The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [42]
She was a lovely girl, small and plump, a glimpse through the nightie placket of breasts so buttery that even women who saw them were captivated. And she seemed sensible in the shop. Surely Biju would like her? The girl’s father was making money, so they said….
“Three kilos potatoes,” he told the girl in a voice unusually gentle for him. “What about rice? Is it clean?”
“No, Uncle,” she said. “What we have is very dirty. It’s so full of little stones you’ll crack your teeth if you eat it.”
“What about the atta?”
“The atta is better.”
Anyway, he said to himself, money wasn’t everything. There was that simple happiness of looking after someone and having someone look after you.
Sixteen
When Sai became interested in love, she became interested in other people’s love affairs, and she pestered the cook about the judge and his wife.
The cook said: “When I joined the household, all the old servants told me that the death of your grandmother made a cruel man out of your grandfather. She was a great lady, never raised her voice to the servants. How much he loved her! In fact, it was such a deep attachment, it turned one’s stomach, for it was too much for anybody else to look upon.”
“Did he really love her so very much?” Sai was astonished.
“Must have,” said the cook. “But they said he didn’t show it.”
“Maybe he didn’t?” she then suggested.
“Bite your tongue, you evil girl. Take your words back!” shouted the cook. “Of course he loved her.”
“How did the servants know, then?”
The cook thought a bit, thought of his own wife. “True,” he said. “Nobody really knew, but no one said anything in those days, for there are many ways of showing love, not just the way of the movies—which is all you know. You are a very foolish girl. The greatest love is love that’s never shown.”
“You say anything that suits you.”
“Yes, I’ve found it’s the best way,” said the cook after thinking some more.
“So? Did he or didn’t he?”
______
The cook and Sai were sitting with Mutt on the steps leading to the garden, picking the ticks off her, and this was always an hour of contentment for them. The large khaki-bag ones were easy to dispatch, but the tiny brown ticks were hard to kill; they flattened against the depressions in the rock, so when you hit them with a stone, they didn’t die but in a flash were up and running.
Sai chased them up and down. “Don’t run away, don’t you dare climb back on Mutt.”
Then they tried to drown them in a can of water, but they were tough, swam about, climbed on one another’s backs and crawled out. Sai chased them down again, put them back in the can, rushed to the toilet, and flushed them, but even then they resurfaced, doing a mad-scrabble swim in the toilet bowl.
______
Remembrance, now authentic, shone from the cook’s eyes.
“Oh no,” said the cook. “He didn’t like her at all. She went mad.”
“She did?!”
“Yes, they said she was a very mad lady.”
“Who was she?”
“I’ve forgotten the name, but she was the daughter of a rich man and the family was of much higher standing than your grandfather, of a particular branch of a caste that in itself was not high, of course, as you know, but within this group, they had distinguished themselves. You could tell from her features, which were delicate; her toes, nose, ears, and fingers were all very fine and small, and she was very fair—just like milk. Complexion-wise, they said, you could have mistaken her for a foreigner. Her family only married among fifteen families, but an exception was made for your grandfather because he was in the ICS. But more than that I do not know.”
______
“Who was my grandmother?” Sai then asked the judge sitting poised like a heron over his