The Inheritance of Loss (11 page)

He looked after my parents when they were ill and right from the beginning we made a vow that he wouldn’t leave me and that I wouldn’t leave him. Both things. Neither of us will leave each other. He will never die and leave me and I will never die and leave him. We made this vow. From before we got married we said this."

And she began to cry. Kesang with her crazy brown teeth going in different directions and her shabby stained clothes and funny topknot perched precariously on the nob of her head. Kesang, whom they had taken in untrained as a kindness and taught to make an Indonesian
sate
with peanut butter and soy sauce, a sweet-sour with ketchup and vinegar, and a Hungarian goulash with tomatoes and curd.

Her love had shocked

the sisters. Lola had always professed that servants didn’t experience love in the same manner as people like themselves—"Their entire structure of relationships is different, it’s economic, practical—far more sensible, I’m sure, if only one could manage it oneself." Even Lola was forced to wonder now if it were she who had never experienced the real thing; never had she and Joydeep had such a conversation of faith over the plunge—it wasn’t rational, so they hadn’t. But therefore might they not have had the love? She buried the thought.

________

Noni had never had love at all.

She had never sat in a hushed room and talked about such things as might make your soul tremble like a candle. She had never launched herself coquettishly at Calcutta parties, sari wrapped tightly over her hips, ice tonkling madly in her lime soda. She had never flown the brief glorious flag of romance, bright red, over her existence, not even as an episode of theater, a bit of pretense to raise her above her life. What did she have? Not even terrible hatreds; not even bitterness, grief. Merely irritations over small things: the way someone would
not
blow her nose but went
sur-sur-sur
in the library, laddering up the snot again and again.

She found, to her shock, that she had actually felt jealous of Kesang. The lines had blurred, luck had been misassigned.

And who would love Sai?

When Sai had first arrived, Noni had seen herself in her, in Sai’s shyness.

This was what came of committing a sensitive creature to a mean-spirited educational system, she thought. Noni, too, had been sent to such a school—you could only remain unsnared by going underground, remaining quiet when asked questions, expressing no opinion, hoping to be invisible—or they got you, ruined you.

Noni had recovered her confidence when it was too late. Life had passed her by and in those days things had to happen fast for a girl, or they didn’t happen at all.

________

"Don’t you want to meet people your own age?" she asked Sai.

But Sai was shy around her peers. Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.

Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest—she couldn’t stop. In this way she had read
To Kill a Mockingbird, Cider with Rosie,
and
Life with Father
from the Gymkhana Club library. And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the
National Geographics,
a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow. . . .—She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words—the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful. She remembered her parents, her father’s hope of space travel. She studied the photographs taken via satellite of a storm blowing a red cloud off the sun’s surface, felt a terrible desire for the father she did not know, and imagined that she, too, must surely have within her the same urge for something beyond the ordinary.

Cho Oyu and the judge’s habits seemed curtailments to her then.

"Now and again, I wish I lived by the sea," sighed Noni. "At least the waves are never still."

A long while ago, when she was a young woman, she had gone to Digha and learned what it was to be lifted by the mysterious ocean. She stared out at the mountains, at the perfection of their stillness.

"The Himalayas were once underwater," Sai said. She knew this from her reading. "There are ammonite fossils on Mt. Everest."

________

Noni and Sai picked up the physics book again. Then they put it down again.

________

"Listen to me," Noni told Sai, "if you get a chance in life, take it. Look at me, I should have thought about the future when I was young. Instead, only when it was too late did I realize what I should have done long ago. I used to dream about becoming an archaeologist. I’d go to the British Council and look at the books on King Tutankhamen. . . . But my parents were not the kind to understand, you know, my father was the old-fashioned type, a man brought up and educated only to give orders. . . . You must do it on your own, Sai."

________

Once more they tried physics, but Noni couldn’t find an answer to the problem.

"I am afraid I have exhausted my abilities in science and mathematics.

Sai will require a tutor more qualified in these areas," said the note she sent home with Sai for the judge.

"Bloody irresponsible woman," said the judge, grumpy because the heat reminded him of his nationality. Later that evening he dictated to Sai a letter for the principal of the local college.

"If there is a teacher or an older student who provides tutoring, please let them know that we are looking for a mathematics and science instructor."

Thirteen

Not even a few sunshiny weeks
had passed before the principal replied that he could recommend a promising student who had finished his bachelor’s degree, but hadn’t yet been able to find a job.

The student was Gyan, a quiet student of accounting who had thought the act of ordering numbers would soothe him; however, it hadn’t turned out quite like that, and in fact, the more sums he did, the more columns of statistics he transcribed—well, it seemed simply to multiply the number of places at which solid knowledge took off and vanished to the moon. He enjoyed the walk to Cho Oyu and experienced a refreshing and simple happiness, although it took him two hours uphill, from Bong Busti where he lived, the light shining through thick bamboo in starry, jumping chinks, imparting the feeling of liquid shimmering.

