The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [133]
Startled, she yelped, but immediately they clamped her muzzle with hands strong from physical labor.
The judge was having his bucket bath, the cook was churning butter, Sai was in her bed whispering venomously, “Gyan, you bastard, you think I’m going to cry over you?” They didn’t see or hear a thing.
The trespassers lifted Mutt up, bound her with rope, and put her in a sack. The man slung the sack over his shoulders, and they carried her through town without drawing any attention to themselves. They walked around the mountainside, then all the way down and across the Relli and over three ridges that billowed like blue-green ocean, to a small hamlet that was far from any paved road.
“You don’t think they’ll find us?” the father asked his daughter-in-law.
“They won’t walk so far and they can’t drive here. They don’t know our names, they don’t know our village, they asked us no questions.”
She was right.
Even the police hadn’t bothered to find out the name of the man they had beaten and blinded. They would hardly bother to look for a dog.
Mutt was healthy, they noticed, when they pinched her through the sack; fat and ready to make them a little money. “Or maybe we can use her to breed and then we can sell the puppies….” (They didn’t know, of course, that she had been fixed long ago by a visiting vet when she was beginning to attract love from all kinds of scurrilous loafers on the hillside, wheedling strays, conniving gentleman dogs….)
“Should we take her out of the sack?”
“Better leave her in for now. She’ll just start barking….”
Forty-five
Like a failing bus laboring through the sky, the Gulf Air plane seemed barely to be managing, though most of the passengers felt immediately comfortable with this lack of oomph. Oh yes, they were going home, knees cramped, ceiling level at their heads, sweat-gluey, fate-resigned, but happy.
The first stop was Heathrow and they crawled out at the far end that hadn’t been renovated for the new days of globalization but lingered back in the old age of colonization.
All the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European—North American travelers came and went, making those brisk no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named The Milano.
Frankfurt. The planeload spent the night in a similar quarantined zone, a thousand souls stretched out as if occupying a morgue, even their faces covered to block the buzzing tube lights.
Like a bus, New York-London-Frankfurt-Abu Dhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta, the plane stopped again to allow men from the Gulf countries to clamber on. They came racing—Quick! Quick!… Quick!!—unzipping their carry-ons for the Scotch, drinking straight from the bottle’s mouth. Crooked little ice crystals formed on the plane window. Inside, it was hot. Biju ate his tray of chicken curry, spinach and rice, strawberry ice cream, rinsed his mouth into the empty ice-cream cup, then tried to get another dinner. “As it is we are short,” the stewardesses said, harassed by the men, drunk and hooting, pinching them as they passed, calling them by name, “Sheila! Raveena! Kusum! Nandita!”
Added to the smell of sweat, there was now the thick odor of food and cigarettes, the recycled breathing of an entire plane, the growing fetor of the bathroom.
In the mirror of this bathroom, Biju saluted himself. Here he was, on his way home, without name or knowledge of the American president, without the name of the river on whose bank he had lingered, without even hearing about any of the tourist sights—no Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, Little Italy, Brooklyn