The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [109]
“HELLO? HELLO?”
“PITAJI, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
They retreated from each other again—
Beep beep honk honk trr butt ock, the phone went dead and they were stranded in the distance that lay between them.
“HELLO? HELLO?”—into the rictus of the receiver.
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” they echoed back to themselves.
The cook put down the phone, trembling.
“He’ll ring again,” said the watchman.
But the phone remained mute.
Outside, the frogs said tttt tttt, as if they had swallowed the dial tone.
He tried to shake the gadget back into life, wishing for at least the customary words of good-bye. After all, even on clichéd phrases, you could hoist true emotion.
“There must be a problem with the line.”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
As always, the problem with the line.
“He will come back fat. I have heard they all come back fat,” said the watchman’s sister-in-law abruptly, trying to comfort the cook.
______
The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced.
He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other’s lives except for the hope that they would be relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual Fuck-Shit Cock Dick Pussy Love War, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse—the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart.
If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.
______
They all grow fat there….
The cook knew about them all growing fat there. It was one of the things everyone knew:
“Are you growing fat, beta, like everyone in America?” he had written to his son long ago, in a departure from their usual format.
“Yes, growing fat,” Biju had written back, “when you see me next, I will be myself times ten.” He laughed as he wrote the lines and the cook laughed very hard when he read them; he lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air like a cockroach.
“Yes,” Biju had said, “I am growing fat—ten times myself,” and was shocked when he went to the ninety-nine-cent store and found he had to buy his shirts at the children’s rack. The shopkeeper, a man from Lahore, sat on a high ladder in the center and watched to make sure nobody stole anything, and his eyes clutched onto Biju as soon as he entered, making Biju sting with a feeling of culpability. But he had done nothing. Everyone could tell that he had, though, for his guilty look was there for all to see.
He missed Saeed. He wanted to look, once again, if briefly, at the country through the sanguine lens of his eyes.
______
Biju returned to the Gandhi Café where they had not noticed his absence.
“You all come and watch the cricket match, OK?” Harish-Harry had brought in a photo album to show his staff pictures of the New Jersey condominium for which he had just made a down payment. He had already mounted a giant satellite dish smack-bang in the middle of the front lawn despite the fact that the management of this select community insisted it be placed subtly to the side like a discreet ear; he had prevailed in his endeavor, having cleverly cried, “Racism! Racism! I am not getting good reception