The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [143]
“Why are you talking like this?” he said to his father. “You’re following the script of a village idiot. She is unsuitable to be my wife.”
“It was a mistake to send you away. You have become like a stranger to us.”
“You are the one who sent me and now you come and say it was a mistake! A fine thing.” He had been recruited to bring his countrymen into the modern age, but he could only make it himself by cutting them off entirely, or they would show up reproachful, pointing out to him the lie he had become.
______
His father stayed only two nights. They didn’t talk much after the first conversation, and Jemubhai asked no questions about anyone in Piphit, since he realized that it would have been a mockery to do so. But when his father left, Jemubhai tried to give him some money, shabbily trying to transfer it between hands. He wouldn’t take it, turned his face, and climbed into the car. The judge felt he should call him back, was about to, the words began in his throat—but then he didn’t say anything and the driver took his father back to the station where, not so long ago, Nimi had, unknown to herself, seen Nehru.
______
War broke out in Europe and India, even in the villages, and the news of the country disintegrating filled the newspapers; almost a million were dead in riots, three to four million in the Bengal famine, thirteen million were evicted from their homes; the birth of the nation was all in shadow. It seemed appropriate.
The judge worked harder than ever. The departure of the British left such a vacuum of power, all Indian members of the ICS rose to the very top, no matter what side they had taken in the independence movement, no matter their talents or expertise.
Somewhere, in the course of those dusky years, a second telegram arrived, the telegram that preceded the telegram about Sai’s impending arrival at Cho Oyu.
A woman had caught fire over a stove.
Oh, this country, people exclaimed, glad to fall into the usual sentences, where human life was cheap, where standards were shoddy, where stoves were badly made and cheap saris caught fire as easily—
—as a woman you wanted dead or—
—well, as a woman who wanted to kill herself—
—without a witness, without a case—
—so simple, a single movement of the hand—
—and for the police, a case so simple, just another quick movement of the hand—
—the rupees made an oiled movement between palms—
“Oh thank you, sir,” said a policeman.
“Nothing to thank me for,” said the brother-in-law.
And in a blink of an eye you could have missed the entire thing.
The judge chose to believe it was an accident.
Ashes have no weight, they tell no secrets, they rise too lightly for guilt; too lightly for gravity, they float upward and, thankfully, disappear.
These years were blurry for many, and when they came out of them, exhausted, the whole world had changed, there were gaps in everything—what had happened in their own families, what had happened elsewhere, what filth had occurred like an epidemic everywhere in a world that was now full of unmarked graves—they didn’t look, because they couldn’t afford to examine the past. They had to grasp the future with everything they had.
One true thing Jemubhai learned: a human can be transformed into anything. It was possible to forget and sometimes essential to do so.
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Now Jemubhai wondered if he had killed his wife for the sake of false ideals. Stolen her dignity, shamed his family, shamed hers, turned her into the embodiment of their humiliation. Even they couldn’t accept her then, and her life could only be useless after that, and his daughter could only be useless and absurd. He had condemmed the girl to convent boarding schools, relieved when she reached a new height of uselessness and absurdity by eloping with a man who had grown up in an orphanage. Not even the relatives expected him to pay any attention to her again—
He hadn’t liked his wife, but that was no excuse, was it?
Then he remembered a moment long ago when he had indeed liked her. He was twenty, she fourteen.