Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

"I have been abroad before and I have always returned. You can see from my passport." England. Switzerland. America. Even New Zealand. Looking forward, when in New York, to the latest movie, to pizza, to Cal-ifornian wine, also Chilean – very good, you know, and reasonably priced. If you were lucky already you would be lucky again.

Biju approached his assigned window that framed a clean young man with glasses. White people looked clean because they were whiter; the darker you were, Biju thought, the dirtier you looked.

"Why are you going?"

"I would like to go as a tourist."

"How do we know you will come back?"

"My family, wife, and son are here. And my shop."

"What shop?"

"Camera shop." Could the man really believe this?

"Where are you going to stay?"

"With my friend in New York. Nandu is his name and here is his address if you would like to see."

"How long?"

"Two weeks, if that is suitable to you." (Oh, please, just a day, a day. That will be enough to serve my purpose…)

"Do you have funds to cover your trip?"

He showed a fake bank statement procured by the cook from a corrupt state bank clerk in exchange for two bottles of Black Label.

"Pay at the window around the corner and you can collect your visa after five p.m."

How could this be?

A man he had spoken to, still in the line behind him, called out in a piercing tone:

"Were you successful, Biju? Biju, were you successful? Biju?Biju! "

In that passionate peacock cry, Biju felt this man was willing to die for him, but his desperation was for himself, of course.

"Yes, I was successful."

"You are the luckiest boy in the whole world," the man said.

The luckiest boy in the whole world. He walked through a park to luxuriate in the news alone. Raw sewage was being used to water a patch of grass that was lush and stinking, grinning brilliantly in the dusk. Out of the sewage Biju chased a line of pigs with black watermarks across their bellies, ran after them in jubilation. "Hup hup," he shouted. The crows that had been sitting on the pigs’ backs scrambled into indignant flight, having to start up backward. A jogger in a tracksuit stopped to stare, the chauffeur waiting for the jogger and brushing his teeth with a neem twig, meanwhile, also stopped and stared. Biju ran after a cow. "Hup hup." He hopped over the ornamental plants and he jumped on the exercise bars, did pull-ups and push-ups.

The next day, he sent a telegram to his father, "the luckiest boy in the whole wide world," and when it arrived he knew his father would be the happiest father in the world. He didn’t know, of course, that Sai, too, would be overjoyed. That when he had visited Kalimpong for that doomed interview with the cruise ship, she had found her heart shaken by the realization that the cook had his own family and thought of them first. If his son were around, he would pay only the most cursory attention to her. She was just the alternative, the one to whom he gave his affection if he could not have Biju, the real thing.

"Yipeee," she had shouted when she heard of his visa. "Hip hip hooray."

In the Gandhi Café, a little after three years from the day he’d received his visa, the luckiest boy in the whole world skidded on some rotten spinach in Harish-Harry’s kitchen, streaked forward in a slime green track and fell with a loud popping sound. It was his knee. He couldn’t get up.

"Can you get a doctor?" he said to Harish-Harry after Saran and Jeev had helped him to his mattress between the vegetables.

"Doctor!! Do you know what is medical expense in this country?!"

"It happened here. Your responsibility."

"My responsibility!" Harish-Harry stood over Biju, enraged. " You slip in the kitchen. If you slip on the road, then who would you ask, hm? " He had given this boy the wrong impression. He had been too kind and Biju had misunderstood those nights of holding his boss’s divided soul in his lap, gluing it together with Harish-Harry’s favorite axioms. "I take you in. I hire you with no papers, treat you like my own son and now this is how you repay me! Living here rent-free. In India would they pay you? What right do you have? Is it my fault you don’t even clean the floor? YOU should have to pay ME for not cleaning, living like a pig. Am I telling YOU to live like a pig?"

"Biju’s throbbing knee made him brave, reduced him to animal directness. He glared at Harish-Harry, the pretence was gone; in this moment of physical pain, his own feelings were strained clear.

"Without us living like pigs," said Biju, "what business would you have? This is how you make your money, paying us nothing because you know we can’t do anything, making us work day and night because we are illegal. Why don’t you sponsor us for our green cards?"

Volcanic explosion.

"How can I sponsor you?! If I sponsor you I have to sponsor Rishi, and if I sponsor Rishi, then I have to sponsor Saran, and if him then Jeev, and then Mr. Lalkaka will come and say, but I have been here for longest, I am the most distinguished, and I should be first in line. How can I make an exception? I have to go to the INS and say that no American citizen can do the job. I have to prove it. I have to prove I advertised it. They will look into my restaurant. They will study and ask questions. And the way they have it, it’s the owner who gets put in jail for hiring illegal staff. If you are not happy, then go right now. Go find someone to sponsor you. Know how easily I can replace you? Know how lucky you are!!! You think there aren’t thousands of people in this city looking for a job? I can replace you like this," he snapped his fingers, "I’ll snap my fingers and in one second hundreds of people will appear. Get out of my face! "

But since Biju couldn’t walk, it was Harish-Harry who had to leave. He went back up and then he came back down, because his temper had changed in a flash – it was always like that with him, a thunder squall that moved on fast.

"Look," he said more kindly, "when have I treated you badly? I am not a bad man, am I? Why are you attacking me? As it is, I stick out my neck for you, Biju, tell me, how much more can you ask? These risky things I cannot do." He counted out fifty dollars from his wallet. "Here. Why not take some rest? You can help cutting the vegetables while lying down and if you are not better, go home. Doctors are very cheap and good in India. Get the best medical attention and later on you can always return."

A modest geometry of morning light lay on the floor, a small rhombus falling through the grate. "Naaty boy," Harish-Harry waggled his finger like a joke. The geometrical shape began to leak light, became shifty, exited slithering up the walls.

Return.

Come back.

Somebody in one of the kitchens of Biju’s past had said: "It could not be so hard or there would not be so many of you here."

But it WAS so hard and YET there were so many here. It was terribly, terribly hard. Millions risked death, were humiliated, hated, lost their families – YET there were so many here.

But Harish-Harry knew this. How could he say "Return – come back," in that easy oiled way?

"Naaty boy…" he said again when he brought Biju prasad from the temple in Queens. "Giving so much worry and trouble."

And in that prasad Biju knew not to expect anything else. It was a decoy, an old Indian trick of master to servant, the benevolent patriarch garnering the loyalty of staff; offering slave wages, but now and then a box of sweets, a lavish gift…

So Biju lay on his mattress and watched the movement of the sun through the grate on the row of buildings opposite. From every angle that you looked at this city without a horizon, you saw more buildings going up like jungle creepers, starved for light, holding a perpetual half darkness congealed at the bottom, the day shafting through the maze, slivering into apartments at precise and fleeting times, a cuprous segment visiting between 10 and 12 perhaps, or between 10 and 10:45, between 2:30 and 3:45. As in places of poverty where luxury is rented out, shared, and passed along from neighbor to neighbor, its time of arrival was noted and anticipated by cats, plants, elderly people who might sit with it briefly across their knees. But this light was too brief for real succor and it seemed more the visitation of a beautiful memory than the real thing.