The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [125]
But what was the false name then? Biju possessed no name at all for this black water. It was not his history.
And then came fucking Moby Dick. The river full of dead fucking whales. The fucking carcasses were hauled up the river, fucking pulverized in the factories.
“Oil, you know,” he said with intense internal frustration. “It’s always been fucking oil. And underwear.”
Eyebrows and saliva spray.
“Corsets!!” he said suddenly.
“No speak English,” said Biju through a tunnel made from his hands and began to walk quickly away.
______
“No speak English,” he always said to mad people starting up conversations in this city, to the irascible ornery bums and Bible folk dressed in ornate bargain-basement suits and hats, waiting on street corners, getting their moral and physical exercise chasing after infidels. Devotees of the Church of Christ and the Holy Zion, born-agains handing out pamphlets that gave him up-to-date million-dollar news of the devil’s activities: “SATAN IS WAITING TO BURN YOU ALIVE,” screamed the headlines. “YOU DON’T HAVE A MOMENT TO LOSE.”
Once, he had been accosted by a Lithuanian Hare Krishna, New York via Vilnius and Vrindavan. A reproachful veggie look accompanied the brochure to the former beef cook. Biju looked at him and had to avert his gaze as if from an obscenity. In its own way it was like a prostitute—it showed too much. The book in his hand had a cover of Krishna on the battlefield in lurid colors, the same ones used in movie posters.
What was India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?
What was he doing and why?
It hadn’t even been a question before he left. Of course, if you could go, you went. And if you went, of course, if you could, you stayed….
The park lamps had come on by the time Biju climbed the urine-stinking stone steps to the street, and the lights were dissolving in the gloaming—to look at them made everyone feel like they were crying. In front of the stage-set night-light of the city, he saw the homeless man walking stiffly, as if on artificial legs, crossing with his grocery cart of rubbish to his plastic igloo where he would wait out the storm.
Biju walked back to the Gandhi Café, thinking he was emptying out. Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air. And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity—oh the tediousness of it. Clumsy in America, a giant-sized midget, a bigfat-sized helping of small…. Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.
And if he continued on here? What would happen? Would he, like Harish-Harry, manufacture a fake version of himself and using what he had created as clues, understand himself backward? Life was not about life for him anymore, and death—what would even that mean to him? It would have nothing to do with death.
______
The proprietor of the newly opened Shangri-la Travel in the same block as the Gandhi Café ordered a “nonveg” lunch special each day: lamb curry, dal, vegetable pilau, and kheer. Mr. Kakkar was his name.
“Arre, Biju,” he greeted him, for Biju had just been given the task of delivering his food. “Again you saved me from my wife’s cooking, ha ha. We will throw her food down the toilet!”
“Why don’t you give it to that dirty bum,” said Biju trying to help the homeless man and insult him at the same time.
“Oh no,” he said, “bitch-witch, she is the type, she will coming walking down the road on a surprise visit and catch him eating it, that kind of coincidence is always happening to her, and that will be the end of yours truly.”
A minute later, “You are sure you want to go back??” he