The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [77]
This tagged on to make him feel antisecular and anti-Gandhian.
“Do what you will,” he shrugged, “it’s nothing to me—it only shows to the whole world that you are a FOOL.”
He uttered the words deliberately, eager to see that hurt cross her face.
“Well, why don’t you go home then, if I’m such a fool? What is the point of teaching me?”
“All right, I will. You’re right. What is the point of teaching you? It’s clear all you want to do is copy. Can’t think for yourself. Copycat, copycat. Don’t you know, these people you copy like a copycat, THEY DON’T WANT YOU!!!!”
“I’m not copying anyone!”
“You think you are the original person celebrating Christmas? Come on, don’t tell me you’re as stupid as that?”
“Well, if you’re so clever,” she said, “how come you can’t even find a proper job? Fail, fail, fail. Every single interview.”
“Because of people like you!”
“Oh, because of me… and you’re telling me that I am stupid? Who’s stupid? Go put it before a judge and we’ll see who he says is the stupid one.”
She picked up her glass and the water in it sloshed over before it reached her lips, she was trembling so.
Twenty-eight
The judge was thinking of his hate.
______
When he returned from England, he had been greeted by the same geriatric brass band that had seen him off on his journey, but it was invisible this time because of the billows of smoke and dust raised by the fireworks that had been thrown on the railway track, exploding as the train drew into the station. Whistles and whoops went up from the two thousand people who had gathered to witness this historic event, the first son of the community to join the ICS. He was smothered with garlands; flower petals settled on the brim of his hat. And there, standing in a knife’s width of shade at the end of the station, was someone else who looked vaguely familiar; not a sister, not a cousin; it was Nimi, his wife, who had been returned from her father’s house, where she’d spent the intervening time. Except for exchanges with landladies and “How do you do?” in shops, he hadn’t spoken to a woman in years.
She came toward him with a garland. They didn’t look at each other as she lifted it over his head. Up went his eyes, down went hers. He was twenty-five, she was nineteen.
“So shy, so shy”—the delighted crowd was sure of having witnessed the terror of love. (What amazing hope the audience has—always refusing to believe the nonexistence of romance.)
What would he do with her?
He had forgotten he had a wife.
Well, he knew, of course, but she had drifted away like everything in his past, a series of facts that no longer had relevance. This one, though, it would follow him as wives in those days followed their husbands.
______
All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart—how lovely she must have appeared to him…. He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. She rummaged in the toilet case Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge and found a jar of green salve, a hairbrush and comb set in silver, a pom-pom with a loop of silk in a round container of powder—and, coming at her exquisitely, her first whiff of lavender. The crisp light scents that rose from his new possessions were all of a foreign place. Piphit smelled of dust and once in a while there was the startling fragrance of rain. Piphit’s perfumes were intoxicants, rich and dizzying. She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.
“Shorts!” said a young uncle.
“Underwear,” the ladies insisted.
Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?
She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her