The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [37]
She looked again and found her face tinged with sadness, and the image seemed faraway.
She’d have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed.
______
Over the days, she found herself continually obsessed with her own face, aware that she was meanwhile whetting her appetite for something else.
But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.
Fourteen
At 4:25 a.m., Biju made his way to the Queen of Tarts bakery, watching for the cops who sometimes came leaping out: where are you going and what are you doing with whom at what time and why?
But Immigration operated independently of Police, the better, perhaps, to bake the morning bread, and Biju fell, again and again, through the cracks in the system.
Above the bakery the subway ran on a rawly sketched edifice upheld by metal stilts. The trains passed in a devilish screaming; their wheels sparked firework showers that at night threw a violent jagged brightness over the Harlem projects, where he could see a few lights on already and some others besides himself making a start on miniature lives. At the Queen of Tarts, the grill went zipping up, the light flickered on, a rat moved into the shadow. Tap root tail, thick skulled, broad shouldered, it looked over its back sneering as it walked with a velvet crunch right over the trap too skimpy to detain it.
“Namaste, babaji,” said Saeed Saeed.
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Biju considered his previous fight with a Pakistani, the usual attack on the man’s religion that he’d grown up uttering: “Pigs, pigs, sons of pigs.”
Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju’s admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn’t drowning, he was bobbing in the tides. In fact, a large number of people wished to cling to him like a plank during a shipwreck—not only fellow Zanzibaris and fellow illegals but Americans, too; overweight confidence-leached citizens he teased when they lunched alone on a pizza slice; lonely middle-aged office workers who came by for conversation after nights of lying awake wondering if, in America—in America!—they were really getting the best of what was on offer. They told such secrets as perhaps might only be comfortably told to an illegal alien.
Saeed was kind and he was not Paki. Therefore he was OK?
The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?
Therefore he liked Muslims and hated only Pakis?
Therefore he liked Saeed, but hated the general lot of Muslims?
Therefore he liked Muslims and Pakis and India should see it was all wrong and hand over Kashmir?
No, no, how could that be and—
This was but a small portion of the dilemma. He remembered what they said about black people at home. Once a man from his village who worked in the city had said: “Be careful of the hubshi. Ha ha, in their own country they live like monkeys in the trees. They come to India and become men.”
Biju had thought the man from his village was claiming that India was so far advanced that black men learned to dress and eat when they arrived, but what he had meant was that black men ran about attempting to impregnate every Indian girl they saw.
Therefore he hated all black people but liked Saeed?
Therefore there was nothing wrong with black people and Saeed?
Or Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, or anyone else…???
This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed an awe of white people, who arguably