The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [76]
For a moment all the different pretences he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him—all these things joined together to form a single truth.
The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.
And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor.
It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk—
It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.
He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement take the harshest route possible.
Twenty-seven
Moody and restless, Gyan arrived at Cho Oyu the next day, upset at having to undertake that long walk in the cold for the small amount of money the judge paid him. It maddened him that people lived here in this enormous house and property, taking hot baths, sleeping alone in spacious rooms, and he suddenly remembered the cutlets and boiled peas dinner with Sai and the judge, the judge’s “Common sense seems to have evaded you, young man.”
“How late you are,” said Sai when she saw him, and he was angry in a different way from the night before when, indignant in war paint, he had stuck his bottom out one way and his chest the other way and discovered a self-righteous posturing, a new way of talking. This was a petty anger that pulled him back, curtailed his spirit, made him feel peevish. The annoyance was different from any he’d felt with Sai before.
______
To cheer him up, Sai told him of the Christmas party—
You know, three times we tried to light the soup ladle full of brandy and pour it over the pudding—
Gyan ignored her, opened up the physics book. Oh, if only she would shut up—that bright silliness he had not noticed in her before—he was too irritated to stand it.
She turned reluctantly to its pages; it was a long time since they had properly looked at physics.
“If two objects, one weighing… and the other weighing… are dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa, at which time and at what speed will they fall to the ground?”
“You’re in an unpleasant mood,” she said and yawned with luxury to indicate other, better, options.
He pretended he hadn’t heard her.
Then he yawned, too, despite himself.
She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward.
Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.
She did—
He did.
“Bored by physics?” she asked, encouraged by the apparent reconciliation.
“No. Not at all.”
“Why are you yawning then?”
“BECAUSE I’M BORED TO DEATH BY YOU, THAT’S WHY.”
Stunned silence.
“I am not interested in Christmas!” he shouted. “Why do you celebrate Christmas? You’re Hindus and you don’t celebrate Id or Guru Nanak’s birthday or even Durga Puja or Dussehra or Tibetan New Year.”
She considered it: Why? She always had. Not because of the convent, her hatred of it was so deep, but….
“You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It’s because of people like you we never get anywhere.”
Stung by his unexpected venom, “No,” she said, “that’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“If I want to