The Inheritance of Loss (24 page)

For a moment all the different pretences he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him—all these things joined together to form a single truth.

The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.

And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor.

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk—

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement take the harshest route possible.

Twenty-seven

Moody and restless,
Gyan arrived at Cho Oyu the next day, upset at having to undertake that long walk in the cold for the small amount of money the judge paid him. It maddened him that people lived here in this enormous house and property, taking hot baths, sleeping alone in spacious rooms, and he suddenly remembered the cutlets and boiled peas dinner with Sai and the judge, the judge’s

"Common sense seems to have evaded you, young man."

"How late you are," said Sai when she saw him, and he was angry in a different way from the night before when, indignant in war paint, he had stuck his bottom out one way and his chest the other way and discovered a self-righteous posturing, a new way of talking. This was a petty anger that pulled him back, curtailed his spirit, made him feel peevish. The annoyance was different from any he’d felt with Sai before.

________

To cheer him up, Sai told him of the Christmas party—

You know, three times we tried to light the soup ladle full of brandy and pour it over the pudding—

Gyan ignored her, opened up the physics book. Oh, if only she would shut up—that bright silliness he had not noticed in her before—he was too irritated to stand it.

She turned reluctantly to its pages; it was a long time since they had properly looked at physics.

"If two objects, one weighing . . . and the other weighing . . . are dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa, at which time and at what speed will they fall to the ground?"

"You’re in an unpleasant mood," she said and yawned with luxury to indicate other, better, options.

He pretended he hadn’t heard her.

Then he yawned, too, despite himself.

She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward.

Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.

She did—

He did.

"Bored by physics?" she asked, encouraged by the apparent reconciliation.

"No. Not at all."

"Why are you yawning then?"

"BECAUSE I’M BORED TO DEATH BY YOU, THAT’S WHY."

Stunned silence.

"I am not interested in Christmas!" he shouted. "Why do you celebrate Christmas? You’re Hindus and you don’t celebrate Id or Guru Nanak’s birthday or even Durga Puja or Dussehra or Tibetan New Year."

She considered it: Why? She always had. Not because of the convent, her hatred of it was so deep, but. . . .

"You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It’s because of people like you we never get anywhere."

Stung by his unexpected venom, "No," she said, "that’s not it."

"Then what?"

"If I want to celebrate Christmas, I will, and if I don’t want to celebrate Diwali then I won’t. Nothing wrong in a bit of fun and Christmas is an Indian holiday as much as any other."

This tagged on to make him feel antisecular and anti-Gandhian.

"Do what you will," he shrugged, "it’s nothing to me—it only shows to the whole world that you are a FOOL."

He uttered the words deliberately, eager to see that hurt cross her face.

"Well, why don’t you go home then, if I’m such a fool? What
is
the point of teaching me?"

"All right, I will. You’re right. What
is
the point of teaching you? It’s clear all you want to do is copy. Can’t think for yourself.
Copycat, copycat.
Don’t you know, these people you copy like a copycat, THEY DON’T WANT YOU!!!!"

"I’m not copying anyone!"

"You think you are the original person celebrating Christmas? Come on, don’t tell me you’re as stupid as that?"

"Well, if you’re so clever," she said, "how come you can’t even find a proper job? Fail, fail, fail. Every single interview."

"
Because of people like you!
"

"Oh, because of me. . . and you’re telling me that I am stupid? Who’s stupid?

Go put it before a judge and we’ll see who he says is the stupid one."

She picked up her glass and the water in it sloshed over before it reached her lips, she was trembling so.

Twenty-eight

The judge was thinking
of his hate.

________

When he returned from England, he had been greeted by the same geriatric brass band that had seen him off on his journey, but it was invisible this time because of the billows of smoke and dust raised by the fireworks that had been thrown on the railway track, exploding as the train drew into the station. Whistles and whoops went up from the two thousand people who had gathered to witness this historic event, the first son of the community to join the ICS. He was smothered with garlands; flower petals settled on the brim of his hat. And there, standing in a knife’s width of shade at the end of the station, was someone else who looked vaguely familiar; not a sister, not a cousin; it was Nimi, his wife, who had been returned from her father’s house, where she’d spent the intervening time. Except for exchanges with landladies and "How do you do?" in shops, he hadn’t spoken to a woman in years.

She came toward him with a garland. They didn’t look at each other as she lifted it over his head. Up went his eyes, down went hers. He was twenty-five, she was nineteen.

"So shy, so shy"—the delighted crowd was sure of having witnessed the terror of love. (What amazing hope the audience has—always refusing to believe the nonexistence of romance.)

What would he do with her?

He had forgotten he had a wife.

Well, he knew, of course, but she had drifted away like everything in his past, a series of facts that no longer had relevance. This one, though, it would follow him as wives in those days followed their husbands.

