The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [120]
She saw his thoughts recast his eyes and mouth, remembered that he had abandoned her, not the other way around, and she was bitterly angry.
Dirty hypocrite.
Pretending one thing, living another. Nothing but lies through and through.
Farther away, she could see an outhouse made of four bamboo poles and threadbare sacking over an alarming drop.
Perhaps he’d hoped he’d wheedle his way into Cho Oyu; maybe his whole family could move in there, if he played his cards right, and use those capacious bathrooms, each as big as his entire home. Cho Oyu might be crumbling, but it had once been majestic; it had its past if not its future, and that might be enough—a gate of black lace, the name worked into imposing stone pillars with mossy cannonballs on top as in To the Manor Born.
The sister was looking at them curiously.
“What do you want?” Gyan’s refrigerated voice repeated.
To think that she had come to call him momo, cosy scoop of minced mutton in charming dimpled wrapping, that she had come to climb into his lap, ask why he hadn’t forgiven her as before at the Christmastime fight, but she wouldn’t satisfy him by admitting any vulnerability now.
Instead she said she had come about Father Booty.
______
Her outrage at the injustice done to her friend returned to her in a rush. Dear Father Booty, who had been forced onto a jeep leaving for the Siliguri airport, having lost everything but his memories: the time he had given a lecture on how dairies might create a mini Swiss-style economy in Kalimpong and had been greeted with a standing ovation; his poem on a cow in the Illustrated Weekly; and “Nothing so sweet, dear friends”—evenings on Uncle Potty’s veranda, when the music ended on a drawn-out note of honey, and the moon—it was whole—sailed upward, an alchemist’s marvel of illuminated cheese. How fast the earth spun! It was all over.
How was he to live where, he despaired, he would be snipped into an elderly person supported by the state and packaged in a very clean box alongside other aged people with supposedly everything in common with him—
He had left his friend Uncle Potty in mourning, drinking, the world breaking in waves about him; chair going one way, the table and stove the other; the whole kitchen rocking back and forth.
______
“Look at what you people are doing,” she accused Gyan.
“What am I doing? What have I to do with Father Booty?”
“Everything.”
“Well, if that’s what it will take, so be it. Should Nepalis sit miserably for another two hundred years so the police don’t have an excuse to throw out Father Booty?” He came out of the gate, marched her away from his house.
“Yes,” said Sai. “You, for one, are better gone than Father Booty. Think you’re wonderful… well, you know what? You’re not! He’s done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside.”
Gyan became seriously angry.
“In fact, good thing they kicked him out,” he said, “who needs Swiss people here? For how many thousands of years have we produced our own milk?”
“Why don’t you then? Why don’t you make cheese?”
“We live in India, thank you very much. We don’t want any cheese and the last thing we need is chocolate cigars.”
“Ah, that same old thing again.” She wished to claw him. She wanted to pluck out his eyes and kick him black-and-blue. The taste of blood, salty, dark—she could anticipate its flavor. “Civilization is important,” she said.
“That is not civilization, you fool. Schools and hospitals. That is.”
You fool—how dare he!
“But you have to set a standard. Or else everything will be brought down to the same low level as you and your family.”
She was shocked at herself as she spoke, but in this moment she was willing to believe anything that lay on the other side of Gyan.
“I see, Swiss luxury sets a standard, chocolates and watches set the standard…. Yes, soothe your guilty conscience, stupid little girl, and hope someone doesn’t burn down your house for the simple reason that you are a fool.”
Again he was calling her fool—
“ If this is what you’ve been thinking, why didn’t you boycott the cheese instead