The Inheritance of Loss

Eighteen

"Oh, bat, bat," said Lola, panicking, as one swooped by her ear with its high-pitched choo choo.

"What does it matter, just a bit of shoe leather flying about," said Noni, looking, in her pale summer sari, as if she were a blob of melting vanilla ice cream…

"Oh shut up," said Lola.

"It’s too hot and stuffy," Lola said then, by way of apology to her sister. The monsoon must be on its way.

It was just two months after Gyan had arrived to teach Sai, and Sai had at first confused the tension in the air with his presence.

But now everyone was complaining. Uncle Potty sat limply. "It’s building. Early this year. Better get me rum in, dolly, before the old boy is maroooooned."

Lola sipped a Disprin that fizzed and hopped in the water.

When the papers, too, reported the approach of storm clouds, she became quite merry: "I told you. I can always tell. I’ve always been very sensitive. You know how I am – the princess and the pea – my dear, what can I say – the princess and the pea."

At Cho Oyu, the judge and Sai sat out on the lawn. Mutt, catching sight of the shadow of her own tail, leapt and caught it, began to whizz around and around, confused as to whose tail it was. She would not let go, but her eyes expressed confusion and beseeching – how could she stop? what should she do? – she had caught a strange beast and didn’t know it was herself. She went skittering helplessly about the garden.

"Silly girl," said Sai.

"Little pearl," said the judge when Sai left, in case Mutt’s feelings had been bruised.

Then, in a flash, it was upon them. An anxious sound came from the banana trees as they began to flap their great ears for they were always the first to sound the alarm. The masts of bamboo were flung together and rang with the sound of an ancient martial art.

In the kitchen, the cook’s calendar of gods began to kick on the wall as if it were alive, a plethora of arms, legs, demonic heads, blazing eyes.

The cook clamped everything shut, doors and windows, but then Sai opened the door just as he was sifting the flour to get rid of the weevils, and up the flour gusted and covered them both.

"Ooof ho. Look what you’ve done." Little burrowing insects ran free and overexcitedly on the floor and walls. Looking at each other covered with white, they began to laugh.

"Angrez ke tarah. Like the English."

"Angrez ke tarah. Angrez jaise."

Sai put her head out. "Look," she said, feeling jolly, "just like English people."

The judge began to cough as an acrid mix of smoke and chili spread into the drawing room. "Stupid fool," he said to his granddaughter. "Shut the door!"

But the door shut itself along with all the doors in the house. Bang bang bang. The sky gaped, lit by flame; blue fire ensnared the pine tree that sizzled to an instant death leaving a charcoal stump, a singed smell, a Crosshatch of branches over the lawn. An unending rain broke on them and Mutt turned into a primitive life form, an amoebic creature, slithering about the floor.

A lightning conductor atop Cho Oyu ran a wire into an underground pit of salt, which would save them, but Mutt couldn’t understand. With renewed thunder and a blast upon the tin roof, she sought refuge behind the curtains, under the beds. But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds in the empty soda bottles: whoo hoooo hooo.

"Don’t be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It’s just rain."

She tried to smile, but her tail kept folding under and her eyes were those of a soldier in war, finished with caring for silly myths of courage. Her ears strained beyond the horizon, anticipating what didn’t fail to arrive, yet another wave of bombardment, the sound of civilization crumbling – she had never known it was so big – cities and monuments fell – and she fled again.

This aqueous season would last three months, four, maybe five. In Cho Oyu, a leak dripping into the toilet played a honky-tonk, until it was interrupted by Sai, who held an umbrella over herself when she went inside the bathroom. Condensation fogged the glass of clocks, and clothes hanging to dry in the attic remained wet for a week. A white scurf sifted down from the beams, a fungus spun a shaggy age over everything. Bits of color, though, defined this muffled scene: insects flew in carnival gear; bread, in a day, turned green as grass; Sai, pulling open her underwear drawer, found a bright pink jelly scalloping the layers of dreary cotton; and the bound volumes of National Geographic fell open to pages bruised with flamboyant disease, purple-yellow molds rivaling the bower birds of Papua New Guinea, the residents of New Orleans, and the advertisements – "It’s better in the Bahamas!" – that it showcased.

Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these months, the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense and she could experience the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible. She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail. Phones emitted a death rattle, televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour. And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing, chilly and solitary – not anything you could grasp. The world vanished, the gate opened onto nothing – no Gyan around the bend of the mountain – and that terrible feeling of waiting released its stranglehold. Even Uncle Potty was impossible to visit for the jhora had overflowed its banks and carried the bridge downstream.

At Mon Ami, Lola, fiddling the knob of the radio, had to relinquish proof that her daughter Pixie still prevailed in a dry place amid news of bursting rivers, cholera, crocodile attacks, and Bangladeshis up in their trees again. "Oh well," Lola sighed, "perhaps it will wash out the hooligans in the bazaar."

Recently a series of strikes and processions had indicated growing political discontent. And now a three-day strike and a raasta roko roadblock endeavor were postponed because of the weather. What was the point of preventing rations from getting through if they weren’t getting through anyway? How to force offices to close when they were going to remain closed? How to shut down streets when the streets had gone? Even the main road into Kalimpong from Teesta Bazaar had simply slipped off the incline and lay in pieces down in the gorge below.

Between storms, a grub-white sun appeared and everything began to sour and steam as people rushed to market.

