The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [30]
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He shared his dream with Jemubhai. So fantastic was their dreaming, it thrilled them like a fairy tale, and perhaps because this dream sailed too high in the sky to be tackled by logic, it took form, began to exert palpable pressure. Without naivete, father and son would have been defeated; had they aimed lower, according to the logic of probability, they would have failed.
The recommended number of Indians in the ICS was 50 percent and the quota wasn’t even close to being filled. Space at the top, space at the top. There certainly was no space at the bottom.
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Jemubhai attended Bishop’s College on a scholarship, and after, he left for Cambridge on the SS Strathnaver. When he returned, member of the ICS, he was put to work in a district far from his home in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
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“So many servants then,” the cook told Sai. “Now, of course, I am the only one.” He had begun working at ten years old, at a salary half his age, five rupees, as the lowest all-purpose chokra boy in the kitchen of a club where his father was pudding cook.
At fourteen, he was hired by the judge at twelve rupees a month. Those were days when it was still pertinent to know that if you tied a pot of cream to the underside of a cow, as you walked to the next camp it would churn itself into butter by day’s end. That a portable meat safe could be made with an upside-down open umbrella tied about with mosquito netting.
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“We were always on tour,” said the cook, “three weeks out of four. Only in the worst days of the monsoon did we stop. Your grandfather would drive in his car if he could, but the district was mostly without roads, and hardly any bridges spanned the rivers, so more often he had to ride out on horseback. Now and then, through jungly areas and through deeper, swifter currents, he crossed on elephant. We would travel before him in a train of bullock carts piled with the china, tents, furniture, carpets—everything. There were porters, orderlies, a stenographer. There was a thunder box for the bathroom tent and even a murga-murgi in a cage under the cart. They were a foreign breed and that hen laid more eggs than any other murgi I have known.”
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“Where did you sleep?” Sai asked.
“We would put up tents in villages all over the district: a big bedroom tent like a top for your grandfather, with an attached tent bathroom, dressing room, drawing room, and dining room. The tents were very grand, Kashmiri carpets, silver dishes, and your grandfather dressed for dinner even in the jungle, in black dinner jacket and bow tie.
“As I said, we went first, so that when your grandfather arrived, everything was set up exactly as it had been left in the old camp, the same files open at the same angle turned to the same page. If it was even a little bit different, he would lose his temper.
“The timetable was strictly enforced—we couldn’t be late by even five minutes, so we all had to learn how to read a clock.
“At five-forty-five I would take the bed tea on a tray to your grandfather’s tent. ‘Bed tea,’ I would call out as I lifted the tent flap.
“Bad tea,” was how it sounded. “Baaad teee. Baaad teeee.” Sai began to laugh.
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The judge stared at his chessboard, but after the burning memory of his beginnings, he experienced the sweet relief now of recalling his life as a touring official in the civil service.
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The tight calendar had calmed him, as did the constant exertion of authority. How he relished his power over the classes that had kept his family pinned under their heels for centuries—like the stenographer, for example, who was a Brahmin. There he was, crawling into a tiny tent to the side, and there was Jemubhai reclining like