Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

The world had failed Mutt. It had failed beauty; it had failed grace. But by having forsaken this world, for having held himself apart, Mutt would suffer.

The judge had lost his clout… A bit of "sir sahib huzoor " for politeness’ sake, but that was just residual veneer now; he knew what they really thought of him.

He remembered all of a sudden why he had gone to England and joined the ICS; it was clearer than ever why – but now that position of power was gone, frittered away in years of misanthropy and cynicism.

" Biscuit, pooch, din din, milkie, khana, ishtoo, porridge, daha, chalo, car, pom-pom, doo-doo, walkie " -

He shouted all the language that was between Mutt and himself, sending nursery words of love flying over the Himalayas, rattled her leash so it clinked the way that made her jump – whoop! – up on all four legs together, as if on a pogo stick.

" Walkie, baba, muffin…

" Mutt, mutton, little chop … "he cried, then, "forgive me, my little dog… Please let her go whoever you are…"

He kept burning the image of Mutt, how she sometimes lay on her back with all four legs in the air, warming her tummy as she snoozed in the sun. How he’d recently tempted her to eat her lousy pumpkin stew by running around the garden making buzzing noises as if the vegetable were a strange insect, and then he’d popped the cube into her wide-open-with-surprise mouth, and in amazement she’d hastily swallowed.

He pictured the two of them cozy in bed: good night, good morning.

The army came out at dusk to make sure curfew was strictly enforced.

"You must return, sir," said a soldier.

"Get out of my way," he said in a British accent to make the man back away, but the soldier continued to follow at a safe distance until the judge turned angrily toward home while pretending not to be hurried.

Please come home, my dear, my lovely girl,

Princess Duchess Queen,

Soo-soo, Poo-poo, Cuckoo, good good smelly smell,

Naughty girl,

Treat-treat, dinnertime,

Diamond Pearl,

Teatime! Biscuit!

Sweetheart! Chicki!

Catch the bone!

How ridiculous it all sounded without a dog to receive the words.

The soldier followed meekly, surprised at what was coming from the judge’s mouth.

Something was wrong, he told his wife back in the quarters for married servicemen, concrete blocks defacing the wilderness.

Something indecent was happening.

"What?" she said, newly married, absolutely delighted by her modern plumbing and cooking gadgets.

"God knows what happens, these senile men and their animals… you know," he said, "all kinds of strange things…"

Then they forgot the conversation, because the army was still being well fed and the wife informed her husband that they had been allotted so much butter that they could share it with their extended family, even though this was against the law, and that while a broiler chicken was usually between six hundred and eight hundred grams, the chicken they had been delivered was almost double the weight: was the army poultry supplier injecting the birds with water?

In the meantime, in the aftermath of the parade, the police had been reinforced and were hunting down the GNLF boys, combing remote hamlets, trying to weed Gorkhaland supporters from the Marxists, from the Congress supporters, from those who didn’t care either way. They raided tea gardens as they were closing down; managers recalling the attacks by rebels on plantation owners in Assam left on private planes for Calcutta. Wanted men, on the run, were dodging the police, sleeping in the homes of the wealthier people in town – Lola and Noni, the doctor, the Afghan princesses, retired officials, Bengalis, outsiders, anyone whose home would not be searched.

There were reports of comings and goings over the Nepal and Sikkim border, of retired army men controlling the movement, offering quick training on how to wire bombs, ambush the police, blow up the bridges. But anyone could see they were still mostly just boys, taking their style from Rambo, heads full up with kung fu and karate chops, roaring around on stolen motorcycles, stolen jeeps, having a fantastic time. Money and guns in their pockets. They were living the movies. By the time they were done, they would defeat their fictions and the new films would be based on them…

They arrived with masks in the night, climbed over gates, ransacked houses. Seeing a woman walking home bundled in a shawl, they made her unwrap it and took the rice and the bit of sugar she’d concealed.

On the road to the market, the trees were hung with the limbs of enemies – which side and whose enemy? This was the time to make anyone you didn’t like disappear, to avenge ancient family vendettas. Screams continued from the police station though a bottle of Black Label could save your life. Injured men, their spilling guts wrapped in chicken skins to keep them fresh, were rushed on bamboo stretchers to the doctor to be stitched up; a man was found buried in the sewage tank, every inch of his body slashed with a knife, his eyes gouged out…

But while the residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all. Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of as they sat at home with nothing to do, and found that it was possible, faced with the stench of unimaginable evil, for a human being to grow bored, yawn, be absorbed by the problem of a missing sock, by neighborly irritations, to feel hunger skipping like a little mouse inside a tummy and return, once again, to the pressing matter of what to eat… There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice – the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event.

After Delhi, the Gulf Air flight landed in Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport. Biju smelled again, the distinctive smell of a floor being disinfected with phenyl by a sweeper woman both destitute and with a talent for being exceedingly irritating. Eyes lowered and swatting bare feet with a filthy rag, she introduced some visitors for the first time to that potent mixture of intense sympathy and intense annoyance.

There was an unruly crowd around the luggage conveyer belts because several planes were in at the same time and even more varieties of Indians than the ones showcased on Gulf Air were on display, back in the common soup after deliberate evolution into available niches abroad. There was the yuppie who had taken lessons on wine, those who were still maintaining their culture and going to the temple in Bern, or wherever. The funky Bhangra boy with earring and baggy pants. The hippie who had hit on the fact that you could escape from being a drab immigrant and have a fantastic time as an Indian among the tie-dyed, spout all kinds of Hindu-mantra-Tantra-Mother-Earth-native-peoples-single-energy-organic- Shakti -ganja-crystal-shaman-intuition stuff. There were computer boys who’d made a million. Taxi drivers, toilet cleaners, and young straight-laced businessmen who tried to be cool by having friends over for "some really hot curry, man, how spicy can you take it?"

Indians who lived abroad, Indians who traveled abroad, richest and poorest, the back-and-forth ones maintaining green cards. The Indian student bringing back a bright blonde, pretending it was nothing, trying to be easy, but every molecule tense and self-conscious: "Come on, yaar, love has no color…" He had just happened to stumble into the stereotype; he was the genuine thing that just happened to be the cliché…