The Inheritance of Loss

Sixteen

When Sai became interested in love, she became interested in other people’s love affairs, and she pestered the cook about the judge and his wife.

The cook said: "When I joined the household, all the old servants told me that the death of your grandmother made a cruel man out of your grandfather. She was a great lady, never raised her voice to the servants. How much he loved her! In fact, it was such a deep attachment, it turned one’s stomach, for it was too much for anybody else to look upon."

"Did he really love her so very much?" Sai was astonished.

"Must have," said the cook. "But they said he didn’t show it."

"Maybe he didn’t?" she then suggested.

"Bite your tongue, you evil girl. Take your words back!" shouted the cook. "Of course he loved her."

"How did the servants know, then?"

The cook thought a bit, thought of his own wife. "True," he said.

Nobody really knew, but no one said anything in those days, for there are many ways of showing love, not just the way of the movies – which is all you know. You are a very foolish girl. The greatest love is love that’s never shown."

"You say anything that suits you."

"Yes, I’ve found it’s the best way," said the cook after thinking some more.

"So? Did he or didn’t he?"

The cook and Sai were sitting with Mutt on the steps leading to the garden, picking the ticks off her, and this was always an hour of contentment for them. The large khaki-bag ones were easy to dispatch, but the tiny brown ticks were hard to kill; they flattened against the depressions in the rock, so when you hit them with a stone, they didn’t die but in a flash were up and running.

Sai chased them up and down. "Don’t run away, don’t you dare climb back on Mutt."

Then they tried to drown them in a can of water, but they were tough, swam about, climbed on one another’s backs and crawled out. Sai chased them down again, put them back in the can, rushed to the toilet, and flushed them, but even then they resurfaced, doing a mad-scrabble swim in the toilet bowl.

Remembrance, now authentic, shone from the cook’s eyes.

"Oh no," said the cook. "He didn’t like her at all. She went mad."

"She did?!"

"Yes, they said she was a very mad lady."

"Who was she?"

"I’ve forgotten the name, but she was the daughter of a rich man and the family was of much higher standing than your grandfather, of a particular branch of a caste that in itself was not high, of course, as you know, but within this group, they had distinguished themselves. You could tell from her features, which were delicate; her toes, nose, ears, and fingers were all very fine and small, and she was very fair – just like milk. Complexion-wise, they said, you could have mistaken her for a foreigner. Her family only married among fifteen families, but an exception was made for your grandfather because he was in the ICS. But more than that I do not know."

"Who was my grandmother?" Sai then asked the judge sitting poised like a heron over his chessboard. "Did she come from a very fancy family?"

He said: "I’m playing chess, can’t you see?"

He looked back at the board, and then he got up and walked into the garden. Flying squirrels chased one another through the circination of ferns and mist; the mountains were like ibex horns piercing through. He returned to his chessboard and made his move, but it felt like an old move in an old game.

He didn’t want to think of her, but the picture that came to mind was surprisingly gentle.

The Patels had been dreaming of sending their son to England, but there wasn’t enough money no matter how much Jemu’s father worked, so they visited the moneylenders, who surveyed father and son with the sleepiness of crocodiles and then pounced with an offer of ten thousand rupees. At 22 percent interest.

There still wasn’t enough, though, and they began to search for a bride.

Jemu would be the first boy of their community to go to an English university. The dowry bids poured in and his father began an exhilarated weighing and tallying: ugly face – a little more gold, a pale skin – a little less. A dark and ugly daughter of a rich man seemed their best bet.

On the other side of Piphit, by the military cantonment, lived a short man with a rhinocerous-like nose that seemed to travel up, not down, who carried a malacca cane, wore a long coat of brocade, and lived in a haveli carved so delicately it seemed weightless. This was Bomanbhai Patel. It was his father who had discreetly helped the right side in a certain skirmish between the English and the Gaekwads, and he was repaid by the regimental quartermaster with a contract to be the official supplier of horse feed to the British military encampment at Piphit. Eventually, the family had monopolized the delivery of all dry goods to the army, and when Bomanbhai succeeded his father, he saw the way to greater profit yet by extending his business seamlessly into another. He offered soldiers unauthorized women in an unauthorized part of town on whom they might spend their aggrandizement of manhood; returned them to their barracks strewn about with black hairs, and smelling like rabbits from a rabbit hutch.

Bomanbhai’s own wife and daughters, however, were kept carefully locked up behind the high walls of the haveli outside which a plaque read:

"Residence of Bomanbhai Patel, Military Purveyor, Financier, Merchant." Here they lived an idle existence inside the women’s quarters, the strictness of this purdah enforcement increasing Bomanbhai’s honor in the community, and he began to acquire little fancies and foibles, to cultivate certain eccentricities that, just as he plotted, reiterated the security of his wealth and reinforced his honor all over again. He displayed his purchases, his habits casually but planned them with exactitude – acquired his trademark coat of brocade, his polished cane and kept a pet pangolin, since he had an affinity with all big-nosed creatures. He ordered a set of stained-glass panes that flooded the haveli with luscious multi-fruit-colored light under which the children played, entertained by how they might look orange or purple or half orange and half green.

