The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [18]
The judge picked up a book and tried to read, but he couldn’t. He realized, to his surprise, that he was thinking of his own journeys, of his own arrivals and departures, from places far in his past. He had first left home at the age of twenty, with a black tin trunk just like the one Sai had arrived with, on which white letters read “Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver.” The year was 1939. The town he had left was his ancestral home of Piphit. From there he had journeyed to the Bombay dock and then sailed to Liverpool, and from Liverpool he had gone to Cambridge.
Many years had passed, and yet the day returned to him vividly, cruelly.
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The future judge, then called only Jemubhai—or Jemu—had been serenaded at his departure by two retired members of a military band hired by his father-in-law. They had stood on the platform between benches labeled “Indians Only” and “Europeans Only,” dressed in stained red coats with dull metallic ricrac unraveling about the sleeves and collars. As the train left the station, they played “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” a tune they remembered was appropriate to the occasion of leaving.
The judge was accompanied by his father. At home, his mother was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of good-bye and the briefness of the last moment.
“Don’t let him go. Don’t let him go.”
Her little son with his frail and comical mustache, with his love for her special choorva that he would never get in England and his hatred of cold that he would get too much of; with his sweater that she had knit in a pattern fanciful enough to express the extravagance of her affection; with his new Oxford English Dictionary and his decorated coconut to be tossed as an offering into the waves, so his journey might be blessed by the gods.
Father and son had rattled forth all through the morning and afternoon, the immensity of the landscape within which Jemu had unknowingly lived impressing itself upon him. The very fact that they were sitting in the train, the speed of it, rendered his world trivial, indicated through each window evidence of emptiness that stood eager to claim an unguarded heart. He felt a piercing fear, not for his future, but for his past, for the foolish faith with which he had lived in Piphit.
The malodor of Bombay duck drying on a scaffolding of sticks alongside the track snuffed his thoughts for a moment; passing into neutral air, his fears came up again.
He thought of his wife. He was a one-month-married man. He would return… many years from now… and then what…? It was all very strange. She was fourteen years old and he had yet to properly examine her face.
They crossed the saltwater creek into Bombay, arrived at the Victoria Terminus, where they turned down hotel touts to stay with an acquaintance of his father-in-law’s, and woke early to make their way to the Ballard Pier.
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When Jemubhai had first learned that the ocean traveled around a globe, he had felt strengthened by this fact, but now when he stood on the confetti-strewn deck of the ship, looking out at the sea flexing its endless muscles, he felt this knowledge weaken him. Small waves subsided against the side of the ship in a parsimonious soda water fizz, over which the noise of the engine now exerted itself. As three siren blasts rent the air, Jemu’s father, searching the deck, located his son.
“Don’t worry,” he shouted. “You’ll do first class first.” But his tone of terror undid the reassurance of the words.
“Throw the coconut!” he shrieked.
Jemubhai looked at his father, a barely educated man venturing where he should not be, and the love in Jemubhai’s heart mingled