The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [80]
Nimi learned no English, and it was out of stubbornness, the judge thought.
“What is this?” he questioned her angrily, holding aloft a pear.
“What is this?”—pointing at the gravy boat bought in a secondhand shop, sold by a family whose monogram had happily matched, JPP, in an extravagance of flourishes. He had bought it secretly and hidden it within another bag, so his painful pretension and his thrift would not be detected. James Peter Peterson or Jemubhai Popatlal Patel. IF you please.
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“What is this?” he asked holding up the bread roll.
Silence.
“If you can’t say the word, you can’t eat it.”
More silence.
He removed it from her plate.
Later that evening, he snatched the Ovaltine from her tentative sipping: “And if you don’t like it, don’t drink it.”
He couldn’t take her anywhere and squirmed when Mrs. Singh waggled her finger at him and said, “Where is your wife, Mr. Patel? None of that purdah business, I hope?” In playing her part in her husband’s career, Mrs. Singh had attempted to mimic what she considered a typical Englishwoman’s balance between briskly pleasant and firmly no-nonsense, and had thus succeeded in quashing the spirits of so many of the locals who prided themselves on being mostly nonsense.
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Nimi did not accompany her husband on tour, unlike the other wives, who went along on horseback or elephantback or camelback or in palkis upheld by porters (all of whom would, because of the ladies’ fat bottoms, die young), as rattling behind came the pots and pans and the bottle of whiskey and the bottle of port, Geiger counter and Scintillometre, the tuna fish tin and the mad-with-anxiety live chicken. Nobody had ever told it, but it knew; it was in its soul, that anticipation of the hatchet.
Nimi was left to sit alone in Bonda; three weeks out of four, she paced the house, the garden. She had spent nineteen years within the confines of her father’s compound and she was still unable to contemplate the idea of walking through the gate. The way it stood open for her to come and go—the sight filled her with loneliness. She was uncared for, her freedom useless, her husband disregarded his duty.
She climbed up the stairs to the flat roof in the slow civility of summer dusks, and watched the Jamuna flowing through a scene tenderly co-cooned in dust. Cows were on their way home; bells were ringing in the temple; she could see birds testing first one tree as a roost for the night, then another, all the while making an overexcited noise like women in a sari shop. Across the river, in the distance, she could see the ruins of a hunting lodge that dated to the Mughal emperor Jehangir: just a few pale arches still upholding carvings of irises. The Mughals had descended from the mountains to invade India but, despite their talent in waging war, were softhearted enough to weep for the loss of this flower in the heat; the persistent dream of the iris was carved everywhere, by craftsman who felt the nostalgia, saw the beauty of what they had made and never known.
The sight of this scene, of history passing and continuing, touched Nimi in a desolate way. She had fallen out of life altogether. Weeks went by and she spoke to nobody, the servants thumped their own leftovers on the table for her to eat, stole the supplies without fear, allowed the house to grow filthy without guilt until the day before Jemubhai’s arrival when suddenly it was brought to luster again, the clock set to a timetable, water to a twenty-minute boil, fruit soaked for the prescribed number of minutes in solutions of potassium permanganate. Finally Jemubhai’s new second-hand car—that looked more like a friendly stout cow than an automobile—would come belching through the gate.
He entered the house briskly, and when he found his wife rudely contradicting his ambition—
Well, his irritation was too much to bear.
Even her expressions annoyed him, but as they were gradually replaced by a blankness, he became upset by their absence.
What would