The Inheritance of Loss (17 page)

________

Mid morning he rose from his books, went to the lavatory for the daily trial of his digestion, where he sat straining upon the pot with pained and prolonged effort.

As he heard others shuffling outside, waiting for their turn, he stuck a finger up the hole and excavated within, allowing a backed up load of scropulated goat pellets to rattle down loudly. Had they heard him outside? He tried to catch them before they bulleted the water. His finger emerged covered in excrement and blood, and he washed his hands repeatedly, but the smell persisted, faintly trailing him through his studies. As time went on, Jemubhai worked harder. He measured out a reading calendar, listed each book, each chapter in a complex chart. Topham’s
Law of Property,
Aristotle,
Indian
Criminal Procedure, the Penal Code
and the
Evidence Act.

He worked late into the night back in his rented room, still tailed by the persistent smell of shit, falling from his chair directly into bed, rising in terror a few hours later, and rolling up onto the chair again. He worked eighteen hours a day, over a hundred hours a week, sometimes stopping to feed his landlady’s dog when she begged for a share of pork pie dinner, drooling damp patches onto his lap, raking an insistent paw across his knees and wrecking the pleat of his corduroys. This was his first friendship with an animal, for in Piphit the personalities of dogs were not investigated or encouraged. Three nights before the Probation Finals, he did not sleep at all, but read aloud to himself, rocking back and forth to the rhythm, repeating, repeating.

A journey once begun, has no end. The memory of his ocean trip shone between the words. Below and beyond, the monsters of his unconscious prowled, awaiting the time when they would rise and be proven real and he wondered if he’d dreamt of the drowning power of the sea before his first sight of it.

His landlady brought his dinner tray right to his door. A treat: a quadruplet of handsome oily sausages, confident, gleaming, whizzing with life. Ready already for the age when food would sing on television to advertise itself.

"Don’t work too hard."

"One must, Mrs. Rice."

He had learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay, to keep even himself away from himself like the Queen.

Open Competitive Examination, June 1942

He sat before a row of twelve examiners and the first question was put to him by a professor of London University—Could he tell them how a steam train worked?

Jemubhai’s mind drew a blank.

"Not interested in trains?" The man looked personally disappointed.

"A fascinating field, sir, but one’s been too busy studying the recommended subjects."

"No idea of how a train works?"

Jemu stretched his brain as far as he could—what powered what?—but he had never seen the inside of a railway engine.

"No, sir."

Could he describe then, the burial customs of the ancient Chinese.

He was from the same part of the country as Gandhi. What of the noncooperation movement? What was his opinion of the Congress?

The room was silent. BUY BRITISH—Jemubahi had seen the posters the day of his arrival in England, and it had struck him that if he’d yelled BUY

INDIAN in the streets of India, he would be clapped into jail. And all the way back in 1930, when Jemubhai was still a child, Gandhi had marched from Sabarmati ashram to Dandi where, at the ocean’s maw, he had performed the subversive activity of harvesting salt.

"—
Where will that get him? Phtoo! His heart may be in the right place but
his brain has fallen out of his head
"—Jemu’s father had said although the jails were full of Gandhi’s supporters. On the SS
Strathnaver,
the sea spray had come flying at Jemubhai and dried in taunting dots of salt upon his face and arms. . . .

It
did
seem ridiculous to tax it. . . .

"If one was not committed to the current administration, sir, there would be no question of appearing here today."

Lastly, who was his favorite writer?

A bit nervously for he had none, he replied that one was fond of Sir Walter Scott.

"What have you read?"

"All the printed works, sir."

"Can you recite one of your favorite poems for us?" asked a professor of social anthropology.

Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the
wide Border his steed was the best

By the time they stood for the ICS, most of the candidates had crisp-ironed their speech, but Jemubhai had barely opened his mouth for whole years and his English still had the rhythm and the form of Gujerati.

But ere he alighted at Netherby gate

The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

For a laggard in love and a dastard in war

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar. . . .

When he looked up, he saw they were all chuckling.

While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,
And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume. . . .

________

The judge shook himself. "Damn fool," he said out loud, pushed his chair back, stood up, brought his fork and knife down in devastating judgment upon himself and left the table. His strength, that mental steel, was weakening. His memory seemed triggered by the tiniest thing—Gyan’s unease, his reciting that absurd poem. . . . Soon all the judge had worked so hard to separate would soften and envelop him in its nightmare, and the barrier between this life and eternity would in the end, no doubt, be just another such failing construct.

Mutt followed him to his room. As he sat brooding, she leaned against him with the ease that children have when leaning against their parents.

________

"I am sorry," said Sai, hot with shame. "It’s impossible to tell how my grandfather will behave."

Gyan didn’t appear to hear her.

"Sorry," said Sai again, mortified, but again he didn’t appear to have heard.

For the first time his eyes rested directly upon her as if he were eating her alive in an orgy of the imagination—aha! At last the proof.

________

The cook cleared away the dirty dishes and shut the quarter cup of leftover peas into the cupboard. The cupboard looked like a coop, with its wire netting around a wooden frame and its four feet standing in bowls of water to deter ants and other vermin. He topped the water in these bowls from one of the buckets placed under the leaks, emptied the other buckets out of the window, and returned them to their appointed spots.

He made up the bed in an extra room, which was actually filled with rubbish but contained a bed placed in the very center, and he fixed pale virginal candles into saucers for Sai and Gyan to take to their rooms. "Your bed is ready for you,
masterji,
"
he said and sniffed: Was there a strange atmosphere in the room?

But Sai and Gyan seemed immersed in the newspapers again, and he confused their sense of ripening anticipation with his own, because that morning, two letters from Biju had arrived in the post. They were lying under an empty tuna fish tin by his bed, saved for the end of the day, and all evening he’d been savoring the thought of them. He rolled up his pants and departed with an umbrella as it had begun to pour again.

