The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [78]
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The afternoons in Piphit lasted so long, the Patels were resting, trying to efface the fear that time would never move again, all except for Jemubhai who had grown unused to such surrender.
He sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner—a foreigner—every bit of him screamed. Only his digestion dissented and told him he was home: squatting painfully in that cramped outhouse, his gentleman’s knees creaking, swearing “Bloody hell,” he felt his digestion work as super efficient as—as Western transportation.
Idly deciding to check on his belongings, he uncovered the loss.
“Where is my powder puff?” shouted Jemubhai at the Patel ladies spread-eagled on mats in the veranda shade.
“What?” they asked, raising their heads, shielding their eyes against the detonating light.
“Someone has been through my belongings.”
Actually, by then, almost everyone in the house had been through his belongings and they failed to see why this was a problem. His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable; why did he mind and how did this coincide with stealing?
“But what is missing?”
“My puff.”
“What is that?”
He tried to explain.
“But what on earth is it for, baba?” They looked at him bemused.
“Pink and white what? That you put on your skin? Why?”
“Pink?”
His mother began to worry. “Is anything wrong with your skin?” she asked, concerned.
But, “Ha ha,” laughed a sister who was listening carefully, “we sent you abroad to become a gentleman, and instead you have become a lady!”
The excitement spread, and from farther houses in the Patel clan, relatives began to arrive. The kakas kakis masas masis phuas phois. Children horrible all together, a clump that could not be separated child into child, for they resembled a composite monster with multiple arms and legs that came cartwheeling in, raising the dust, screaming; hundreds of hands were held over the monster’s hundreds of giggling mouths. Who had stolen what?
“His powder puff is missing,” said Jemubhai’s father, who seemed to think this thing must be crucial to his son’s work.
They all said powder puff in English, for, naturally, there was no Gujarati word for this invention. Their very accents rankled the judge. “Pauvdar Paaf,” sounding like some Parsi dish.
They pulled out all the items in the cupboard, turned them upside down, exclaiming over and examining each one, his suits, his underwear, his opera glasses, through which he had viewed the tutus of ballerinas dancing a delicate sideways scuttle in Giselle, unfolding in pastry patterns and cake decorations.
But no, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the kitchen either, or in the veranda. It wasn’t anywhere.
His mother questioned the naughtiest cousins.
“Did you see it?”
“What?”
“The paudar paaf.”
“What is a paudur poff? Paudaar paaf?”
“To protect the skin.”
“To protect the skin from what?”
And the entire embarrassment of explaining had to be gone through again.
“Pink and white? What for?”
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“What the hell do all of you know?” said Jemubhai. Thieving, ignorant people.
He had thought they would have the good taste to be impressed and even a little awed by what he had become, but instead they were laughing.
“You must know something,” the judge finally accused Nimi.
“I haven’t seen it. Why should I pay it any attention?” she said. Her heart pounded beneath her two lavender-powdered pink and white breasts, beneath her husband’s England-returned puff.
He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty, dismissed it. Once it had been a terrifying beckoning thing that had made his heart turn to water, but now it seemed beside the point. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one.
Just then, as he was turning away, he saw it—
Sticking out between the hooks, a few thin and tender filaments.
“You filth!