The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [33]
Unsuspecting of the approaching news, Lola was in the garden picking caterpillars off the English broccoli. The caterpillars were mottled green and white, with fake blue eyes, ridiculous fat feet, a tail, and an elephant nose. Magnificent creatures, she thought, studying one closely, but then she threw it to a waiting bird that pecked and a green stuffing squiggled out of the caterpillar like toothpaste from a punctured tube.
On the Mon Ami veranda, Noni and Sai sat before an open text book: neutrons… and protons… electrons…. So if—then—???
They were yet unable to grasp the question but were taunted by the sight, beyond the veranda, of a perfect sunlit illustration of the answer: speck insects suspended in a pod within which they jigged tirelessly, bound by a spell that could not be undone.
Noni felt a sudden exhaustion come over her; the answer seemed attainable via miracle not science. They put the book aside when the baker arrived at Mon Ami as he did each afternoon, lifting his trunk from his head and unlatching it. Outside the trunk was scuffed; inside it glowed like a treasure chest, with Swiss rolls, queen cakes, and, taught to him by missionaries on the hillside, peanut butter cookies evocative of, the ladies thought, cartoon America: gosh, golly, gee whiz, jeepers creepers.
They picked out pink and yellow queen cakes and began to chat.
“So, Sai, how old are you now? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen.”
It was hard to tell, Noni thought. Sai looked far older in some ways, far younger in some.
Younger, no doubt, because she’d lived such a sheltered life and older, no doubt, because she spent all her time with retired people. She might always look like this, girlish even when she was old, old even when she was young. Noni looked her over critically. Sai was wearing khaki pants and a T-Shirt that said “Free Tibet.” Her feet were bare and she wore her short hair in two untidy braids ending just before her shoulders. Noni and Lola had recently discussed how bad it was for Sai to continue to grow up like this: “She won’t pick up social skills… nobody her own age… house full of men….”
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“Don’t you find it difficult living like that with your grandfather?”
“The cook talks so much,” said Sai, “that I don’t mind.”
The way she’d been abandoned to the cook for years…. If it wasn’t for Lola and herself, Noni thought, Sai would have long ago fallen to the level of the servant class herself.
“What does he talk about?”
“Oh, stories about his village, how his wife died, his court case with his brother…. I hope Biju makes a lot of money,” reflected Sai, “they are the poorest family in the village. Their house is still made of mud with a thatch roof.”
Noni didn’t think this was suitable information for the cook to share. It was important to draw the lines properly between classes or it harmed everyone on both sides of the great divide. Servants got all sorts of ideas, and then when they realized the world wasn’t going to give them and their children what it gave to others, they got angry and resentful. Lola and Noni constantly had to discourage their maid, Kesang, from divulging personal information, but it was hard, Noni acknowledged, to keep it that way. Before one knew it one could slide into areas of the heart that should be referred to only between social equals. She thought of an episode not so long ago when the sisters had been too fascinated to stop their maid telling them of her romance with the milkman:
“I liked him so much,” Kesang said. “I am a Sherpa, he is a Rai, but I lied and told my parents he was a Bhutia so they agreed to let us marry. It was a very nice wedding. His people, you have to give so much, pork, money, this and that, whatever they ask for you have to give, but we didn’t have a wedding like that. He looked after my parents when they were ill and right from the beginning we made a vow that he wouldn’t leave me and that I wouldn’t leave him. Both things. Neither of us will leave each other. He will never