Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

The cook went to the judge with a made-up story of the roof of his village hut having blown off again in the latest storm. The judge gave up and the cook traveled to the village.

He became worried now, all these years later, that the sacrifice hadn’t really worked, that its effect had been undone by the lie he told the judge, that his wife’s spirit hadn’t actually been appeased, that the offering hadn’t been properly recorded, or wasn’t big enough. He had sacrificed a goat and a chicken, but what if the spirit still had a hunger for Biju?

The cook had first made the effort to send his son abroad four years ago when a recruiting agent for a cruise ship line appeared in Kalimpong to solicit applications for waiters, vegetable choppers, toilet cleaners – basic drudge staff, all of whom would appear at the final gala dinner in suits and bow ties, skating on ice, standing on one another’s shoulders, with pineapples on their heads, and flambéing crepes.

"Will procure legal employment in the USA!!!!" said the advertisements that appeared in the local paper and were pasted on the walls in various locations around town.

The man set up a temporary office in his room at Sinclair’s Hotel.

The line that formed outside circled the hotel and came all the way back around, at which point the head of the line got mixed up with the tail and there was some foul play.

Pleased to get in sooner than he had expected was Biju, who had been summoned from their home to Kalimpong for this interview, despite the judge’s objection. Why couldn’t Biju plan to work for him when the cook retired?

Biju took some of the cook’s fake recommendations with him to the interview to prove he came from an honest family, and a letter from Father Booty to say he was of sound moral character and one from Uncle Potty to say he made the best damn roast bar none, though Uncle Potty had never eaten anything cooked by this boy who had also never eaten anything cooked by himself, since he had simply never cooked. His grandmother had fed and spoiled him all his life, though they were one of the poorest families in a poor village.

Nevertheless – the interview was a success.

"I can make any kind of pudding. Continental or Indian."

"But that is excellent. We have a buffet of seventeen sweets each night."

In a wonderful moment Biju was accepted and he signed on the dotted line of the proffered form.

The cook was so proud: "It was because of all the puddings I told the boy about… They have a big buffet in the ship every night, the ship is like a hotel, you see, run just like the clubs in the past. The interviewer asked him what he could make and he said, ‘I can make this and that, anything you require. Baked Alaska, floating island, brandy snap.’"

"Are you sure he seemed legitimate?" asked the MetalBox watchman.

"Completely legitimate," the cook said, defending the man who had so appreciated his son.

They went back to the hotel the next evening with a completed medical form and a bank draft of eight thousand rupees to cover his processing fee and the cost of the training camp that was to be held in Kathmandu, since it made sense to them all to pay to get a job. The recruiter made out a receipt for the bank draft, checked the medical forms that had been completed free by the bazaar doctor, who had been kind enough to show Biju’s blood pressure as being lower than it was, his weight as greater, and she had filled up the inoculations column with dates that would have been the correct time to have inoculations had he had them.

"Have to look perfect or the embassy people will make trouble and then what will you do?" She knew this because she’d sent her own son off on this journey some years ago. In return for the favor, Biju promised to take a packet of dried churbi cheese to the U.S. and mail it to her son doing a medical residency in Ohio, for the boy had been a boarder in a Dar-jeeling school and acquired the habit of chewing it as he studied.

Two weeks later, Biju traveled to Kathmandu by bus for a week of training at the recruiting agency’s main office.

Kathmandu was a carved wooden city of temples and palaces, caught in a disintegrating tangle of modern concrete that stretched into the dust and climbed into the sky.

He looked in vain for the mountains; Mt. Everest – where was it? He traversed along flat main roads into a knot of medieval passages full of the sounds of long ago, a street of metal workers, a street of potters melding clay, straw, sand, with their bare feet; rats in a Ganesh temple eating sweets. At one point a crooked shutter etched with stars opened and a face from a fairy tale looked out, pure among the muck, but when he looked back the young girl was gone; a wrinkled old crone had taken her place to talk to another old crone on her way with a puja tray of offerings; and then he was back out among the blocks of concrete, scooters, and buses. A billboard was painted with an underwear advertisement showing a giant, bulging underwear placket; across the bulge was a black crisscross. "No Pickpocket," it warned. Some laughing foreigners were having their picture taken in front of it. Down a lane, around a corner, behind a cinema, there was a small butcher’s shop, with a row of yellow chicken feet in a decorative fringe over the door. A man stood outside, his hands dripping with meat juices over a basin of water tinged rust with blood, and the number inscribed on the side of the door matched the address Biju had in his pocket: 223 A block, ground floor, behind Pun Cinema House.

"Another one!" the man in front shouted to the back room. Several other men were there wrestling with an unwilling goat that had caught sight of a fellow grazer’s heart lying discarded on the floor.

"You’ve been cheated," the butcher laughed. "So many people have been asking to go the USA."

The men trussed up the goat and came out grinning, all with bloody vests. "Ah, idiot. Who goes and gives money like that? Where do you come from? What do you think the world is made of? Criminals! Criminals! Go file a report at the police station. Not that they will do anything…"

Before the butcher slit the goat’s throat, Biju could hear him working up his disdain, yelling " Bitch, whore, cunt, sali, " at her, dragging her forward then, and killing her.

You have to swear at a creature to be able to destroy it.

As Biju stood dazed outside, wondering what to do, they skinned her, slung her upside down to drain.

His second attempt at America was a simple, straightforward application for a tourist visa.

A man from his village had made fifteen tries and recently, on the sixteenth, he got the visa.

"Never give up," he’d advised the boys in the village, "at some point your lucky day will come."

"Is this the Amriken embassy?" Biju asked a watchman outside the formidable exterior.

" Amreeka nehi, bephkuph. This is U.S. embassy!"

He walked on: "Where is the Amriken embassy?"

"It is there." The man pointed back at the same building.

"That is U.S."

"It is the same thing," said the man impatiently. "Better get it straight before you get on the plane, bhai. "

Outside, a crowd of shabby people had been camping, it appeared, for days on end. Whole families that had traveled from distant villages, eating food packed and brought with them; some individuals with no shoes, some with cracked plastic ones; all smelling already of the ancient sweat of a never-ending journey. Once you got inside, it was air-conditioned and you could wait in rows of orange bucket chairs that shook if anyone along the length began to bop their knees up and down.

First name: Balwinder

Last name: Singh