The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [91]
The garden at St. Joseph’s Convent was abuzz with such fecundity that Sai wondered, as they drove by in the jeep, if it discomfited the nuns. Huge, spread-open Easter lilies were sticky with spilling anthers; insects chased each other madly through the sky, zip zip; and amorous butterflies, cucumber green, tumbled past the jeep windows into the deep marine valleys; the delicacy of love and courtliness apparent even between the lesser beasts.
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Gyan and Sai—she thought of the two of them together, of their fight over Christmas; it was ugly, and how badly it contrasted with the past. She remembered her face in his neck, arms and legs over and under, bellies, fingers, here then there, so much so that at times she kissed him and found instead that she’d kissed herself.
“Jesus is coming,” read a sign on the landslide reinforcements as they nose-dived to the Teesta.
“To become a Hindu,” someone had added in chalk underneath.
This struck Father Booty as very funny, but he stopped laughing when they passed the Amul billboard.
Utterly Butterly Delicious—
“Plastic! How can they call it butter and cheese? It’s not. You could use it for waterproofing!”
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Lola and Noni were waving out of the jeep window. “Hello, Mrs. Thondup.” Mrs. Thondup, from an aristocratic Tibetan family, was sitting out with her daughters Pem Pem and Doma in jewel-colored bakus and pale silk blouses woven subtly with the eight propitious Buddhist signs. These daughters, who attended Loreto Convent, were supposed to make friends with Sai—once, long ago, so the adults had conspired—but they didn’t want to be her friends. They had friends already. All full up. No room for oddness.
“What an elegant lady,” Lola and Noni always said when they saw her, for they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful: the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx.
Thus, they did not wave to Mrs. Sen emerging from the post office. “They keep begging and begging my daughter to please just take a green card,” Lola mimicked her neighbor. Liar, liar, pants on fire….
They waved again as they passed the Afghan princesses sitting on cane chairs among white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick. From their house came the unmistakable smell of chicken.
“Soup?” shouted Uncle Potty, already hungry, nose trembling with excitement. He had missed his usual leftovers-inside-an-omelet breakfast.
“Soup!”
Waving, then, at the Graham’s School orphans in the playground—they were so angelically beautiful, they looked as if they had already died and gone to heaven.
The army came jogging along overlaid by courting butterflies and the colorful dashes—blue, red, orange—of dragonflies, hinged in the severely cricked geometric angles of their mating. The men puffed and panted, their spindly legs protruding from comically wide shorts: how would they defend India against the Chinese so close over the mountains at Nathu-La?
From the army mess kitchens came rumors of increasing vegetarianism.
Lola often encountered young officers who were not only vegetarian, but also teetotalers. Even the top command.
“I think to be in the army you should eat fish at least,” she said.
“Why?” asked Sai.
“To kill you must be carnivorous or otherwise you’re the hunted. Just look at nature—the deer, the cow. We are animals after all and to triumph you must taste blood.” But the army was retreating from being a British-type army and was becoming a true Indian army. Even in choice of paint. They passed the Striking Lion’s Club that was painted a bridal pink.
“Well,” said Noni, “they must be tired of that mud color over every single thing.”
“FLOWERS,” it read on a grand sign nearby as part of the Army Beautification Program, though it was the only spot on the hill where there were none.
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They stopped for a pair of young monks crossing to the gates of a mansion recently bought by their order.
“Hollywood money,” Lola said. “And once upon a time the monks used to be grateful to