The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [98]
But he couldn’t manage to keep this up.
He now pleaded directly with the judge: “We’re friends, aren’t we?
“Aren’t we? Aren’t we friends?”
“Time passes, things change,” said the judge, feeling claustrophobia and embarrassment.
“But what is in the past remains unchanged, doesn’t it?”
“I think it does change. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind, Bose.”
The judge knew that he would never communicate with Bose again. He wanted neither to pretend he had been the Englishman’s friend (all those pathetic Indians who glorified a friendship that was later proclaimed by the other [white] party to be nonexistent!), nor did he wish to allow himself to be dragged through the dirt. He had kept up an immaculate silence and he wasn’t about to have Bose destroy it. He wouldn’t tumble his pride to melodrama at the end of his life and he knew the danger of confession—it would cancel any hope of dignity forever. People pounced on what you gave them like a raw heart and gobbled it up.
The judge called for the bill, once, twice, but even the bill was unimportant to the waiter. He was forced to walk back into the kitchen.
Bose and the judge shook a soggy handshake, and the judge wiped his hands on his pants when they were done, but still, Bose’s eye on him was like mucous.
“Good night. Good-bye. So long”—not Indian sentences. English sentences. Perhaps that’s why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place: the self-consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.
______
The mist was hooked tightly into the tea bushes on either side of the road as he left Darjeeling, and the judge could barely see. He drove slowly, no other cars, nothing around, and then, damn it—
A memory of—
Six little boys at a bus stop.
“Why is the Chinaman yellow? He pees against the wind, HA HA. Why is the Indian brown? He shits upside down, HA HA HA.”
Taunting him in the street, throwing stones, jeering, making monkey faces. How strange it was: he had feared children, been scared of these human beings half his size.
Then he remembered a worse incident. Another Indian, a boy he didn’t know, but no doubt someone just like himself, just like Bose, was being kicked and beaten behind the pub at the corner. One of the boy’s attackers had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a crowd of jeering red-faced men. And the future judge, walking by, on his way home with a pork pie for his dinner—what had he done? He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t called for help. He’d turned and fled, run up to his rented room and sat there.
______
Without thinking, the judge made the calibrated gestures, the familiar turns back to Cho Oyu, instead of over the edge of the mountainside.
Close to home, he almost ran into an army jeep parked by the side of the road, lights off. The cook and a couple of soldiers were hiding boxes of liquor in the bushes. The judge swore but continued on. He knew about this side business of the cook’s and ignored it. It was his habit to be a master and the cook’s to be a servant, but something had changed in their relationship within a system that kept servant and master both under an illusion of security.
Mutt was waiting for him at the gate, and the judge’s expression softened—he blew his horn to signal his arrival. In a second she went from being the unhappiest dog in the world to the happiest and Jemubhai’s heart grew young with pleasure.
The cook opened the gate, Mutt jumped into the seat next to him, and they rode together from the gate to the garage—this was her treat and even when he stopped driving anywhere, he gave her rides about the property to entertain her. As soon as she’d get in, she would acquire a regal air, angling her