________

In the drawing room, sitting with the newspapers, Sai and Gyan were left alone, quite alone, for the first time.

Kiki De Costa’s recipe column: marvels with potatoes. Tasty treat with meat.

Noodles with doodles and doodles of sauce and oodles and oodles of cheese.

Fleur Hussein’s beauty tips.

The handsome baldy competition at the Calcutta Gymkhana Club had given out prizes to Mr. Sunshine, Mr. Moonshine, and Mr. Will Shine.

Their eyes read on industriously, but their thoughts didn’t cleave to such discipline, and finally Gyan, unable to bear this any longer, this tightrope tension between them, put down his paper with a crashing sound, turned abruptly toward her, and blurted:

"Do you put oil in your hair?"

"No," she said, startled. "I never do."

After a bit of silence, "Why?" she asked. Was there something wrong with her hair?

"I can’t hear you—the rain is so loud," he said, moving closer. "What?"

"Why?"

"It looks so shiny I thought you might."

"No."

"It looks very soft," he observed. "Do you wash it with shampoo?"

"Yes."

"What kind?"

"Sunsilk."

Oh, the unbearable intimacy of brand names, the boldness of the questions.

"What soap?" Lux.

"Beauty bar of the film stars?"

But they were too scared to laugh.

More silence.

"You?"

"Whatever is in the house. It doesn’t matter for boys."

He couldn’t admit that his mother bought the homemade brown soap that was sold in large rectangles in the market, blocks sliced off and sold cheap.

The questions grew worse: "Let me see your hands. They are so small."

"Are they?"

"Yes." He held his own out by hers. "See?"

Fingers. Nails.

"
Hm.
What long fingers. Little nails. But look, you bite them."

He weighed her hand.

"Light as a sparrow. The bones must be hollow."

These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the deliberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.

________

Rainy season beetles flew by in many colors. From each hole in the floor came a mouse as if tailored for size, tiny mice from the tiny holes, big mice from big holes, and the termites came teeming forth from the furniture, so many of them that when you looked, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, all seemed to be wobbling.

But Gyan did not see them. His gaze itself was a mouse; it disappeared into the belladonna sleeve of Sai’s kimono and spotted her elbow.

"A sharp point," he commented. "You could do some harm with that."

Arms they measured and legs. Catching sight of her foot—Let me see.

He took off his own shoe and then the threadbare sock of which he immediately felt ashamed and which he bundled into his pocket. They examined the nakedness side by side of those little tubers in the semidark.

Her eyes, he noted, were extraordinarily glamorous: huge, wet, full of theater, capturing all the light in the room.

But he couldn’t bring himself to mention them; it was easier to stick to what moved him less, to a more scientific approach.

With the palm of his hand, he cupped her head. . . .

"Is it flat or is it curved?"

With an unsteady finger, he embarked on the arch of an eyebrow. . . .

Oh, he could not believe his bravery; it drove him on and wouldn’t heed the fear that called him back; he was brave despite himself. His finger moved down her nose.

The sound of water came from every direction: fat upon the window, a popgun off the bananas and the tin roof, lighter and messier on the patio stones, a low-throated gurgle in the gutter that surrounded the house like a moat. There was the sound of the
jhora
rushing and of water drowning itself in this water, of drainpipes disgorging into the rain barrels, the rain barrels brimming over, little sipping sounds from the moss.

The growing impossibility of speech would make other intimacies easier.

As his finger was about to leap from the tip of Sai’s nose to her perfectly arched lips—

Up she jumped.

"
Owwaaa,
"
she shouted.

He thought it was a mouse.

It wasn’t. She was used to mice.

"
Oooph,
" she said. She couldn’t stand a moment longer, that peppery feeling of being traced by another’s finger and all that green romance burgeoning forth.

Wiping her face bluntly with her hands, she shook out her kimono, as if to rid the evening of this trembling delicacy.

"Well, good night," she said formally, taking Gyan by surprise. Placing her feet one before the other with the deliberateness of a drunk, she made her way toward the door, reached the rectangle of the doorway, and dove into the merciful dark with Gyan’s bereft eyes following her.

She didn’t return.

But the mice did. It was quite extraordinary how tenacious they were—

you’d think their fragile hearts would shatter, but their timidity was misleading; their fear was without memory.

________

In his bed slung like a hammock on broken springs, leaks all around, the judge lay pinned by layers of fusty blankets. His underwear lay on top of the lamp to dry and his watch sat below so the mist under the dial might lift—a sad state for the civilized man. The air was spiked with pinpricks

of moisture that made it feel as if it were raining indoors as well, yet this didn’t freshen it. It bore down thick enough to smother, an odiferous yeasty mix of spore and fungi, wood smoke and mice droppings, kerosene and chill. He got out of bed to search for a pair of socks and a woolen skull cap. As he was putting them on, he saw the unmistakable silhouette of a scorpion, bold against the dingy wall, and lurched at it with a fly swatter, but it sensed his presence, bristled, the tail went up, and it began to run. It vanished into the crack between the bottom of the wall and the floorboard. "Drat!" he said. His false teeth leered at him with a skeleton grin from a jar of water. He rummaged about for a Calmpose and swallowed it with a gulp of water from the top of the jar, so cold, always cold—

the water in Kalimpong was directly from Himalayan snow—and it transformed his gums to pure pain. "Good night, my darling mutton chop," he said to Mutt when he could manipulate his tongue again. She was already dreaming, but oh the weakness of an aged man, even the pill could not chase the unpleasant thoughts unleashed at dinner back into their holes.