Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

"And these are the last of the tourists. We’re lucky to have them. This political trouble will drive them away."

In this Gymkhana dining hall, in one of the corners slung about with antlers and moth eaten hides, hovered the ghost of the last conversation between the judge and his only friend, Bose.

It had been the last time they ever met. The last time the judge had ever driven his car out of the Cho Oyu gates.

They had not seen each other in thirty-three years.

Bose lifted his glass. "To old times," he had said, and drank. "Ahhh. Mother’s milk."

He had brought a bottle of Talisker for them to share, and it was he, as was expected, who had instigated this meeting. It was a month before Sai had arrived in Kalimpong. He had written to the judge that he would stay at the Gymkhana. Why did the judge go? Out of some vain hope of putting his memories to sleep? Out of curiosity? He told himself he went because if he did not go to the Gymkhana, Bose would come to Cho Oyu instead.

"You have to say we have the best mountains in the world," said Bose. "Have you ever trekked up Sandak Fu? That Micky went – remember him? Stupid fellow? Wore new shoes and by the time he arrived at the base, he had developed such blisters he had to sit at the bottom, and his wife Mithu – remember her? lot of spirit? great girl? – she ran all the way to the top in her Hawaii chappals.

"Remember Dickie, that one with a tweed coat and cherry pipe pretending to be an English lord, saying things like, ‘Look upon this hoary… hoary… winter’s… light… et cetera?’ Had a retarded child and couldn’t take it… he killed himself.

"Remember Subramanium? Wife, a dumpy woman, four feet by four feet? Cheered himself up with the Anglo secretary, but that wife of his, she booted him out of the house and took all the money… and once the money vanished so did the Anglo. Found some other bugger…"

Bose threw back his head to laugh and his dentures came gnashing down. He hurriedly lowered his head and gobbled them up again. The judge was pained by the scene of them before they’d even properly embarked on the evening – two white-haired Fitzbillies in the corner of the club, water-stained durries, the grimacing head of a stuffed bear slipping low, half the stuffing fallen out. Wasps lived in the creature’s teeth, and moths lived in its fur, which also fooled some ticks that had burrowed in, confident of finding blood, and died of hunger. Above the fireplace, where a portrait of the king and queen of England in coronation attire had once hung, there was now one of Gandhi, thin and with ribs showing. Hardly conducive to appetite or comfort in a club, the judge thought.

Still, you could imagine what it must have been like, planters in boiled shirts riding for miles through the mist, coattails in their pockets to meet for tomato soup. Had the contrast excited them, the playing of tiny tunes with fork and spoon, the dancing against a backdrop that celebrated blood-sports and brutality? In the guest registers, the volumes of which were kept in the library, massacres were recorded in handwriting that had a feminine delicacy and perfect balance, seeming to convey sensitivity and good sense. Fishing expeditions to the Teesta had brought back, just forty years ago, a hundred pounds of mahaseer. Twain had shot thirteen tigers on the road between Calcutta and Darjeeling. But the mice hadn’t been shot out and they were chewing the matting and scurrying about as the two men talked.

"Remember how I took you to buy the coat in London? Remember that awful bloody thing you had? Looking like a real gow wallah? Remember how you used to pronounce Jheelee as Giggly? Remember? Ha ha."

The judge’s heart filled with a surge of venomous emotion: how dare this man! Is this why he had made the journey, to raise himself up, put the judge down, establish a past position of power so as to be able to respect himself in the present?

"Remember Granchester? And is there honey still for tea? "

He and Bose in the boat, holding themselves apart in case they brush against the others and offend them with brown skin.

The judge looked for the waiter. They should order dinner, get this over with, make it an early night. He thought of Mutt waiting for him.

She would be at the window, her eyes hooked on the gate, tail uncurled between her legs, her body tense with waiting, her brows furrowed.

When he returned, he would pick up a stick.

"I could throw it? You could catch it? Should I?" he would ask her.

Yes yes yes yes – she would leap and jump, unable to bear the anticipation for a moment longer.

So he tried to ignore Bose, but hysterically, once he had begun, Bose accelerated the pace and tone of his invasiveness.

He had been one of the ICS men, the judge knew, who had mounted a court case to win a pension equal to that of a white ICS man, and they had lost, of course, and somehow the light had gone out of Bose.

Despite letter after letter typed on Bose’s portable Olivetti, the judge had refused to become involved. He’d already learned his cynicism by then and how Bose had kept his naïveté alive – well, it was miraculous. Even stranger, his naïveté had clearly been inherited by his son, for years later, the judge heard that the son, too, had fought a case against his employer, Shell Oil, and he, too, had lost. The son had reasoned that it was a different age with different rules, but it had turned out to be only a different version of the same old.

"It costs less to live in India," they responded.

But what if they wished to have a holiday in France? Buy a bottle at the duty-free? Send a child to college in America? Who could afford it? If they were paid less, how would India not keep being poor? How could Indians travel in the world and live in the world the same way Westerners did? These differences Bose found unbearable.

But profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other. They were damning the third world to being third-world. They were forcing Bose and his son into an inferior position – thus far and no further – and he couldn’t take it. Not after believing he was their friend. He thought of how the English government and its civil servants had sailed away throwing their topis overboard, leaving behind only those ridiculous Indians who couldn’t rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn.

Again they went to court and again they would go to court with their unshakable belief in the system of justice. Again they lost. Again they would lose.

The man with the white curly wig and a dark face covered in powder, bringing down his hammer, always against the native, in a world that was still colonial.

In England they had a great good laugh, no doubt, but in India, too, everyone laughed with the joy of seeing people like Bose cheated. There they had thought they were superior, putting on airs, and they were just the same – weren’t they? – as the rest.

The more the judge’s mouth tightened, the more Bose seemed determined to drive the conversation until it broke.

"Best days of my life," he said. "Remember? Punting by King’s, Trinity, what a view, my God, and then what was it? Ah yes, Corpus Christi… No, I’m getting it wrong, aren’t I? First Trinity, then St. John’s. No. First Clare, then Trinity, then some ladies’ thing, Primrose… Primrose?"

"No, that’s not the order at all," the judge heard himself saying in tight-wound offended tones like an adolescent. "It was Trinity then Clare."

"No, no, what are you saying. King’s, Corpus Christi, Clare, then St. John. Memory going, old chap…"