The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [84]
Nevertheless—the interview was a success.
“I can make any kind of pudding. Continental or Indian.”
“But that is excellent. We have a buffet of seventeen sweets each night.”
In a wonderful moment Biju was accepted and he signed on the dotted line of the proffered form.
The cook was so proud: “It was because of all the puddings I told the boy about…. They have a big buffet in the ship every night, the ship is like a hotel, you see, run just like the clubs in the past. The interviewer asked him what he could make and he said, ‘I can make this and that, anything you require. Baked Alaska, floating island, brandy snap.’”
“Are you sure he seemed legitimate?” asked the MetalBox watchman.
“Completely legitimate,” the cook said, defending the man who had so appreciated his son.
They went back to the hotel the next evening with a completed medical form and a bank draft of eight thousand rupees to cover his processing fee and the cost of the training camp that was to be held in Kathmandu, since it made sense to them all to pay to get a job. The recruiter made out a receipt for the bank draft, checked the medical forms that had been completed free by the bazaar doctor, who had been kind enough to show Biju’s blood pressure as being lower than it was, his weight as greater, and she had filled up the inoculations column with dates that would have been the correct time to have inoculations had he had them.
“Have to look perfect or the embassy people will make trouble and then what will you do?” She knew this because she’d sent her own son off on this journey some years ago. In return for the favor, Biju promised to take a packet of dried churbi cheese to the U.S. and mail it to her son doing a medical residency in Ohio, for the boy had been a boarder in a Darjeeling school and acquired the habit of chewing it as he studied.
Two weeks later, Biju traveled to Kathmandu by bus for a week of training at the recruiting agency’s main office.
Kathmandu was a carved wooden city of temples and palaces, caught in a disintegrating tangle of modern concrete that stretched into the dust and climbed into the sky.
He looked in vain for the mountains; Mt. Everest—where was it? He traversed along flat main roads into a knot of medieval passages full of the sounds of long ago, a street of metal workers, a street of potters melding clay, straw, sand, with their bare feet; rats in a Ganesh temple eating sweets. At one point a crooked shutter etched with stars opened and a face from a fairy tale looked out, pure among the muck, but when he looked back the young girl was gone; a wrinkled old crone had taken her place to talk to another old crone on her way with a puja tray of offerings; and then he was back out among the blocks of concrete, scooters, and buses. A billboard was painted with an underwear advertisement showing a giant, bulging underwear placket; across the bulge was a black crisscross. “No Pickpocket,” it warned. Some laughing foreigners were having their picture taken in front of it. Down a lane, around a corner, behind a cinema, there was a small butcher’s shop, with a row of yellow chicken feet in a decorative fringe over the door. A man stood outside, his hands dripping with meat juices over a basin of water tinged rust with blood, and the number inscribed on the side of the door matched the address Biju had in his pocket: 223 A block, ground floor, behind Pun Cinema House.
“Another one!” the man in front shouted to the back room. Several other men were there wrestling with an unwilling goat that had caught sight of a fellow grazer’s heart lying discarded on the floor.