The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [117]
You’re Nap-O-lean Brandy,
You’re the tops
You’re Ma-HAT-ma Gandy!
But her laugh was only another confectionary concocted for his sake, a pretense that their friendship was what it had been.
He had anticipated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art; the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than any simple bovine happiness. Years ago, as a student at Oxford, Uncle Potty had considered himself a lover of love. He looked up the word in the card catalog and brought back armfuls of books; he smoked cheroots, drank port and Madeira, read everything he could from psychology to science to pornography to poetry, Egyptian love letters, ninth century Tamilian erotica…. There was the joy of the chase and the joy of the fleeing, and when he set off on practical research trips, he had found pure love in the most sordid of spots, the wrong sides of town where the police didn’t venture; medieval, tunneling streets so narrow you had to pass crabwise past the drug dealers and the whores; where, at night, men he never saw ladled their tongues into his mouth. There had been Louis and André, Guillermo, Rassoul, Johan and Yoshi, and “Humberto Santamaria,” he had once shouted atop a mountain in the Lake District for an elegant amour. Some loved him while he didn’t love them; others he loved madly, deeply, and they, they didn’t love him at all. But Sai was up too close to appreciate his perspective.
Uncle Potty scratched his feet so the dead skin flew: “Once you start scratching, my dear, you cannot stop….”
______
When Sai next went to Mon Ami, they laughed and guessed, glad for a bit of fun in the midst of trouble: “Who is the lucky boy? Tall and fair and handsome?”
“And rich?” Noni said. “Let’s hope he’s rich?”
______
Fortunately, though, a single bit of luck fell on Sai and shrouded this fall of her dignity. Her rescuer was the common domestic cold. Heroically, it caught her common domestic grief in the nick of time, muddled the origin of her streaming eyes and sore throat, shuffled the symptoms of virus and disgraceful fall from the tightrope of splendrous love. Shielded thus from simple diagnosis, she enveloped her face in the copious folds of a man’s handkerchief. “A cold!” Whonk whonk. One part common cold to nine parts common grief. Lola and Noni prepared toddies of honey, lemon, rum, hot water.
“Sai, you look terrible, terrible.”
Her eyes were red and raw, spilling over. Pressure weighed downward like a gestapo boot on her brain.
Back in Cho Oyu, the cook rummaged in the medicine drawer for the Coldrin and the Vicks Vaporub. He found a silk scarf for her throat, and Sai hung in the hot and cold excitement of Vicks, buffeted by arctic winds of eucalyptus, still feeling the perpetual gnawing urgency and intensity of waiting, of hope living on without sustenance. It must feed on itself. It would drive her mad.
Was her affection for Gyan just a habit? How on earth could she think of someone so much?
The more she did, the more she did, the more she did.
Summoning her strength, she spoke directly to her heart. “Oh why must you behave so badly?”
But it wouldn’t soften its stance.
There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to—everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life.
The giant squid, the last dodo.
One morning, her cold on the wane, she realized her excuse would no longer hold. As curfew was lifted, in order to salvage her dignity, Sai started out on the undignified mission of searching for Gyan.
Forty
He wasn’t anywhere in the market, not in the music and video shop where Rinzy and Tin Tin Dorji rented out exhausted tapes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies.
“No, haven’t seen him,” said Dawa Bhutia sticking his head out from the steam of cabbage cooking in the Chin Li Restaurant kitchen.
“Isn’t in yet,” said Tashi at the Snow Lion, who had closed down the travel side of the business, what with the lack of tourists,