The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [79]
His dandy puff.
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“Break the bed,” shouted an ancient aunt, hearing the scuffle inside the room, and they all began to giggle and nod in satisfaction.
“Now she will settle down,” said another medicine-voiced hag. “That girl has too much spirit.”
Inside the room, specially vacated of all who normally slept there, Jemubhai, his face apuff with anger, grabbed at his wife.
She slipped from his grasp and his anger flew.
She who had stolen. She who had made them laugh at him. This illiterate village girl. He grabbed at her again.
She was running and he was chasing her.
She ran to the door.
But the door was locked.
She tried again.
It didn’t budge.
The aunt had locked it—just in case. All the stories of brides trying to escape—now and then even an account of a husband sidling out. Shameshameshameshame to the family.
He came at her with a look of murder.
She ran for the window.
He blocked her.
Without thinking, she picked up the powder container from the table near the door and threw it at his face, terrified of what she was doing, but the terror had joined irreversibly with the gesture, and in a second it was done—
The container broke apart, the powder lurched up
filtered down.
Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury—penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of—he stuffed his way ungracefully into her.
An aging uncle, wizened bird man in dhoti and spectacles, watching through a crack in the wall outside, felt his own lust ripen and—pop—it sent him hopping about the courtyard.
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Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury—this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas—but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevolency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run—it turned his civilized stomach.
Yet he repeated the gutter act again and again. Even in tedium, on and on, a habit he could not stand in himself. This distaste and his persistence made him angrier than ever and any cruelty to her became irresistible. He would teach her the same lessons of loneliness and shame he had learned himself. In public, he never spoke to or looked in her direction.
She grew accustomed to his detached expression as he pushed into her, that gaze off into middle distance, entirely involved with itself, the same blank look of a dog or monkey humping in the bazaar; until all of a sudden he seemed to skid from control and his expression slid right off his face. A moment later, before anything was revealed, it settled back again and he withdrew to spend a long fiddly time in the bathroom with soap, hot water, and Dettol. He followed his ablutions with a clinical measure of whiskey, as if consuming a disinfectant.
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The judge and Nimi traveled two days by train and by car, and when they arrived in Bonda, the judge rented a bungalow at the edge of the civil lines for thirty-five rupees a month, without water or electricity. He could afford nothing better until he repaid his debts, but still, he kept money aside to hire a companion for Nimi. A Miss Enid Pott who looked like a bulldog with a hat on top. Her previous employment had been governess to the children of Mr. Singh, the commissioner, and she had brought up her charges to call their mother Mam, their father Fa, had given them cod-liver oil for their collywobbles, and taught them to recite “Nellie Bly.” A photograph in her purse showed her