The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [140]
“What is the point? All that space lying there useless, waste of water, waste of electricity, waste of heating, air-conditioning, not very intelligent is it? And you have to drive half an hour to the market! They call this the first world??? Ekdum bekaar!”
The father on the hot dog: “The sausage is bad, the bun is bad, the ketchup is bad, even the mustard is bad. And this an American institution! You can get a better sausage in Calcutta!”
Now the son had the lost-luggage story.
______
Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, and he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother’s lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of color from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan “Good food makes good mood.” Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home—he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing—that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.
Forty-nine
The judge got down on his knees, and he prayed to God, he, Jemubhai Popatlal the agnostic, who had made a long hard journey to jettison his family’s prayers; he who had refused to throw the coconut into the water and bless his own voyage all those years ago on the deck of the SS Strath-naver.
“If you return Mutt, I will acknowledge you in public, I will never deny you again, I will tell the world that I believe in you—you—if you return Mutt—”
Then he got up. He was undoing his education, retreating to the superstitious man making bargains, offering sacrifices, gambling with fate, cajoling, daring whatever was out there—
Show me if you exist!
Or else I will know you are nothing.
Nothing! Nothing!—taunting it.
But by night, the thought reentered his mind—
Was this faith that he had turned away, was it paying him back?
For sins he had committed that no court in the world could take on. But that fact, he knew, didn’t lessen the weight they placed on the scale, didn’t render them nothing…. But who could be paying him back? He didn’t believe in angered divinity, in a scale of balance. Of course not. The universe wasn’t in the business of justice. That had simply been his own human conceit—until he learned better.
Yet he thought of his family that he had abandoned.
He thought of his father, whose strength and hope and love he had fed on, only to turn around to spit in his face. Then he thought of how he had returned his wife, Nimi. By this time, Bomanbhai Patel of the delicately carved haveli was dead, and an uncle had usurped the throne, the one misfortune of Bomanbhai—all daughters, no son—playing out its curse beyond his existence.
______
The judge’s mind returned to why exactly he had sent his wife home. It hinged on one particular incident.
Early one morning in Bonda, a car stopped and a whole group of ladies came flowering out, passionate Congresswoman Mrs. Mohan at the wheel. She had spotted Nimi by the gate of Jemubhai’s residence: “Oh, Mrs. Patel, come along with us—why always no? This time I won’t take no for an answer! Let’s go and have some fun. You must get out of the house now and then.”
Half happy, half scared, she had found herself on the wide lap of a stranger