The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [89]
A modest geometry of morning light lay on the floor, a small rhombus falling through the grate. “Naaty boy,” Harish-Harry waggled his finger like a joke. The geometrical shape began to leak light, became shifty, exited slithering up the walls.
Return.
Come back.
Somebody in one of the kitchens of Biju’s past had said: “It could not be so hard or there would not be so many of you here.”
But it WAS so hard and YET there were so many here. It was terribly, terribly hard. Millions risked death, were humiliated, hated, lost their families—YET there were so many here.
But Harish-Harry knew this. How could he say “Return–come back,” in that easy oiled way?
“Naaty boy…” he said again when he brought Biju prasad from the temple in Queens. “Giving so much worry and trouble.”
And in that prasad Biju knew not to expect anything else. It was a decoy, an old Indian trick of master to servant, the benevolent patriarch garnering the loyalty of staff; offering slave wages, but now and then a box of sweets, a lavish gift….
So Biju lay on his mattress and watched the movement of the sun through the grate on the row of buildings opposite. From every angle that you looked at this city without a horizon, you saw more buildings going up like jungle creepers, starved for light, holding a perpetual half darkness congealed at the bottom, the day shafting through the maze, slivering into apartments at precise and fleeting times, a cuprous segment visiting between 10 and 12 perhaps, or between 10 and 10:45, between 2:30 and 3:45. As in places of poverty where luxury is rented out, shared, and passed along from neighbor to neighbor, its time of arrival was noted and anticipated by cats, plants, elderly people who might sit with it briefly across their knees. But this light was too brief for real succor and it seemed more the visitation of a beautiful memory than the real thing.
______
After two weeks, Biju could walk with the aid of a stick. Two more weeks and the pain left him, but not, of course, the underlying green card problem. That continued to make him ill.
His papers, his papers. The green card, green card, the machoot sala oloo ka patha chaar sau bees green card that was not even green. It roosted heavily, clumsily, pinkishly on his brain day and night; he could think of nothing else, and he threw up sometimes, embracing the toilet, emptying his gullet into its gullet, lying over it like a drunk. The post brought more letters from his father, and as he picked them up, he cried. Then he read them and he grew violently angry.
“Please help Oni…. I asked you in my previous letter but you have not replied…. He went to the embassy and the Americans were very impressed with him. He will be arriving in one month’s time…. Maybe he can stay with you until he finds something….” Biju began to grind his teeth through his nightmares, woke one morning with a tooth that had cracked across.
“You sound like a cement mixer,” complained Jeev, “I just can’t sleep myself, what with you grinding and the rats running.”
One night, Jeev woke and trapped a rat in the metal garbage can where it was foraging.
He poured in lighter fluid and set the rat aflame.
“Shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” men shouted from up above. “Shithead. What the fuck. For fuck’s sake. Asshole. Fuck you.” A rain of beer bottles crashed around them.
______
“Ask me the price of any shoes all over Manhattan and I’ll tell you where to get the best price.”
Saeed Saeed again. How did he come popping up all over the city?
“Come on, ask me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Pay attention, man,” he said with strict kindness. “Now you are here, you are not back home. Anything you want, you try and you can do.” His English was good enough now that he was reading two books, Stop Worrying and Start Living and How to Share Your Life with Another