The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [19]
The ship moved, the water split and spilled, flying fish exploded silver above the unravelment, Tom Collinses were passed around, and the party atmosphere reached a crescendo. The crowd on the shore became flotsam churning at the tide’s hem: scallops and starbursts, petticoat ruffles, rubbishy wrappings and saliva flecks, fish tails and tears…. Soon it vanished in the haze.
Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn’t throw the coconut and he didn’t cry. Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn’t adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.
They sailed past the Colaba Lighthouse and out into the Indian Ocean until there was only the span of the sea whichever way he turned.
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He was silly to be upset by Sai’s arrival, to allow it to trigger this revisitation of his past. No doubt the trunks had jogged his memory.
Miss S. Mistry, St. Augustine’s Convent.
Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver.
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But he continued to remember: when he located his cabin, he found he had a cabinmate who had grown up in Calcutta composing Latin sonnets in Catullan hendecasyllables, which he had inscribed into a gilded volume and brought along with him. The cabinmate’s nose twitched at Jemu’s lump of pickle wrapped in a bundle of puris; onions, green chilies, and salt in a twist of newspaper; a banana that in the course of the journey had been slain by heat. No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana, but it had been packed just in case. In case of What? Jemu shouted silently to his mother.
In case he was hungry along the way or it was a while before meals could be properly prepared or he lacked the courage to go to the dining salon on the ship, given that he couldn’t eat with knife and fork—
He was furious that his mother had considered the possibility of his humiliation and thereby, he thought, precipitated it. In her attempt to cancel out one humiliation she had only succeeded in adding another.
Jemu picked up the package, fled to the deck, and threw it overboard. Didn’t his mother think of the inappropriateness of her gesture? Undignified love, Indian love, stinking, unaesthetic love—the monsters of the ocean could have what she had so bravely packed getting up in that predawn mush.
The smell of dying bananas retreated, oh, but now that just left the stink of fear and loneliness perfectly exposed.
In his cabin bunk at night, the sea made indecent licking sounds about the ship’s edge. He thought of how he had half undressed and hurriedly re-dressed his wife, of how he had only glimpsed her expression, just bits and pieces of it in the slipping of the pallu over her head. However in memory of the closeness of female flesh, his penis reached up in the dark and waved about, a simple blind sea creature but refusing to be refused. He found his own organ odd: insistent but cowardly; pleading but pompous.
They berthed at Liverpool and the band played “Land of Hope and Glory.” His cabinmate, in Donegal tweeds, hailed a porter to help with his luggage—a white person to pick up a brown person’s bags! Jemubhai carried his own bags, stumbled onto a train, and on his way to Cambridge, found himself shocked as they progressed through fields by the enormous difference between the (boxy) English and the (loopy) Indian cow.
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He continued to be amazed by the sights that greeted him. The England in which he searched for a room to rent was formed of tiny gray houses in gray streets, stuck together and down as if on a glue trap. It took him by surprise because he’d expected only grandness, hadn’t realized that here, too, people could be poor and live unaesthetic lives. While he was unimpressed, though, so too were the people who answered his knock, when they opened their doors to his face: “Just let,” “All full,” or even a curtain lifted and quickly dropped, a stillness as if all the inhabitants had, in that instant, died. He visited twenty-two homes before he arrived at the doorstep of Mrs.