Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

"What an elegant lady," Lola and Noni always said when they saw her, for they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful: the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx.

Thus, they did not wave to Mrs. Sen emerging from the post office. "They keep begging and begging my daughter to please just take a green card," Lola mimicked her neighbor. Liar, liar, pants on fire…

They waved again as they passed the Afghan princesses sitting on cane chairs among white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick. From their house came the unmistakable smell of chicken.

"Soup?" shouted Uncle Potty, already hungry, nose trembling with excitement. He had missed his usual leftovers-inside-an-omelet breakfast.

"Soup!"

Waving, then, at the Graham’s School orphans in the playground – they were so angelically beautiful, they looked as if they had already died and gone to heaven.

The army came jogging along overlaid by courting butterflies and the colorful dashes – blue, red, orange – of dragonflies, hinged in the severely cricked geometric angles of their mating. The men puffed and panted, their spindly legs protruding from comically wide shorts: how would they defend India against the Chinese so close over the mountains at Nathu-La?

From the army mess kitchens came rumors of increasing vegetarianism.

Lola often encountered young officers who were not only vegetarian, but also teetotalers. Even the top command.

"I think to be in the army you should eat fish at least," she said.

"Why?" asked Sai.

"To kill you must be carnivorous or otherwise you’re the hunted. Just look at nature – the deer, the cow. We are animals after all and to triumph you must taste blood." But the army was retreating from being a British-type army and was becoming a true Indian army. Even in choice of paint. They passed the Striking Lion’s Club that was painted a bridal pink.

"Well," said Noni, "they must be tired of that mud color over every single thing."

"FLOWERS," it read on a grand sign nearby as part of the Army Beautification Program, though it was the only spot on the hill where there were none.

They stopped for a pair of young monks crossing to the gates of a mansion recently bought by their order.

"Hollywood money," Lola said. "And once upon a time the monks used to be grateful to Indians, the only country to take them in! Now they despise us. Waiting for Americans to take them to Disneyland. Fat chance!"

"God, they’re so handsome," said Uncle Potty, "who wants them to leave?"

He remembered the time he and Father Booty had first met… their admiring eyes on the same monk in the market… the start of a grand friendship…

"Everyone says poor Tibetans – poor Tibetans," Lola continued, "but what brutal people, barely a Dalai Lama survived – they were all popped off before their time. That Potala Palace – the Dalai Lama must be thanking his lucky stars to be in India instead, better climate, and let’s be honest, better food. Good fat mutton momos. "

Noni: "But he must be vegetarian, no?"

"These monks are not vegetarian. What fresh vegetables grow in Tibet? And in fact, Buddha died of greed for pork."

"What a situation," said Uncle Potty. "The army is vegetarian and the monks are gobbling down meat…"

Down they hurtled through the sal trees and the pani saaj, Kiri te Kanawa on the cassette player, her voice soaring from valley level to hover around the five peaks of Kanchenjunga.

Lola: "But give me Maria Callas any day. Nothing like the old lot. Caruso over Pavarotti."

In an hour, they had descended into the tropical density of air thick and hot over the river and into even greater concentrations of butterflies, beetles, dragonflies. "Wouldn’t it be nice to live there?" Sai pointed at the government rest house with its view over the sand banks, through the grasses to the impatient Teesta -

Then they rose up again into the pine and ether amid little snips of gold rain. "Blossom rain, metok-chharp, " said Father Booty. "Very auspicious in Tibet, rain and sunshine at the same time." He beamed at the sunny buds through the broken windows as he sat on his swimming ring.

In order to accommodate the population boom, the government had recently passed legislation that allowed an extra story to be built on each home in Darjeeling; the weight of more concrete pressing downward had spurred the town’s lopsided descent and caused more landslides than ever. As you approached it, it looked like a garbage heap rearing above and sliding below, so it seemed caught in a photostill, a frozen moment of its tumble. "Darjeeling has really gone downhill," the ladies said with satisfaction, and meant it not just literally. "Remember how lovely it used to be?"

By the time they found a parking space half in a drain behind the bazaar, the point had been too well proven and their smugness had changed to sourness as they dismounted between cows quaffing fruit peels, made their way past nefarious liquid pouring down the streets, and through traffic jams on the market road. To add to the confusion and noise, monkeys loped over the tin roofs overhead, making a crashing sound. But then, just as Lola was going to make another remark about Darjeeling’s demise, suddenly the clouds broke and Kanchenjunga came looming – it was astonishing; it was right there; close enough to lick: 28,168 feet high. In the distance, you could see Mt. Everest, a coy triangle.

A tourist began generously to scream as if she had caught sight of a pop star.

Uncle Potty departed. He wasn’t in Darjeeling for the sake of books but to procure enough alcohol to last him through civil unrest. He’d already bought up the entire supply of rum in the Kalimpong shops and with the addition of a few more cartons here, he would be prepared for curfew and a disruption of liquor supplies during strikes and roadblocks.

"Not a reader," said Lola, disapproving.

"Comics," corrected Sai. He was an appreciative consumer of As-terix, Tin Tin, and also Believe It or Not in the loo, didn’t consider himself above such literature though he had studied languages at Oxford. Because of his education, the ladies put up with him, and also because he came from a well-known Lucknow family and had called his parents Mater and Pater. Mater had been such the belle in her day that a mango was named for her: Haseena. "She was a notorious flirt," said Lola who had heard from someone who had heard from someone of a sari slipping off the shoulder, low-cut blouse and all… After packing in as much fun as she possibly could, she’d married a diplomat named Alphonso (also, of course, the name of a distinguished mango). Haseena and Alphonso, they celebrated their wedding with the purchase of two racehorses, Chengiz Khan and Tamerlane, who once made front page of the Times of India. They had been sold along with a home off Marble Arch in London, and defeated by bad luck and changing times, Mater and Pater finally became reconciled to India, went like mice into an ashram, but this sad end to their fabulous spirit their son refused to accept.

"What kind of ashram?" Lola and Noni had asked him. "What are their teachings?"

"Starvation, sleep deprivation," mourned Uncle Potty, "followed by donation. Proper dampening of the spirits so you howl out to God to save you." He liked to tell the story of when, into strict vegetarian surroundings – no garlic or onions, even, to heat the blood – he’d smuggled a portion of roast jungli boar that he had caught rooting in his garlic field and shot. The meat was redolent with the creature’s last meal. "Licked up every scrap, they did, Mater and Pater!"