The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [115]
Her lips stretched out and her mouth was enormous with the extent of her shame.
“Look at what you’ve left me to! Do you know how I have suffered, do you have any idea??? Where are you?! You and your piddling little life, and look what I have to deal with, just look. I don’t even have my decency.”
She held on to her ridiculed old woman’s breasts and shook them. How could she and her sister leave now? If they left, the army would move in. Or squatters claiming squatters’ rights would instigate a court case. They would lose the home that the two of them, Joydeep and Lola, had bought with such false ideas of retirement, sweet peas and mist, cat and books.
______
The silence rang in the pipes, reached an unbearable pitch, subsided, rose. She wrenched the tap open—not a drop fell—then she twisted the tap viciously shut as if wringing its neck.
Bastard! Never a chink in his certainty, his poise. Never the brains to buy a house in Calcutta—no. No. Not that Joydeep, with his romantic notions of countryside living; with his Wellington boots, binoculars, and bird-watching book; with his Yeats, his Rilke (in German), his Mandelstam (in Russian); in the purply mountains of Kalimpong with his bloody Talisker and his Burberry socks (memento from Scottish holiday of golf + smoked salmon + distillery). Joydeep with his old-fashioned gentleman’s charm. He had always walked as if the world were firm beneath his feet and he never suffered a doubt. He was a cartoon. “You were a fool,” she screamed at him.
But then,
in a moment,
quite suddenly,
she went weak.
“Your eyes are lovely, dark and deep.”
He used to kiss those glistening orbs when he departed to work on his files.
“But I have promises to keep,”
First one eye then the other—
“And miles to go before I sleep—”
“And miles to go before you sleep?”
She would make a duet—
“And miles to go before I sleep.”
He would echo.
To the end, and even beyond, he could resurrect the wit that had fired her love when they were not much more than children, after all. “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” he had sung to her at their wedding reception, and then they had honeymooned in Europe.
______
Noni at the door: “Are you all right?”
Loudly, Lola said: “No, I’m not all right. Why don’t you go away?”
“Why don’t you open the door?”
“Go away I tell you, go join the boys in the street whom you are always defending.”
“Lola, open the door.”
“No.”
“Open it.”
“Bugger off,” said Lola.
“Lola?” said Noni. “I made you a rum and nimboo.”
“ Bug off,” Lola said.
“Well, sister, in any such situation atrocities are committed under cover of a legitimate cause—”
“Bosh.”
“But if we forget there is some truth to what they are saying the problems will keep coming. Gorkhas have been used—”
“Cock and bull,” she said crudely. “These people aren’t good people. Gorkhas are mercenaries, that’s what they are. Pay them and they are loyal to whatever. There’s no principle involved, Noni. And what is this with the GOrkha? It was always GUrkha. AND then there aren’t even many Gurkhas here—some of course, and some newly retired ones coming in from Hong Kong, but otherwise they are only sherpas, coolies—”
“Anglicized spelling. They’re just changing it to—”
“My left toe! Why are they writing in English if they want to have Nepali taught in schools? These people are just louts, and that’s the truth, Noni, you know it, we all know it.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Then go and join them like I said. Leave your house, leave your books and your Ovaltine and your long Johns. HA! I’d like to see you, you liar and fake.”
“I will.”
“ Go on, then. And after you are done with that, go end up in hell!”
“Hell?” Noni said, rattling the door on the other side of the bathroom door. “Why hell?”
“Because you’ll be committing CRIME, that’s why!” screeched Lola.
______
Noni returned to sit on the dragon cushions on the sofa. Oh, they had been wrong. The real place had evaded them. The two of them had been