Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

He needed to be a man. He needed to stand tall and be rough. Dryness, space, good firm gestures. Not this fritter, flutter, this worming in sugar…

Oh yes, how he needed to be strong -

For, if truth be told, as the weeks went by, he, Gyan, was scared – he who had thought there was no joy like screaming victory over oppression, he who had raised his fist to authority, who had found the fire of his college friends purifying, he who had claimed the hillside, enjoyed the thought of those Mon Ami sisters with their fake English accents blanching and trembling – he, who was hero for the homeland…

He listened with growing trepidation as the conversation in Gompu’s gained in fervor. When did shouting and strikes get you anywhere, they said, and talked of burning the circuit house, robbing the petrol pump.

When Chhang and Bhang, Gyan, Owl and Donkey had leaped into jeeps, filled up at the petrol station and driven off without paying, Gyan had been shaking just as much as the pump manager on the other side of the window, the muscles of his heart performing uncontrollable spasms.

There were those who were provoked by the challenge, but Gyan was finding that he wasn’t one of these. He was angry that his family hadn’t thought to ban him, keep him home. He hated his tragic father, his mother who looked to him for direction, had always looked to him for direction, even when he was a little boy, simply for being male. He spent the nights awake, worrying he couldn’t live up to his proclamations.

But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn’t leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?

Yes, he owed much to his rejection of Sai.

The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way. In pushing her away, an energy was born, a purpose whittled. He wouldn’t sweetly reconcile.

"You hate me," said Sai, as if she’d read his thoughts, "for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me. You aren’t being fair."

" What’s fair? What’s fair? Do you have any idea of the world? Do you bother to look? Do you have any understanding of how justice operates or, rather, does NOT operate? You’re not a baby anymore, you know…"

"And how grown-up are you?! Too scared even to come for tuition because you know you’ve behaved nastily and you’re too much of a coward to admit it! You’re probably just sitting waiting for your mummy to arrange your marriage. Low-class family, uncultured, arranged-marriage types… they’ll find you a silly fool to marry and you’ll be delighted all your life to have a dummy. Why not admit it, Gyan??"

Coward! How dare she? Who would marry her!

"You think it’s brave of me to sit on your veranda? I can’t spend my life eating cheese toast, can I? "

"I didn’t ask you to. You did it of your own free will, and pay us back for it, if that’s what you think." She found a new attack and went after it even though she grew steadily more horrified by the vermin that coursed from her mouth, but it was as if she were on a stage; the role was more powerful than herself.

"Ate it for free… typical of you people, demand and take and then spit on what you’ve been given. There is exactly one reason why you will get nowhere -

" Because you don’t deserve to. Why did you eat it if it was beneath you?"

"Not beneath me. Nothing to DO with me, YOU FOOL – "

"Don’t call me FOOL. Through this whole conversation you’ve been repeating it, FOOL FOOL – "

Lunging at him with hands and nails, having learned something from the conduct of the common chicken some minutes ago, she scratched his arms in red streaks and – " You told them about the guns, didn’t you? " she was shouting all of a sudden. " You told them to come to Cho Oyu? You did, didn’t you, DIDN’T YOU? "

It all came bursting out although she hadn’t considered this possibility before. Suddenly her anger, Gyan’s absences, his ignoring her in Darjeeling – all came together.

His guilt hooked unawares, rose in his eye, disappeared reappeared. Wriggling leaping trying to get away like a caught fish. " You’re crazy. "

"I saw that," pounced Sai. Jumped to seize it from his eyes. But he caught her before she reached him and then threw her aside into the lan-tana bushes and beat about with a stick.

"Gyan bhaiya? " His sister’s tentative voice as Sai managed to stand.

They both turned in horror. It had all been observed. He dropped the stick and told his sister: "Don’t stick your nose here. Go back. Or I’ll smack you hard."

And he shouted at Sai, "Never come here again." Oh, and now it would all be reported to his parents.

Sai screamed at the sister: "Good you saw, good that you heard. Go and tell your parents what your brother has been up to, telling me he loves me, making all kinds of promises and then sending robbers to our house. I’ll go to the police and then let’s see what happens to your family. Gyan will get his eyes pulled out, his head cut off, and then let’s see when you all come crying to beg… Hah! "

The sister was trying to hear but Gyan had her by the braids and was pulling her home. Sai had betrayed him, led him to betray others, his own people, his family. She had enticed him, sneaked up on him, spied on him, ruined him, caused him to behave badly. He couldn’t wait for the day his mother would show him the photograph of the girl he was to marry, a charming girl, he hoped, with cheeks like two Simla apples, who hadn’t allowed her mind to traverse the gutters and gray areas, and he would adore her for the miracle she was.

Sai was not miraculous; she was an uninspiring person, a reflection of all the contradictions around her, a mirror that showed him himself far too clearly for comfort.

Sai began to follow brother and sister but then stopped. Shame caught up with her. What had she done? It would be her they would laugh at, a desperate girl who had walked all this way for unrequited love. Gyan would be slapped on the back and cheered for his conquest. She would be humiliated. He had hit on the age-old trick that remade him into a hero, "the desired male"… The more he insulted her behind her back – "Oh, that crazy girl is following me…" – the more the men would cheer, the more his status would grow at Thapa’s Canteen, the more Sai would be remade behind her back into a lunatic female, the more Gyan would fatten with pride… She felt her own dignity departing, watched it from far away as Gyan and his sister walked down the path. As they turned into their house, it vanished as well.

She walked home very slowly, sick, sick. The mist was thickening, smoke adding to the dusk and the vapor. The smell of potatoes cooking came from busti houses all along the way, a smell that would surely connote comfort to souls across the world, but that couldn’t comfort her. She felt none of the pity she’d felt earlier while contemplating this scene; even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her…

When she arrived home she saw two people on the veranda talking to the cook and the judge.

A woman was pleading: "Who do you go to when you’re poor? People like us have to suffer. All the goondas come out and the police go hand in hand with them."

"Who are you?"

It was the wife, begging for mercy, of the drunk the police had caught and questioned about the gun robbery and on whom they had practiced their new torture strategy. They, at Cho Oyu, had forgotten about this man, but the man’s wife had traced the connection and she’d come with her father-in-law to see the judge, walking half a day from a village across the Relli River.