The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [136]
The judge persisted, “But can’t you do anything…” and he became angry, threw up his hands.
“A dog! Justice, just listen to yourself. People are being killed. What can I do? Of course I have such high regard…. I have made time despite worry of being accused of favoritism… but we are in an emergency situation. In Calcutta, in Delhi, there is great concern about this severe deterioration of law and order, and in the end that’s what we must think of, isn’t it so? Our country. We must suffer inconvenience and I don’t need to tell someone of your experience this….” The SDO fixed the judge with a certain gluey look that convinced him he meant to be rude.
The judge went on to the police station where the sound of a man’s screaming issued from the inner chamber on purpose, the judge thought, to intimidate him, to extract a bribe.
He looked at the policemen in front of him. They looked insolently back.
They were waiting in the front room, biding time until they would all go in and give the man a final lesson he couldn’t unlearn. They began to snigger. “Ha, ha, ha. Come about his dog! Dog? Ha, ha ha ha ha…. Madman!” They became angry halfway through their humor. “Don’t waste our time,” they said. “Get out.”
Did they perhaps know the name of the person they had picked up after the gun robbery? The judge persisted. He wondered, just a thought, could he be responsible?
Which person?
The one whom they had accused of stealing his guns… he wasn’t blaming the police in any way, but the man’s wife and father had visited him and seemed upset…. There was no such person, they said, what was he talking about? Now, would he stop wasting their time and get out? The sound of the victim screaming in the back intensified as if on cue to give the judge a not so subtle message.
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He couldn’t conceive of punishment great enough for humanity. A man wasn’t equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone any harm. “We should be dying,” the judge almost wept.
______
The world had failed Mutt. It had failed beauty; it had failed grace. But by having forsaken this world, for having held himself apart, Mutt would suffer.
The judge had lost his clout…. A bit of “Sir sahib huzoor” for politeness’ sake, but that was just residual veneer now; he knew what they really thought of him.
He remembered all of a sudden why he had gone to England and joined the ICS; it was clearer than ever why—but now that position of power was gone, frittered away in years of misanthropy and cynicism.
“Biscuit, pooch, din din, milkie, khana, ishtoo, porridge, dalia, chalo, car, pom-pom, doo-doo, walkie”—
He shouted all the language that was between Mutt and himself, sending nursery words of love flying over the Himalayas, rattled her leash so it clinked the way that made her jump—whoop!—up on all four legs together, as if on a pogo stick.
“Walkie, baba, muffin….
“Mutt, mutton, little chop…” he cried, then, “forgive me, my little dog…. Please let her go whoever you are….”
He kept burning the image of Mutt, how she sometimes lay on her back with all four legs in the air, warming her tummy as she snoozed in the sun. How he’d recently tempted her to eat her lousy pumpkin stew by running around the garden making buzzing noises as if the vegetable were a strange insect, and then he’d popped the cube into her wide-open-with-surprise mouth, and in amazement she’d hastily swallowed.
He pictured the two of them cozy in bed: good night, good morning. The army came out at dusk to make sure curfew was strictly enforced.
“You must return, sir,” said a soldier.
“Get out of my way,” he said in a British accent to make the man back away, but the soldier continued to follow at a safe distance until the judge turned angrily toward home while pretending not to be hurried.
Please come home, my dear, my lovely girl,
Princess Duchess Queen,
Soo-soo, Poo-poo, Cuckoo, good good