The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [64]
Nestlé and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills?
Enough was enough.
Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.
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“Rule of nature,” said Odessa to Baz. “Imagine if we were sitting around saying, ‘So-and-so-score years ago, Neanderthals came out of the woods, attacked my family with a big dinosaur bone, and now you give back.’ Two of the very first iron pots, my friend, and one toothsome toothy daughter from the first days of agriculture, when humans had larger molars, and four samples of an early version of the potato claimed, incidentally, by both Chile and Peru.”
She was very witty, Odessa. Baz was proud of her cosmopolitan style, loved the sight of her in her little wire-rimmed glasses. Once he had been shocked to overhear some of their friends say she was black-hearted, but he had put it out of his mind.
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“These white people!” said Achootan, a fellow dishwasher, to Biju in the kitchen. “Shit! But at least this country is better than England,” he said. “At least they have some hypocrisy here. They believe they are good people and you get some relief. There they shout at you openly on the street, ‘Go back to where you came from.’” He had spent eight years in Canterbury, and he had responded by shouting a line Biju was to hear many times over, for he repeated it several times a week: “Your father came to my country and took my bread and now I have come to your country to get my bread back.”
Achootan didn’t want a green card in the same way as Saeed did. He wanted it in the way of revenge.
“Why do you want it if you hate it here?” Odessa had said angrily to Achootan when he asked for sponsorship.
Well, he wanted it. Everyone wanted it whether you liked it or you hated it. The more you hated it sometimes, the more you wanted it.
This they didn’t understand.
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The restaurant served only one menu: steak, salad, fries. It assumed a certain pride in simplicity among the wealthy classes.
Holy cow. Unholy cow. Biju knew the reasoning he should keep by his side. At lunch and dinner the space filled with young uniformed businesspeople in their twenties and thirties.
“How would you like that, ma’am?”
“Rare.”
“And you, sir?”
“Still mooin’.”
Only the fools said, “Well done, please.” Odessa could barely conceal her scorn. “Sure about that? Well, all right, but it’s going to be tough.”
She sat at the corner table where she had her morning tea and aroused the men by tearing into her steak.
“You know, Biju,” she said, laughing, “isn’t it ironic, nobody eats beef in India and just look at it—it’s the shape of a big T-bone.”
But here there were Indians eating beef. Indian bankers. Chomp chomp. He fixed them with a concentrated look of meaning as he cleared the plates. They saw it. They knew. He knew. They knew he knew. They pretended they didn’t know he knew. They looked away. He took on a sneering look. But they could afford not to notice.
“I’ll have the steak,” they said