The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [96]
“Remember how I took you to buy the coat in London? Remember that awful bloody thing you had? Looking like a real gow wallah? Remember how you used to pronounce Jheelee as Giggly? Remember? Ha ha.”
The judge’s heart filled with a surge of venomous emotion: how dare this man! Is this why he had made the journey, to raise himself up, put the judge down, establish a past position of power so as to be able to respect himself in the present?
“Remember Granchester? And is there honey still for tea?”
He and Bose in the boat, holding themselves apart in case they brush against the others and offend them with brown skin.
The judge looked for the waiter. They should order dinner, get this over with, make it an early night. He thought of Mutt waiting for him.
She would be at the window, her eyes hooked on the gate, tail uncurled between her legs, her body tense with waiting, her brows furrowed.
When he returned, he would pick up a stick.
“I could throw it? You could catch it? Should I?” he would ask her.
Yes yes yes yes—she would leap and jump, unable to bear the anticipation for a moment longer.
______
So he tried to ignore Bose, but hysterically, once he had begun, Bose accelerated the pace and tone of his invasiveness.
He had been one of the ICS men, the judge knew, who had mounted a court case to win a pension equal to that of a white ICS man, and they had lost, of course, and somehow the light had gone out of Bose.
Despite letter after letter typed on Bose’s portable Olivetti, the judge had refused to become involved. He’d already learned his cynicism by then and how Bose had kept his naiveté alive—well, it was miraculous. Even stranger, his naïveté had clearly been inherited by his son, for years later, the judge heard that the son, too, had fought a case against his employer, Shell Oil, and he, too, had lost. The son had reasoned that it was a different age with different rules, but it had turned out to be only a different version of the same old.
“It costs less to live in India,” they responded.
But what if they wished to have a holiday in France? Buy a bottle at the duty-free? Send a child to college in America? Who could afford it? If they were paid less, how would India not keep being poor? How could Indians travel in the world and live in the world the same way Westerners did? These differences Bose found unbearable.
But profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other. They were damning the third world to being third-world. They were forcing Bose and his son into an inferior position—thus far and no further—and he couldn’t take it. Not after believing he was their friend. He thought of how the English government and its civil servants had sailed away throwing their topis overboard, leaving behind only those ridiculous Indians who couldn’t rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn.
Again they went to court and again they would go to court with their unshakable belief in the system of justice. Again they lost. Again they would lose.
The man with the white curly wig and a dark face covered in powder, bringing down his hammer, always against the native, in a world that was still colonial.
______
In England they had a great good laugh, no doubt, but in India, too, everyone laughed with the joy of seeing people like Bose cheated. There they had thought they were superior, putting on airs, and they were just the same—weren’t they?—as the rest.
The more the judge’s mouth tightened, the more Bose seemed determined to drive the conversation until it broke.
“Best days of my life,” he said. “Remember? Punting by King’s, Trinity, what a view, my God, and then what was it? Ah yes, Corpus Christi…. No, I’m getting it wrong, aren’t I? First Trinity, then