________

All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart—how lovely she must have appeared to him. . . . He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. She rummaged in the toilet case Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge and found a jar of green salve, a hairbrush and comb set in silver, a pom-pom with a loop of silk in a round container of powder—and, coming at her exquisitely, her first whiff of lavender. The crisp light scents that rose from his new possessions were all of a foreign place. Piphit smelled of dust and once in a while there was the startling fragrance of rain. Piphit’s perfumes were intoxicants, rich and dizzying. She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.

"Shorts!" said a young uncle.

"Underwear," the ladies insisted.

Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?

She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed.

________

The afternoons in Piphit lasted so long, the Patels were resting, trying to efface the fear that time would never move again, all except for Jemubhai who had grown unused to such surrender.

He sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner—
a foreigner
—every bit of him screamed. Only his digestion dissented and told him he was home: squatting painfully in that cramped outhouse, his gentleman’s knees creaking, swearing "Bloody hell," he felt his digestion work as super efficient as—as
Western transportation.

Idly deciding to check on his belongings, he uncovered the loss.

"Where is my powder puff?" shouted Jemubhai at the Patel ladies spread-eagled on mats in the veranda shade.

"What?" they asked, raising their heads, shielding their eyes against the detonating light.

"Someone has been through my belongings."

Actually, by then, almost everyone in the house had been through his belongings and they failed to see why this was a problem. His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable; why did he mind and how did this coincide with stealing?

"But what is missing?"

"My puff."

"What is that?"

He tried to explain.

"But what on earth is it for,
baba?
"
They looked at him bemused.

"Pink and white what? That you put on your skin? Why?"

"Pink?"

His mother began to worry. "Is anything wrong with your skin?" she asked, concerned.

But, "Ha ha," laughed a sister who was listening carefully, "we sent you abroad to become a gentleman, and instead you have become a lady!"

The excitement spread, and from farther houses in the Patel clan, relatives began to arrive. The
kakas kakis masas masis phuas phois.
Children horrible all together, a clump that could not be separated child into child, for they resembled a composite monster with multiple arms and legs that came cartwheeling in, raising the dust, screaming; hundreds of hands were held over the monster’s hundreds of giggling mouths. Who had stolen what?

"His powder puff is missing," said Jemubhai’s father, who seemed to think this thing must be crucial to his son’s work.

They all said
powder puff
in
English, for, naturally, there was no Gujarati word for this invention. Their very accents rankled the judge. "Pauvdar Paaf,"

sounding like some Parsi dish.

They pulled out all the items in the cupboard, turned them upside down, exclaiming over and examining each one, his suits, his underwear, his opera glasses, through which he had viewed the tutus of ballerinas dancing a delicate sideways scuttle in
Giselle,
unfolding in pastry patterns and cake decorations.

But no, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the kitchen either, or in the veranda. It wasn’t anywhere.

His mother questioned the naughtiest cousins.

"Did you see it?"

"What?"

"The paudar paaf."

"What is a paudur poff? Paudaar paaf?"

"To protect the skin."

"To protect the skin from what?"

And the entire embarrassment of explaining had to be gone through again.

"Pink and white? What for?"

________

"What the hell do all of you know?" said Jemubhai. Thieving, ignorant people.

He had thought they would have the good taste to be impressed and even a little awed by what he had become, but instead they were laughing.

"You must know something," the judge finally accused Nimi.

"I haven’t seen it. Why should I pay it any attention?" she said. Her heart pounded beneath her two lavender-powdered pink and white breasts, beneath her husband’s England-returned puff.

He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty, dismissed it. Once it had been a terrifying beckoning thing that had made his heart turn to water, but now it seemed beside the point. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one.

Just then, as he was turning away, he saw it—

Sticking out between the hooks, a few thin and tender filaments.

"You filth!" he shouted and, from between her sad breasts, pulled forth, like a ridiculous flower, or else a bursting ruined heart—

His dandy puff.

________

"Break the bed," shouted an ancient aunt, hearing the scuffle inside the room, and they all began to giggle and nod in satisfaction.

"Now she will settle down," said another medicine-voiced hag. "That girl has too much spirit."

Inside the room, specially vacated of all who normally slept there, Jemubhai, his face apuff with anger, grabbed at his wife.

She slipped from his grasp and his anger flew.

She who had stolen. She who had made them
laugh at him.
This illiterate village girl. He grabbed at her again.

She was running and he was chasing her.

She ran to the door.

But the door was locked.

She tried again.

It didn’t budge.

The aunt had locked it—just in case. All the stories of brides trying to escape—now and then even an account of a husband sidling out.

Shameshameshameshame to the family.

He came at her with a look of murder.

She ran for the window.

He blocked her.

Without thinking, she picked up the powder container from the table near the door and threw it at his face, terrified of what she was doing, but the terror had joined irreversibly with the gesture, and in a second it was done—