywood film so exhausted from emotional wear and tear that she walked home like a sick person and lay in pieces on the sofa; she who thought it vulgar to put oil in your hair and used paper to clean her bottom; felt happier with so-called English vegetables, snap peas, French beans, spring onions, and feared – feared – loki, tinda, kathal, kaddu, patrel, and the local saag in the market.

Eating together they had always felt embarrassed – he, unsettled by her finickiness and her curbed enjoyment, and she, revolted by his energy and his fingers working the dal, his slurps and smacks. The judge ate even his chapatis, his puris and parathas, with knife and fork. Insisted that Sai, in his presence, do the same.

Still, Gyan was absolutely sure that she was proud of her behavior; masqueraded it about as shame at her lack of Indianness, maybe, but it marked her status. Oh yes. It allowed her that perverse luxury, the titillation of putting yourself down, criticizing yourself and having the opposite happen – you did not fall, you mystically rose.

So, in the excitement of the moment, he told. Of the guns and the well-stocked kitchen, the liquor in the cabinet, the lack of a phone and there being nobody to call for help.

Next morning, when he woke, though, he felt guilty all over again. He thought of lying entangled in the garden last year, on the rough grass under high trees jigsawing the sky, spidery stars through the prehistoric ferns.

But so fluid a thing was love. It wasn’t firm, he was learning, it wasn’t a scripture; it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal, taking the mold of whatever he poured it into. And in fact, it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels. It could be used for all kinds of purposes… He wished it were a constraint. It was truly beginning to frighten him.

Worried about growing problems in the market and the disruption of supplies due to strikes, the cook was putting some buffalo meat that was growing harder and harder to buy into Mutt’s stew. He unwrapped the flank from its newspaper wrapping soaked in blood, and suddenly he had the overwhelming thought that he held two kilos of his son’s body there, dead like that.

Years ago when the cook’s wife had been killed falling from a tree while gathering leaves for their goat, everyone in his village had said her ghost was threatening to take Biju with her, since she had died violently. The priests claimed that a spirit passing on in such a way remained angry. His wife had been a mild person – in fact he had little memory of her speaking at all – but they had insisted it was true, that Biju had seen his mother, a transparent apparition in the night, trying to claw at him. The extended family walked all the way to the post office in the nearest town to send a barrage of telegrams to the judge’s address. The telegrams in those days had arrived via postal runner who ran shaking a spear from village to village. "In the name of Queen Victoria let me pass," he sang in a high voice, although he neither knew nor cared that she was long gone.

"The priest has said the balli must be done at amavas, darkest no-moon night of the month. You must sacrifice a chicken."

The judge refused to let the cook go. "Superstition. You fool! Why aren’t there ghosts here? Wouldn’t they be here as well as in your village?"

"Because there is electricity here," said the cook. "They get a scare from electricity and in our village there is no electricity, that’s why…"

"What has your life been for?" said the judge, "You live with me, go to a proper doctor, you have even learned to read and write a little, sometimes you read the newspaper, and all to no purpose! Still the priests make a fool of you, rob you of your money."

All the other servants set up a chorus advising the cook to disregard their employer’s opinions and save his son instead, for there certainly were ghosts: " Hota hai hota hai, you have to do it."