The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [14]
Thus they had died under the wheels of foreigners, amid crates of babushka nesting dolls. If their last thoughts were of their daughter in St. Augustine’s, she would never know.
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Moscow was not part of the convent curriculum. Sai imagined a sullen bulky architecture, heavyset, solid-muscled, bulldog-jowled, in Soviet shades of gray, under gray Soviet skies, all around gray Soviet peoples eating gray Soviet foods. A masculine city, without frill or weakness, without crenellation, without a risky angle. An uncontrollable spill of scarlet now in this scene, unspooling.
“Very sorry,” said Sister Caroline, “very sorry to hear the news, Sai. You must have courage.”
“I’m an orphan,” Sai whispered to herself, resting in the infirmary. “My parents are dead. I am an orphan.”
She hated the convent, but there had never been anything else she could remember.
“Dear Sai,” her mother would write, “well, another winter coming up and we have brought out the heavy woolens. Met Mr. and Mrs. Sharma for bridge and your papa cheated as usual. We enjoy eating herring, a pungent fish you must sample one day.”
She responded during the supervised letter writing sessions:
“Dear Mummy and Papa, how are you? I am fine. It is very hot here. Yesterday we had our history exam and Arlene Macedo cheated as usual.”
But the letters seemed like book exercises. Sai had not seen her parents in two whole years, and the emotional immediacy of their existence had long vanished. She tried to cry, but she couldn’t.
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In the conference room beneath a Jesus in a dhoti pinned onto two varnished sticks, the nuns conferred anxiously. This month there would be no Mistry bank draft in the convent coffers, no mandatory donations to the toilet renovation fund and bus fund, to fete days and feast days.
“Poor thing, but what can we do?” The nuns tsk-tsked because they knew Sai was a special problem. The older nuns remembered her mother and the fact that the judge paid for her keep but never visited. There were other parts of the tale that none of them would be able to piece together, of course, for some of the narrative had been lost, some of it had been purposely forgotten. All they knew of Sai’s father was that he had been brought up in a Zoroastrian charity for orphans, and that he had been helped along by a generous donor from school to college and then finally into the air force. When Sai’s parents eloped, the family in Gujarat, feeling disgraced, disowned her mother.
In a country so full of relatives, Sai suffered a dearth.
There was only a single listing in the register under “Please contact in case of emergency.” It was the name of Sai’s grandfather, the same man who had once paid the school fees:
Name: Justice Jemubhai Patel
Relation: Maternal Grandfather
Position: Chief Justice (Retd.)
Religion: Hindu
Caste: Patidar
Sai had never met this grandfather who, in 1957, had been introduced to the Scotsman who had built Cho Oyu and was now on his way back to Aberdeen.
“It is very isolated but the land has potential,” the Scotsman had said, “quinine, sericulture, cardamom, orchids.” The judge was not interested in agricultural possibilities of the land but went to see it, trusting the man’s word—the famous word of a gentleman—despite all that had passed. He rode up on horseback, pushed open the door into that spare space lit with a monastic light, the quality of which altered with the sunlight outside. He had felt he was entering a sensibility rather than a house.The floor was dark, almost black, wide planked; the ceiling resembled the rib cage of a whale, marks of an ax still in the timber.