The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [59]
“I like the pictures very much,” Biju assured him.
There was also Saeed with the family at the Bread & Puppet theater festival posing with the evil insurance-man puppet; Saeed touring the Grafton cheese factory; Saeed by the compost heap with his arm around Grandma, braless in her summer muumuu, salt-and-pepper armpit hair shooting off in several directions.
Oh, the United States, it’s a wonderful country. A wonderful country. And its people are the most delightful in the world. The more he told them about his family in Zanzibar, his faked-up papers, of how he had one passport for Saeed Saeed and one for Zulfikar—the happier they got. Stayed up late into the zany Vermont night, stars coming down coming down, cheering him on. Any subversion against the U.S. government—they would be happy to help.
Grandma wrote a letter to the INS to assure them Zulfikar of Zanzibar was a welcome—no, more than that—a cherished new member of the ancient clan of the Mayflower Williams.
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He slapped Biju on the back. “See you around,” he said and he left to practice kissing for the interview. “Have to look right or they will sus-pect.
Biju continued on his way, tried to smile at female American citizens: “Hi. Hi.” But they barely looked at him.
______
The cook went back to the post office. “You are getting the letters wet. Taking no care.”
“Babaji, just look outside—how are we to keep them dry? It is humanly impossible, they are getting wet as we transfer them from van to office.”
Next day: “Post came?”
“No, no, roads closed. Nothing today. Maybe the road will open in the afternoon. Come back later.”
Lola was hysterically trying to make a phone call from the STD booth because it was Pixie’s birthday: “What do you mean it doesn’t work, for a week it hasn’t worked!”
“For a month it hasn’t worked,” a young man who had also been in line corrected her, but he seemed content. “The microwave is down,” he explained.
“What?”
“The microwave.” He turned for affirmation to the others in the office. “Yes,” they said, nodding; they were all men and women of the future. He turned back. “Yes, the satellite in the sky,” he indicated, pointing up, “it’s fallen down.” And he pointed at the plebeian floor, gray concrete all stamped about with local mud.
No way to telephone, no way for letters to get through. She and the cook, running into each other, commiserated a moment and then he went on sadly to the butcher and she went to get some Baygon spray and swatters, for the insects. Each day of this fecund season scores of tiny souls lost their brief lives to Lola’s poisons. Mosquitoes, ants, termites, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, woodworms, beetles. Yet, what did it matter? Each day a thousand new ones were born…. Entire nations appeared boldly overnight.
Twenty
Gyan and Sai. At subsequent pauses in the rain they measured ears, shoulders, and the span of their rib cages.
Collar bones, eyelashes, and chins.
Knees, heels, arch of the feet.
Flexibility of fingers and toes.
Cheekbones, necks, muscles of the upper arm, the small complexities of the hinge bones.
The green and purple of their veins.
The world’s most astonishing tongue display: Sai, tutored by her friend Arlene in the convent, could touch her nose with her tongue and showed Gyan.
He could wiggle his eyebrows, slide his head off his neck from left to right to left like a Bharat Natyam dancer, and he could stand on his head.
Now and then, she recalled certain delicate observations she had made during her own explorations before the mirror that had been overlooked by Gyan, on account of the newness of landscape between them. It was, she knew herself, a matter of education to learn how to look at a woman, and worried that Gyan wasn’t entirely aware of how lucky he was.
Ear lobes downy as tobacco leaves, the tender substance of her hair, the transparent skin of the inner wrist….
She brought up the omissions at his next visit, proffered her hair with