The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [126]
“Going back?” he continued, “don’t be completely crazy—all those relatives asking for money! Even strangers are asking for money—maybe they just try, you know, maybe you shit and dollars come out. I’m telling you, my friend, they will get you; if they won’t, the robbers will; if the robbers won’t, some disease will; if not some disease, the heat will; if not the heat, those mad Sardarjis will bring down your plane before you even arrive.”
While Biju had been away, Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by the Sikhs in the name of their homeland; Rajiv Gandhi had taken over—
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“Only a matter of time. Someone will get him, too,” said Mr. Kakkar.
But Biju said: “I have to go. My father….”
“Ah, soft feelings, they will get you nowhere. My father, so long as he was alive, he always told me, ‘Good, stay away, don’t come back to this shitty place.’”
Mr. Kakkar gnashed ice cubes with his teeth, lifting them from his Diet Coke with the help of his ballpoint pen, which had a plane modeled at its rear end.
Nevertheless, he sold Biju a ticket on Gulf Air: New York—London-Frankfurt—Abu Dhabi—Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta. The cheapest they could find. It was like a bus in the sky.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Then he grew more thoughtful. “You know,” he said, “America is in the process of buying up the world. Go back, you’ll find they own the businesses. One day, you’ll be working for an American company there or here. Think of your children. If you stay here, your son will earn a hundred thousand dollars for the same company he could be working for in India but making one thousand dollars. How, then, can you send your children to the best international college? You are making a big mistake. Still a world, my friend, where one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king. You want your son to be on this side or that side?
“Ah,” he said, waggling his pen, “the minute you arrive, Biju, you will start to think of how to get the bloody hell out.”
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But Biju went to Jackson Heights, and from a store like a hangar he bought: a TV and VCR, a camera, sunglasses, baseball caps that said “NYC” and “Yankees” and “I Like My Beer Cold and My Women Hot,” a digital two-time clock and radio and cassette player, waterproof watches, calculators, an electric razor, a toaster oven, a winter coat, nylon sweaters, polyester-cotton-blend shirts, a polyurethane quilt, a rain jacket, a folding umbrella, suede shoes, a leather wallet, a Japanese-made heater, a set of sharp knives, a hot water bottle, Fixodent, saffron, cashews and raisins, aftershave, T-shirts with “I love NY” and “Born in the USA” picked out in shiny stones, whiskey, and, after a moment of hesitation, a bottle of perfume called Windsong… who was that for? He didn’t yet know her face.
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While he shopped, he remembered that as a child he’d been part of a pack of boys who played so hard they’d come home exhausted. They’d thrown stones and slippers into trees to bring down b er and jamun; chased lizards until their tails fell off and tossed the leaping bits on little girls; they’d stolen chooran pellets from the shop, that looked like goat droppings but were so, so tasty with a bit of sandy crunch. He remembered bathing in the river, feeling his body against the cool firm river muscle, and sitting on a rock with his feet in the water, gnawing on sugarcane, working out the sweetness no matter how his jaw hurt, completely absorbed. He had played cricket cricket cricket. Biju found himself smiling at the memory of the time the whole village had watched India win a test match against Australia on a television running off a car battery because the transformer