The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [85]
“You’ve been cheated,” the butcher laughed. “So many people have been asking to go the USA.”
The men trussed up the goat and came out grinning, all with bloody vests. “Ah, idiot. Who goes and gives money like that? Where do you come from? What do you think the world is made of? Criminals! Criminals! Go file a report at the police station. Not that they will do anything….”
Before the butcher slit the goat’s throat, Biju could hear him working up his disdain, yelling “Bitch, whore, cunt, sali,” at her, dragging her forward then, and killing her.
You have to swear at a creature to be able to destroy it.
As Biju stood dazed outside, wondering what to do, they skinned her, slung her upside down to drain.
______
His second attempt at America was a simple, straightforward application for a tourist visa.
A man from his village had made fifteen tries and recently, on the sixteenth, he got the visa.
“Never give up,” he’d advised the boys in the village, “at some point your lucky day will come.”
“Is this the Amriken embassy?” Biju asked a watchman outside the formidable exterior.
“Amreeka nehi, bephkuph. This is U.S. embassy!”
He walked on: “Where is the Amriken embassy?”
“It is there.” The man pointed back at the same building.
“That is U.S.”
“It is the same thing,” said the man impatiently. “Better get it straight before you get on the plane, bhai.”
Outside, a crowd of shabby people had been camping, it appeared, for days on end. Whole families that had traveled from distant villages, eating food packed and brought with them; some individuals with no shoes, some with cracked plastic ones; all smelling already of the ancient sweat of a never-ending journey. Once you got inside, it was air-conditioned and you could wait in rows of orange bucket chairs that shook if anyone along the length began to bop their knees up and down.
______
First name: Balwinder
Last name: Singh
Other names:––––
What would those be??
Pet names, someone said, and trustfully they wrote: “Guddu, Dumpy, Plumpy, Cherry, Ruby, Pinky, Chicky, Micky, Vicky, Dicky, Sunny, Bunny, Honey, Lucky….”
After thinking a bit, Biju wrote “Baba.”
“Demand draft? Demand draft?” said the touts going by in the auto rickshaws. “Passport photo chahiye? Passport photo? Campa Cola chahiye, Campa Cola?”
Sometimes every single paper the applicants brought with them was fake: birth certificates, vaccination records from doctors, offers of monetary support. There was a lovely place you could go, clerks by the hundreds sitting cross-legged before typewriters, ready to help with stamps and the correct legal language for every conceivable requirement….
“How do you find so much money?” Someone in the line was worried he would be refused for the small size of his bank account.
“Ooph, you cannot show so little,” laughed another, looking over his shoulder with frank appraisal. “Don’t you know how to do it?”
“How?”
“My whole family,” he explained, “uncles from all over, Dubai–New Zealand–Singapore, wired money into my cousin’s account in Tulsa, the bank printed the statement, my cousin sent a notarized letter of support, and then he sent the money back to where it had come from. How else can you find enough to please them!”
An announcement was made from the invisible loudspeaker: “Will all visa applicants line up at window number seven to collect a number for visa processing.”
“What what, what did they say?” Biju, like half the room, didn’t understand, but he saw from the ones who did, who were running, pleased to be given a head start, what they should do. Stink and spit and scream and charge; they jumped toward the window, tried to splat themselves against it hard enough that they would just stick and not scrape off; young men mowing through, tossing aside toothless grannies, trampling babies underfoot. This was no place for manners and this is how the line was formed: wolf-faced single men first, men with families second, women on their own and Biju, and last, the decrepit. Biggest pusher, first place; how self-contented and smiling he was; he dusted himself off,