Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

"I think your memory may be failing you ! "

Bose was drinking peg after peg, desperate to wrangle something – a common memory, an establishment of truth that had, at least, a commitment from two people -

"No, no. King’s! Trinity!" he pounded his glass on the table. "Jesus! Clare! Gonville! And then on to tea at Granchester!"

The judge could no longer bear it, he raised his hand into the air, counted fingers:

1. St. John’s!

2. Trinity!

3. Clare!

4. King’s!

Bose fell silent. He seemed relieved by the challenge. "Should we order some dinner?" asked the judge.

But Bose swung rapidly to another position – satisfaction either way – but depth, resolution. Still a question for Bose: should he damn the past or find some sense in it? Drunk, eyes aswim with tears, "Bastards!" he said with such bitterness. "What bastards they were!" raising his voice as if attempting to grant himself conviction. " Goras – get away with everything don’t they? Bloody white people. They’re responsible for all the crimes of the century!"

Silence.

"Well," he said then, to the disapproving silence, trying to reconcile with it, "one thing we’re lucky for, baap re, is that they didn’t stay, thank God. At least they left "

Still nothing from the judge.

"Not like in Africa – still making trouble over there…"

Silence.

"Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much – now they can just do their dirty work from far away…"

Jaw clenched unclenched hands clenched unclenched clenched.

"Oh, they weren’t all bad, I suppose… Not all…"

Jaw clenched unclenched hands clenched unclenched clenched unclenched -

Then the judge burst out, despite himself:

"YES! YES! YES! They were bad. They were part of it. And we were part of the problem, Bose, exactly as much as you could argue that we were part of the solution."

And:

"Waiter!

" Waiter!

" Waiter?

" Waiter!!

" WAITER!!!’ ’shouted the judge, in utter desperation.

"Probably gone chasing the hen," said Bose weakly. "I don’t think they were expecting anyone."

The judge walked into the kitchen and found two green chilis looking ridiculous in a tin cup on a wooden stand that read "Best Potato Exhibit 1933."

Nothing else.

He went to the front desk. "Nobody in the kitchen."

The man at the reception was half asleep. "It is very late, sir. Go next door to Glenary’s. They have a full restaurant and bar."

"We have come here for dinner. Should I report you to the management?" Resentfully the man went around to the back, and eventually a reluctant waiter arrived at their table; dried lentil scabs on his blue jacket made yellow dabs. He had been having a snooze in an empty room – ubiquitous old-fashioned waiter that he was, functioning like a communist employee, existing comfortably away from horrible capitalist ideas of serving monied people politely.

"Roast mutton with mint sauce. Is the mutton tender?" asked the judge imperiously.

The waiter remained unintimidated: "Who can get tender mutton?" he said scornfully.

"Tomato soup?"

He considered this option but lacked the conviction to break free of the considering. After several undecided minutes had passed, Bose broke the spell by asking, " Rissoles ?" That might salvage the evening.

"Oh no," the waiter said, shaking his head and smiling insolently. "No, that you cannot get."

"Well, what do you have then?"

"Muttoncurrymuttonpulaovegetablecurryvegetablepulao…"

"But you said the mutton wasn’t tender."

"Yes, I already told you, didn’t I?"

The food arrived. Bose made a valiant effort to retract and start over: "Just found a new cook myself," he said. "That Sheru kicked the bucket after thirty years of service. The new one is untrained, but he came cheap because of that. I got out the recipe books and read them aloud as he copied it all down in Bengali. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘keep it basic, nothing fancy. Just learn a brown sauce and a white sauce – shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton.’"

But he couldn’t manage to keep this up.

He now pleaded directly with the judge: "We’re friends, aren’t we?

"Aren’t we? Aren’t we friends?"

"Time passes, things change," said the judge, feeling claustrophobia and embarrassment.

"But what is in the past remains unchanged, doesn’t it?"

"I think it does change. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind, Bose."

The judge knew that he would never communicate with Bose again. He wanted neither to pretend he had been the Englishman’s friend (all those pathetic Indians who glorified a friendship that was later proclaimed by the other [white] party to be nonexistent!), nor did he wish to allow himself to be dragged through the dirt. He had kept up an immaculate silence and he wasn’t about to have Bose destroy it. He wouldn’t tumble his pride to melodrama at the end of his life and he knew the danger of confession – it would cancel any hope of dignity forever. People pounced on what you gave them like a raw heart and gobbled it up.

The judge called for the bill, once, twice, but even the bill was unimportant to the waiter. He was forced to walk back into the kitchen.

Bose and the judge shook a soggy handshake, and the judge wiped his hands on his pants when they were done, but still, Bose’s eye on him was like mucous.

"Good night. Good-bye. So long" – not Indian sentences, English sentences. Perhaps that’s why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place: the self-consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.

The mist was hooked tightly into the tea bushes on either side of the road as he left Darjeeling, and the judge could barely see. He drove slowly, no other cars, nothing around, and then, damn it -

A memory of -

Six little boys at a bus stop.

"Why is the Chinaman yellow? He pees against the wind, HA HA. Why is the Indian brown? He shits upside down, HA HA HA."

Taunting him in the street, throwing stones, jeering, making monkey faces. How strange it was: he had feared children, been scared of these human beings half his size.

Then he remembered a worse incident. Another Indian, a boy he didn’t know, but no doubt someone just like himself, just like Bose, was being kicked and beaten behind the pub at the corner. One of the boy’s attackers had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a crowd of jeering red-faced men. And the future judge, walking by, on his way home with a pork pie for his dinner – what had he done? He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t called for help. He’d turned and fled, run up to his rented room and sat there.

Without thinking, the judge made the calibrated gestures, the familiar turns back to Cho Oyu, instead of over the edge of the mountainside.

Close to home, he almost ran into an army jeep parked by the side of the road, lights off. The cook and a couple of soldiers were hiding boxes of liquor in the bushes. The judge swore but continued on. He knew about this side business of the cook’s and ignored it. It was his habit to be a master and the cook’s to be a servant, but something had changed in their relationship within a system that kept servant and master both under an illusion of security.

Mutt was waiting for him at the gate, and the judge’s expression softened – he blew his horn to signal his arrival. In a second she went from being the unhappiest dog in the world to the happiest and Jemu-bhai’s heart grew young with pleasure.