The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [81]
She had been abandoned by Miss Enid Pott who said, “Nimi seems to have made up her mind not to learn. You have a swaraji right under your nose, Mr. Patel. She will not argue—that way one might respond and have a dialogue—she just goes limp.”
Then there was her typically Indian bum—lazy, wide as a buffalo. The pungency of her red hair oil that he experienced as a physical touch.
“Take those absurd trinkets off,” he instructed her, riled by the tinkle-tonk of her bangles.
“Why do you have to dress in such a gaudy manner? Yellow and pink? Are you mad?” He threw the hair oil bottles away and her long hairs escaped no matter how tidily she made her bun. The judge found them winging their way across the room, treading air; he found one strangling a mushroom in his cream of mushroom soup.
One day he found footprints on the toilet seat—she was squatting on it, she was squatting on it!—he could barely contain his outrage, took her head and pushed it into the toilet bowl, and after a point, Nimi, made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. She peered out at the world but could not focus on it, never went to the mirror, because she couldn’t see herself in it, and anyway she couldn’t bear to spend a moment in dressing and combing, activities that were only for the happy and the loved.
When Jemubhai saw her, cheeks erupting in pustules, he took her fallen beauty as a further affront and felt concerned the skin disease would infect him as well. He instructed the servants to wipe everything with Dettol to kill germs. He powdered himself extra carefully with his new puff, each time remembering the one that had been cushioned between his wife’s obscene, clown-nosed breasts.
“Don’t show your face outside,” he said to her. “People might run from you screaming.” By year’s end the dread they had for each other was so severe it was as if they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.
Twenty-nine
“Christmas!” said Gyan. “You little fool!”
As he left he could hear Sai beginning to sob. “You dirty bastard,” she shouted through her weeping, “you get back here. Behave so badly and then run away??”
The sight of the wreck they’d made was alarming and his anger began to scare him as he saw her face through the bars of distorting emotion. He realized Sai could not be the cause of what he felt, but as he left he slammed the gate shut.
Christmas had never bothered him before—
She was defining his hatred, he thought. Through her, he caught sight of it—oh—and then he couldn’t resist sharpening it, if only for clarity’s sake.
Don’t you have any pride? Trying to be so Westernized. They don’t want you!!!! Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms. You will be trying to clean their toilets and even then they won’t want you.
______
Gyan returned to Cho Oyu.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
It took some coaxing.
“Behaving so badly!” said Sai.
“Sorry.”
But in the end she accepted his apology, because she was relieved to turn away from the realization that, for him, she was not the center of their romance. She had been mistaken—she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else’s story.
She turned from this thought into his kisses.
“I can’t resist you, that’s the problem….” Gyan said.
She, the temptress, laughed.
But human nature is what it is. The kisses were too soppy. A few moments more, the apology turned from sincere to insincere, and he was angry at himself for giving in.
______
Gyan went on to the canteen, sunset doing a mad Kali as he walked, and once again he felt the stir of purity. He would have to sacrifice silly kisses for his adulthood. A feeling