Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

Other names: – - – -

What would those be??

Pet names, someone said, and trustfully they wrote: "Guddu, Dumpy, Plumpy, Cherry, Ruby, Pinky, Chicky, Micky, Vicky, Dicky, Sunny, Bunny, Honey, Lucky…"

After thinking a bit, Biju wrote "Baba."

"Demand draft? Demand draft?" said the touts going by in the auto rickshaws. "Passport photo chahiye? Passport photo? Campa Cola chahiye , Campa Cola?"

Sometimes every single paper the applicants brought with them was fake: birth certificates, vaccination records from doctors, offers of monetary support. There was a lovely place you could go, clerks by the hundreds sitting cross-legged before typewriters, ready to help with stamps and the correct legal language for every conceivable requirement…

"How do you find so much money?" Someone in the line was worried he would be refused for the small size of his bank account.

" Ooph, you cannot show so little," laughed another, looking over his shoulder with frank appraisal. "Don’t you know how to do it?" How?

"My whole family," he explained, "uncles from all over, Dubai-New Zealand-Singapore, wired money into my cousin’s account in Tulsa, the bank printed the statement, my cousin sent a notarized letter of support, and then he sent the money back to where it had come from. How else can you find enough to please them!"

An announcement was made from the invisible loudspeaker: "Will all visa applicants line up at window number seven to collect a number for visa processing."

"What what, what did they say?" Biju, like half the room, didn’t understand, but he saw from the ones who did, who were running, pleased to be given a head start, what they should do. Stink and spit and scream and charge; they jumped toward the window, tried to splat themselves against it hard enough that they would just stick and not scrape off; young men mowing through, tossing aside toothless grannies, trampling babies underfoot. This was no place for manners and this is how the line was formed: wolf-faced single men first, men with families second, women on their own and Biju, and last, the decrepit. Biggest pusher, first place; how self-contented and smiling he was; he dusted himself off, presenting himself with the exquisite manners of a cat. I’m civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I’m civilized, mam. Biju noticed that his eyes, so alive to the foreigners, looked back at his own countrymen and women, immediately glazed over, and went dead.

Some would be chosen, others refused, and there was no question of fair or not. What would make the decision? It was a whim; it was not liking your face, forty-five degrees centigrade outside and impatience with all Indians, therefore; or perhaps merely the fact that you were in line after a yes, so you were likely to be the no. He trembled to think of what might make these people unsympathetic. Presumably, though, they would start off kind and relaxed, and then, faced with all the fools and annoying people, with their lies and crazy stories, and their desire to stay barely concealed under fervent promises to return, they would respond with an indiscriminate machine-gun-fire of NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!

On the other hand, it occurred to those who now stood in the front, that at the beginning, fresh and alert, they might be more inclined to check their papers more carefully and find gaps in their arguments… Or perversely start out by refusing, as if for practice.

There was no way to fathom the minds and hearts of these great Americans, and Biju watched the windows carefully, trying to uncover a pattern he might learn from. Some officers seemed more amiable than others, some scornful, some thorough, some were certain misfortune, turning everyone away empty-handed.

He would have to approach his fate soon enough. He stood there telling himself, Look unafraid as if you have nothing to hide. Be clear and firm when answering questions and look straight into the eyes of the officer to show you are honest. But when you are on the verge of hysteria, so full of anxiety and pent-up violence, you could only appear honest and calm by being dishonest. So, whether honest or dishonest, dishonestly honest-looking, he would have to stand before the bulletproof glass, still rehearsing answers to the questions he knew were coming up, questions to which he had to have perfectly made-up replies.

"How much money do you have?"

"Can you prove to us you won’t stay?"

Biju watched as the words were put forward to others with complete bluntness, with a fixed and unembarrassed eye – odd when asking such rude questions. Standing there, feeling the enormous measure of just how despised he was, he would have to reply in a smart yet humble manner. If he bumbled, tried too hard, seemed too cocky, became confused, if they didn’t get what they wanted quickly and easily, he would be out. In this room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their heads and yet they would be begging to come crawling in…

"And what is the purpose of your visit?"

"What should we say, what should we say?" they discussed in the line. "We’ll say a hubshi broke into the shop and killed our sister-in-law and now we have to go to the funeral."

"Don’t say that." An engineering student who was already studying at the University of North Carolina, here for the renewal of his visa, knew this would not sound right.

But he was shouted down. He was unpopular.

"Why not?"

"You are going too far. It’s a stereotype. They’ll suspect."

But they insisted. It was a fact known to all mankind: "It’s black men who do all of this."

"Yes, yes," several others in the line agreed. "Yes, yes." Black people, living like monkeys in the trees, not like us, so civilized…

They were, then, shocked to see the African-American lady behind the counter. (God, if the Americans accepted them, surely they would welcome Indians with open arms? Won’t they be happy to see us!)

But… already some ahead were being turned away. Biju’s worry grew as he saw a woman begin to shriek and throw herself about in an epilepsy of grief. "These people won’t let me go, my daughter has just had a baby, these people won’t let me go, I can’t even look at my own grandchild, these people… I am ready to die… they won’t even let me see the face of my grandchild…" And the security guards came rushing forward to drag her away down the sanitized corridor rinsed with germ killers.

The man with the hubshi story of murder – he was sent to the window of the hubshi. Hubshi hubshi bandar bandar, trying to do some quick thinking – oh no, normal Indian prejudice would not work here, distaste and rudeness – story falling to pieces in his head.

"Mexican, say Mexican," hissed someone else.

"Mexican?"

He arrived at the window, retreating under threat, to his best behavior. "Good morning, ma’am." (Better not make that hubshi angry, yaar – so much he wished to immigrate to the U.S. of A., he could even be polite to black people.) "Yes ma’am, something like this, Mexican-Texican, I don’t know exactly," he said to the woman who pinned him with a lepidopterist’s gaze. (Mexican-Texican??) "I don’t know, madam," squirming, "something or the other like this my brother was saying, but he is so upset, you know, don’t want to ask all the details."

"No, we cannot give you a visa."

"Why ma’am, please ma’am, I already have bought the ticket ma’am…"

And those who waited for visas who had spacious homes, ease-filled lives, jeans, English, driver-driven cars waiting outside to convey them back to shady streets, and cooks missing their naps to wait late with lunch (something light – cheese macaroni…), all this time they had been trying to separate themselves from the vast shabby crowd. By their manner, dress, and accent, they tried to convey to the officials that they were a preselected, numerically restricted, perfect-for-foreign-travel group, skilled in the use of knife and fork, no loud burping, no getting up on the toilet seat to squat as many of the village women were doing at just this moment never having seen the sight of such a toilet before, pouring water from on high to clean their bottoms and flooding the floor with bits of soggy shit.