The Inheritance of Loss (30 page)

"You have to say we have the best mountains in the world," said Bose. "Have you ever trekked up Sandak Fu? That Micky went—remember him? Stupid fellow? Wore new shoes and by the time he arrived at the base, he had developed such blisters he had to sit at the bottom, and his wife Mithu—remember her? lot of spirit? great girl?—she ran all the way to the top in her Hawaii
chappals.

"Remember Dickie, that one with a tweed coat and cherry pipe pretending to be an English lord, saying things like, ‘Look upon this hoary . . . hoary . . .

winter’s . . . light. . . et cetera?’ Had a retarded child and couldn’t take it. . . he killed himself.

"Remember Subramanium? Wife, a dumpy woman, four feet by four feet?

Cheered himself up with the Anglo secretary, but that wife of his, she booted him out of the house and took all the money . . . and once the money vanished so did the Anglo. Found some other bugger. . . ."

Bose threw back his head to laugh and his dentures came gnashing down. He hurriedly lowered his head and gobbled them up again. The judge was pained by the scene of them before they’d even properly embarked on the evening—two white-haired Fitzbillies in the corner of the club, water-stained
durries,
the grimacing head of a stuffed bear slipping low, half the stuffing fallen out. Wasps lived in the creature’s teeth, and moths lived in its fur, which also fooled some ticks that had burrowed in, confident of finding blood, and died of hunger. Above the fireplace, where a portrait of the king and queen of England in coronation attire had once hung, there was now one of Gandhi, thin and with ribs showing.

Hardly conducive to appetite or comfort in a club, the judge thought.

Still, you could imagine what it must have been like, planters in boiled shirts riding for miles through the mist, coattails in their pockets to meet for tomato soup. Had the contrast excited them, the playing of tiny tunes with fork and spoon, the dancing against a backdrop that celebrated blood-sports and brutality?

In the guest registers, the volumes of which were kept in the library, massacres were recorded in handwriting that had a feminine delicacy and perfect balance, seeming to convey sensitivity and good sense. Fishing expeditions to the Teesta had brought back, just forty years ago, a hundred pounds of
mahaseer.
Twain had shot thirteen tigers on the road between Calcutta and Darjeeling. But the mice hadn’t been shot out and they were chewing the matting and scurrying about as the two men talked.

"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 naïveté 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 St. John’s. No. First Clare, then Trinity, then some ladies’ thing, Primrose . . . Primrose?"

"No, that’s not the order at all," the judge heard himself saying in tight-wound offended tones like an adolescent. "It was Trinity then Clare."

"No, no, what are you saying. King’s, Corpus Christi, Clare, then St. John.

Memory going, old chap. . . ."

"I think
your
memory may be failing you
!
"

Bose was drinking peg after peg, desperate to wrangle something—a common memory, an establishment of truth that had, at least, a commitment from two people—

"No, no. King’s! Trinity!" he pounded his glass on the table. "Jesus! Clare!

Gonville! And then on to tea at Granchester!"

The judge could no longer bear it, he raised his hand into the air, counted fingers:

1. St. John’s!

2. Trinity!

3. Clare!

4. King’s!

Bose fell silent. He seemed relieved by the challenge. "Should we order some dinner?" asked the judge.

________

But Bose swung rapidly to another position—satisfaction either way—but depth, resolution. Still a question for Bose: should he damn the past or find some sense in it? Drunk, eyes aswim with tears, "Bastards!" he said with such bitterness.

"What bastards they were!" raising his voice as if attempting to grant himself conviction. "
Goras
—get away with everything don’t they?
Bloody white people.

They’re responsible for all the crimes of the century!"

Silence.

"Well," he said then, to the disapproving silence, trying to reconcile with it, "one thing we’re lucky for,
baap re,
is that they didn’t stay, thank God. At least they left

"

Still nothing from the judge.

"Not like in Africa—still making trouble over there. . . ."

Silence.

"Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much—now they can just do their dirty work from far away. . . ."

Jaw clenched unclenched hands clenched unclenched clenched.

"Oh, they weren’t all bad, I suppose. . . . Not all. . . ."

Jaw

clenched

unclenched

hands

clenched

unclenched

clenched

unclenched—

________

Then the judge burst out, despite himself:

"YES! YES! YES! They were bad. They were part of it. And we were part of the problem, Bose, exactly as much as you could argue that we were part of the solution."

And:

"Waiter!

"
Waiter!

"
Waiter?

"
Waiter!!

"
WAITER!!!’
’shouted the judge, in utter desperation.

"Probably gone chasing the hen," said Bose weakly. "I don’t think they were expecting anyone."

________

The judge walked into the kitchen and found two green chilis looking ridiculous in a tin cup on a wooden stand that read "Best Potato Exhibit 1933."

Nothing else.

He went to the front desk. "Nobody in the kitchen."

The man at the reception was half asleep. "It is very late, sir. Go next door to Glenary’s. They have a full restaurant and bar."

"We have come here for dinner. Should I report you to the management?"

Resentfully the man went around to the back, and eventually a reluctant waiter arrived at their table; dried lentil scabs on his blue jacket made yellow dabs. He had been having a snooze in an empty room—ubiquitous old-fashioned waiter that he was, functioning like a communist employee, existing comfortably away from horrible capitalist ideas of serving monied people politely.

"Roast mutton with mint sauce. Is the mutton tender?" asked the judge imperiously.

The waiter remained unintimidated: "Who can get tender mutton?" he said scornfully.

"Tomato soup?"

He considered this option but lacked the conviction to break free of the considering. After several undecided minutes had passed, Bose broke the spell by asking, "
Rissoles
?"
That might salvage the evening.

"Oh no," the waiter said, shaking his head and smiling insolently. "No,
that
you
cannot
get."

"Well, what do you have then?"

"Muttoncurrymuttonpulaovegetablecurryvegetablepulao. . . ."

"But you said the mutton wasn’t tender."

"Yes, I already told you, didn’t I?"

________

The food arrived. Bose made a valiant effort to retract and start over: "Just found a new cook myself," he said. "That Sheru kicked the bucket after thirty years of service. The new one is untrained, but he came cheap

because of that. I got out the recipe books and read them aloud as he copied it all down in Bengali. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘keep it basic, nothing fancy. Just learn a brown sauce and a white sauce—shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton.’"

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.