________

Sai was unwilling at first to be forced from her immersion in
National
Geographics
and be incarcerated in the dining room with Gyan. Before them, in a semicircle, were the instruments of study set out by the cook: ruler, pens, globe, graph paper, geometry set, pencil sharpener. The cook found they introduced a clinical atmosphere to the room similar to that which awed him at the chemist, at the clinic, and the path lab, where he enjoyed the hush guarded by the shelves of medicines, the weighing scale and thermometers, cupules, phials, pipettes, the tapeworm transformed into a specimen in formaldehyde, the measurements already inscribed on the bottle.

The cook would talk to the chemist, carefully, trying not to upset the delicate balances of the field, for he believed in superstition exactly as much as in science. "I see, yes, I understand," he said even if he didn’t, and in a reasonable tone recorded his symptoms, resisting melodrama, to the doctor whom he revered, who studied him through her glasses: "No potty for five days, evil taste in the mouth, a thun thun in the legs and arms and sometimes a chun chun."

"What is a chun chun and what is a thun thun?"

"Chun chun is a tingling. Thun thun is when there is a pain going on and off."

"What do you have now? Chun chun?"

"No, THUN THUN."

The next visit. "Are you better?"

"Better, but still—"

"Thun thun?"

"No, doctor," he would say very seriously, "chun chun."

He emerged with his medicines feeling virtuous. Oh yes, he awaited modernity and knew that if you invested in it, it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.

But outside the clinic he would run into Kesang or the cleaner at the hospital or the MetalBox watchman, who would begin to declaim, "Now there is no hope, now you’ll have to do
puja,
it will cost many thousands of rupees. . . ."

Or: "I knew someone who had exactly what you are describing, never walked again. . . ." By the time he had returned home he would have lost his faith in science and begun to howl: "
Hai hai, hamara kya hoga, hai hai, hamara kya
hoga?
"
And he’d have to go back to the clinic the next day to recover his good sense.

________

So, appreciating, desiring reasonableness, the cook brought in tea and fried cheese toast with chili pepper mixed into the cheese, and then sat on his stool just outside the door, keeping an eye on Sai and the new tutor, nodding approval at Gyan’s careful tone, the deliberate words that led, calculation by calculation, to an exact, tidy answer that could be confirmed by a list at the back of the text.

Foolish cook. He had not realized that the deliberateness came not from faith in science, but from self-consciousness and doubt; that though they appeared to be engrossed in atoms, their eyes latched tightly to the numbers in that room where the walls swelled like sails, they were flailing; that like the evening hour opening to deeper depths outside, they would be swallowed into something more treacherous than the purpose for which Gyan had been hired; that though they were battling to build a firmness from all that was available to them, there was reason enough to worry it was not good enough to save them.

The small correct answer fell flat.

Gyan produced it apologetically. It was anticlimactic. It would not do.

Flicking it aside, the tremendous anticipation that could no longer be pinned on the sum gathered strength and advanced, leaving them gasping by the time two hours were up and Gyan could flee without looking at Sai, who had produced such a powerful effect upon him.

________

"It is strange the tutor is Nepali," the cook remarked to Sai when he had left. A bit later he said, "I thought he would be Bengali."

"
Hm?
"asked Sai. How had she looked? she was thinking. How had she appeared to the tutor? The tutor himself had the aspect, she thought, of intense intelligence. His eyes were serious, his voice deep, but then his lips were too plump to have such a serious expression, and his hair was curly and stood up in a way that made him look comic. This seriousness combined with the comic she found compelling.

"Bengalis," said the cook, "are very intelligent."

"Don’t be silly," said Sai. "Although they certainly would agree."

"It’s the fish," said the cook. "Coastal people are more intelligent than inland people."

"Who says?"

"Everyone knows," said the cook. "Coastal people eat fish and see how much cleverer they are, Bengalis, Malayalis, Tamils. Inland they eat too much grain, and it slows the digestion—especially millet—forms a big heavy ball. The blood goes to the stomach and not to the head. Nepalis make good soldiers, coolies, but they are not so bright at their studies. Not their fault, poor things."

"Go and eat some fish yourself," Sai said. "One stupid thing after another from your mouth."

"Here I bring you up as my own child with so much love and just see how you are talking to me. . . ." he began.

________

That night Sai sat and stared into the mirror.

Sitting across from Gyan, she had felt so acutely aware of herself, she was certain it was because of his gaze on her, but every time she glanced up, he was looking in another direction.

She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility. She stuck her tongue out at herself and rolled her eyes, then smiled beguilingly. She transformed her expression from demon to queen. When she brushed her teeth, she noticed her breasts jiggle like two jellies being rushed to the table. She lowered her mouth to taste the flesh and found it both firm and yielding. This plumpness jiggliness firmness softness, all coupled together in an unlikely manner, must surely give her a certain amount of bartering power?

But if she continued forever in the company of two bandy-legged men, in this house in the middle of nowhere, this beauty, so brief she could barely hold it steady, would fade and expire, unsung, unrescued, and unrescuable.

She looked again and found her face tinged with sadness, and the image seemed faraway.

She’d have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed.

________

Over the days, she found herself continually obsessed with her own face, aware that she was meanwhile whetting her appetite for something else.

But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.