Traveling Chinamen selling lace and silk waited outside as their wares were taken to the women for inspection. Jewelers brought rare pieces for the daughters’ dowries, heirlooms being sold by a bankrupt raja. Bomanbhai’s wife’s earlobes lengthened with the weight of South African diamonds, so great, so heavy, that one day, from one ear, an earring ripped through, a meteor disappearing with a bloody clonk into her bowl of srikhand.

But the zenith of triumph came when he, nothing but a tin shack shopkeeper by origin, but richer than all the Brahmins in town, hired a Brahmin cook who upheld the laws of pollution so strictly that should you even utter "eendoo," egg, in the kitchen, every pot and pan, every spoon would have to be washed, all the food thrown away.

One day a group of men almost quacking in their excitement, crowded in to see Bomanbhai and told him of Jemu’s imminent departure for England. Bomanbhai’s eyebrows drew together as he mulled over the information, but he said nothing, sipped a little Exshaw No. 1 brandy with hot water in a Venetian goblet.

Ambition still gnawed at him, and Brahmin cook he might have, but he knew that there was a wider world and only very rarely did history provide a chink allowing an acrobatic feat. A week later, he got into his landau drawn by two white mares, drove past the British Club on Thornton Road he could never join no matter how much money he had in his pocket, all the way to the other side of town, and there, he stunned the residents of the Patel warren with the offer of Bela, his most beautiful daughter, who lay with her sisters in their big bed complaining of boredom under a crystal chandelier that provided the luxurious look of ice in the summer heat.

If Jemu succeeded in his endeavor, she would be the wife of one of the most powerful men in India.

The wedding party lasted a week and was so opulent that nobody in Piphit could doubt but the family lived a life awash in ghee and gold, so when Bomanbhai bent over with a namaste and begged his guests to eat and drink, they knew his modesty was false – and of the best kind, therefore. The bride was a polished light-reflecting hillock of jewels, barely able to walk under the gem and metal weight she carried. The dowry included cash, gold, emeralds from Venezuela, rubies from Burma, uncut kundun diamonds, a watch on a watch chain, lengths of woolen cloth for her new husband to make into suits in which to travel to England, and in a crisp envelope, a ticket for passage on the SS Strathnaver from Bombay to Liverpool.

When she married, her name was changed into the one chosen by Jemubhai’s family, and in a few hours, Bela became Nimi Patel.

Jemubhai, made brave by alcohol and the thought of his ticket, attempted to pull off his wife’s sari, as much gold as silk, as she sat on the edge of the bed, just as his younger uncles had advised him, smacking him on the back.

He was almost surprised to discover a face beneath the gilded lump. It was strung with baubles, but even they could not entirely disguise the fourteen-year-old crying in terror: "Save me," she wept.

He himself was immediately terrified, frightened by her fright. The spell of arrogance broken, he retreated to his meek self. "Don’t cry," he said in a panic, trying to undo the damage. "Listen, I’m not looking, I’m not even looking at you." He returned the heavy fabric to her, bundled it back over her head, but she continued to sob.

Next morning, the uncles laughed. "What happened? Nothing?" They gestured at the bed.

More laughter the next day.

The third day, worry.

"Force her," the uncles urged him. "Insist. Don’t let her behave badly."

"Other families would not be so patient," they warned Nimi.

"Chase her and pin her down," the uncles ordered Jemubhai.

Though he felt provoked, and sometimes recognized a focused and defined urge in himself, in front of his wife, the desire vanished.

"Spoiled," they said to Nimi. "Putting on airs."

How could she not be happy with their brainy Jemu, the first boy from their community to go to England?

But Jemubhai began to feel sorry for her, as well as for himself, as they shared this ordeal of inaction through one night and another.

While the family was out selling the jewels for extra money, he offered her a ride on his father’s Hercules cycle. She shook her head, but when he rode up, a child’s curiosity conquered her commitment to tears and she climbed on sideways. "Stick your legs out," he instructed and worked away at the pedals. They went faster and faster, between the trees and cows, whizzing through the cow pats.

Jemubhai turned, caught quick sight of her eyes – oh, no man had eyes like these or looked out on the world this way…

He pedaled harder. The ground sloped, and as they flew down the incline, their hearts were left behind for an instant, levitating amid green leaves, blue sky.

The judge looked up from his chess. Sai had climbed up a tree at the garden’s edge. From its branches you could look onto the road curving down below and she would be able to catch Gyan’s approach.

Each succeeding week of mathematics tutoring, the suspense was growing until they could barely sit in the same room without desiring to flee. She had a headache. He had to leave early. They made excuses, but the minute they left each other’s company, they were restless and curiously angry, and they waited again for the following Tuesday, anticipation rising unbearably.

The judge walked over.

"Get down."

"Why?"

"It’s making Mutt nervous to see you up there."

Mutt looked up at Sai, wagged, not a shadow crossed her eyes.

"Really?" said Sai.

"I hope that tutor of yours doesn’t get any funny ideas," said the judge, then.

"What funny ideas?"

"Get down at once."

Sai got down and went indoors and shut herself up in her room. One day she would leave this place.

"Time should move," Noni had told her. "Don’t go in for a life where time doesn’t pass, the way I did. That is the single biggest bit of advice I can give you."