The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [123]
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She walked home very slowly, sick, sick. The mist was thickening, smoke adding to the dusk and the vapor. The smell of potatoes cooking came from busti houses all along the way, a smell that would surely connote comfort to souls across the world, but that couldn’t comfort her. She felt none of the pity she’d felt earlier while contemplating this scene; even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her…
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When she arrived home she saw two people on the veranda talking to the cook and the judge.
A woman was pleading: “Who do you go to when you’re poor? People like us have to suffer. All the goondas come out and the police go hand in hand with them.”
“Who are you?”
It was the wife, begging for mercy, of the drunk the police had caught and questioned about the gun robbery and on whom they had practiced their new torture strategy. They, at Cho Oyu, had forgotten about this man, but the man’s wife had traced the connection and she’d come with her father-in-law to see the judge, walking half a day from a village across the Relli River.
“What will we do?” she begged. “We are not even Nepalis, we are Lepchas…. He was innocent and the police have blinded him. He knew nothing about you, he was in the market as usual, everyone knows,” sobbed the wife, looking to her father-in-law for help.
What use is it for a woman to protest and cry?
But her father-in-law was too scared. He said nothing at all, just stood there; his expression couldn’t be told apart from his wrinkles. His son, when he was not drinking, had worked to rebuild the roads in the district, filling stones from the Teesta riverbed into contractors’ trucks, unloading them at building sites, clearing landslides that tumbled over and over in the same eternal motion as the river coming down. His son’s wife worked on the highways as well, but no work was being done now that the GNLF had closed down the roads.
“Why come to me? Go to the police. They are the ones who caught your husband, not I. It’s not my fault,” said the judge, alarmed into eloquence. “You had better leave from here.”
“You can’t send this woman to the police,” said the cook, “they’ll probably assault her.”
The woman looked raped and beaten already. Her clothes were very soiled and her teeth resembled a row of rotten corn kernels, some of them missing, some blackened, and she was quite bent from carrying stone—common sight, this sort of woman in the hills. Some foreigners had actually photographed her as proof of horror…
“George!…! George!” said a shocked wife to her husband with a camera.
And he had leaned out of the car: Click! “Got it, babe…!”
“Help us,” she begged.
The judge seemed suddenly to remember his personality, stiffened, and said nothing, set his mouth in a mask, would look neither left nor right, went back to his game of chess.
In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. He was embarrassed by the attention that was being drawn to his humiliation yet again, the setting of the table with the tablecloth, the laughter, the robbery of the rifles that had never contributed to a fast-forward death ballet come duck season.
Now, typically, the mess had grown.
This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority. He had done his duty as far as it was any citizen’s duty to report problems to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a bit and