The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [7]
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In his trembling message, brought forward as if by the motion of his wringing hands, he tried to emphasize how he was just the messenger. He himself had nothing to do with anything and thought it was not worth it to bother the police; he would sooner ignore the robbery and, in fact, the whole conflict and anything else that might give offence. He was a powerless man, barely enough learning to read and write, had worked like a donkey all his life, hoped only to avoid trouble, lived on only to see his son.
Unfortunately the policemen seemed perturbed and questioned him harshly while also making their scorn for him clear. As a servant, he was far beneath them, but the robbery of guns from a retired member of the judiciary could not be ignored and they were forced to inform the superintendent.
That very afternoon the police arrived at Cho Oyu in a line of toad-colored jeeps that appeared through the moving static of a small anxious sleet. They left their opened umbrellas in a row on the veranda, but the wind undid them and they began to wheel about—mostly black ones that leaked a black dye, but also a pink, synthetic made-in-Taiwan one, abloom with flowers.
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They interviewed the judge and wrote out a report to confirm a complaint of robbery and trespassing. “Any threats made, sir?”
“They asked him to set the table and bring the tea,” said the cook in complete seriousness.
The policemen began to laugh.
The judge’s mouth was a straight grim line: “Go sit in the kitchen. Bar bar karta rehta hai.”
The police dusted the surfaces with fingerprint-lifting powder and placed a melamine biscuit jar with greasy pakora thumbprints in a plastic bag.
They measured the footprints coming up the steps of the veranda and uncovered proof of several assorted sizes of feet: “One very big one, sir, in a Bata gym shoe.”
Mostly, because the judge’s residence had long been a matter of curiosity in the bazaar, they, like the gun robbers, took the opportunity to have a good nosy look around.
And, like the robbers, they were not impressed by what they saw. They surveyed the downfall of wealth with satisfaction, and one of the policemen kicked a shaky apparatus of pipes leading from the jhora stream, bandaged here and there with sopping rags. He shone his torch into the toilet tank and discovered the flushing contraption had been fixed with rubber bands and bamboo splints.
“What evidence are you going to find in the toilet?” asked Sai, following him around, feeling ashamed.
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The house had been built long ago by a Scotsman, passionate reader of the accounts of that period: The Indian Alps and How We Crossed Them, by A Lady Pioneer. Land of the Lama. The Phantom Rickshaw. My Mercara Home. Black Panther of Singrauli. His true spirit had called to him, then, informed him that it, too, was wild and brave, and refused to be denied the right to adventure. As always, the price for such romance had been high and paid for by others. Porters had carried boulders from the riverbed—legs growing bandy, ribs curving into caves, backs into U’s, faces being bent slowly to look always at the ground—up to this site chosen for a view that could raise the human heart to spiritual heights. Then the piping arrived, the tiling and tubing, the fancy wrought-iron gates to hang like lace between the banks, the dressmaker’s dummy, which the police now stomped up to the attic and discovered—bom bom, the vigor of their movements causing the last remaining Meissen cup to gnash like a tooth on its saucer. A thousand deceased spiders lay scattered like dead blossoms on the attic floor, and above them, on the underside of the tin sieve roof, dodging drips, their offspring stared at the police as they did at their own ancestors—with a giant, saucer-sized lack of sympathy.
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The police collected their umbrellas and went tramping across to the cook’s hut, extra careful, extra suspicious. Everyone knew it was the servants when it came to robbery, more often than not.
They walked past the garage, car sunk low, nose