Gyan, though, walked in the other direction, to Cho Oyu.

He was worried about the tuition and worried his payment might be denied him, that he and Sai had fallen far behind in the syllabus. So he told himself, slipping about the slopes, clutching onto plants.

Really, though, he walked in this direction because the rain’s pause had brought forth, once again, that unbearable feeling of anticipation, and under its influence he couldn’t sit still. He found Sai among the newspapers that had arrived on the Siliguri bus, two weeks’ worth bunched together. Each leaf had been ironed dry separately by the cook. Several species of ferns were bushy about the veranda, frilled with drops; elephant ears held trembling clutches of rain spawn; and all the hundreds of invisible spiderwebs in the bushes around the house had become visible, lined in silver, caught with trailing tissues of cloud. Sai was wearing her kimono, a present from Uncle Potty, who had found it in a chest of his mother’s, a souvenir of her voyage to Japan to see the cherry blossoms. It was made of scarlet silk, gilded with dragons, and thus Sai sat, mysterious and highlighted in gold, an empress of a wild kingdom, glowing against its lush scene.

The country, Sai noted, was coming apart at the seams: police unearthing militants in Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram; Punjab on fire with Indira Gandhi dead and gone in October of last year; and those Sikhs with their Kanga, Kachha, etc., still wishing to add a sixth K, Khalistan, their own country in which to live with the other five Ks.

In Delhi the government had unveiled its new financial plan after much secrecy and debate. It had seen fit to reduce taxes on condensed milk and ladies’ undergarments, and raise them on wheat, rice, and kerosene.

"Our darling Piu," an obituary outlined in black had a photo of a smiling child – "seven years have passed since you left for your heavenly abode, and the pain has not gone. Why were you so cruelly snatched away before your time? Mummy keeps crying to think of your sweet smile. We cannot make sense of our lives. Anxiously awaiting your reincarnation."

"Good afternoon," said Gyan.

She looked up and he felt a deep pang.

Back at the dining table, the mathematics books between them, tortured by graphs, by decimal points of perfect measurement, Gyan was conscious of the fact that a being so splendid should not be seated before a shabby textbook; it was wrong of him to have forced this ordinariness upon her – the bisection and rebisection of the bisection of an angle. Then, as if to reiterate the fact that he should have remained at home, it began to pour again and he was forced to shout over the sound of rain on the tin roof, which imparted an epic quality to geometry that was clearly ridiculous.

An hour later, it was still hammering down. "I had better go," he said desperately.

"Don’t," she squeaked, "you might get killed by lightning."

It began to hail.

"I really must," he said.

"Don’t," warned the cook, "In my village a man stuck his head out of the door in a hailstorm, a big goli fell on him and he died right away."

The storm’s grip intensified, then weakened as night fell, but it was far too dark by this time for Gyan to pick his way home through a hillside of ice eggs.

The judge looked irritably across the chops at Gyan. His presence, he felt, was an insolence, a liberty driven if not by intent then certainly by foolishness. "What made you come out in such weather, Charlie?" he said. "You might be adept at mathematics, but common sense appears to have eluded you."

No answer. Gyan seemed ensnared by his own thoughts.

The judge studied him.

He detected an obvious lack of familiarity, a hesitance with the cutlery and the food, yet he sensed Gyan was someone with plans. He carried an unmistakable whiff of journey, of ambition – and an old emotion came back to the judge, a recognition of weakness that was not merely a feeling, but also a taste, like fever. He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner. Bitterness flooded the judge’s mouth.

"So," he said, slicing the meat expertly off the bone, "so, what poets are you reading these days, young man?" He felt a sinister urge to catch the boy off guard.

"He is a science student," said Sai.

"So what of that? Scientists are not barred from poetry, or are they?

"Whatever happened to the well-rounded education?" he said into the continuing silence.

Gyan racked his brains. He never read any poets. "Tagore?" he answered uncertainly, sure that was safe and respectable.

"Tagore!" The judge speared a bit of meat with his fork, dunked it in the gravy, piled on a bit of potato and mashed on a few peas, put the whole thing into his mouth with the fork held in his left hand.

"Overrated," he said after he had chewed well and swallowed, but despite this dismissal, he gestured an order with his knife: "Recite us something, won’t you?"

"Where the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls… Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let me and my country awake." Every schoolchild in India knew at least this.

The judge began to laugh in a cheerless and horrible manner.

How he hated this dingy season. It angered him for reasons beyond Mutt’s unhappiness; it made a mockery of him, his ideals. When he looked about he saw he was not in charge: mold in his toothbrush, snakes slithering unafraid right over the patio, furniture gaining weight, and Cho Oyu also soaking up water, crumbling like a mealy loaf. With each storm’s bashing, less of it was habitable.

The judge felt old, very old, and as the house crumbled about him, his mind, too, seemed to be giving way, doors he had kept firmly closed between one thought and the next, dissolving. It was now forty years since he had been a student of poetry.

The library had never been open long enough.

He arrived as it opened, departed when it closed, for it was the rescuer of foreign students, proffered privacy and a lack of thugs.

He read a book entitled Expedition to Goozerat: "The Malabar coast undulates in the shape of a wave up the western flank of India, and then, in a graceful motion, gestures toward the Arabian sea. This is Goozerat. At the river deltas and along the malarial coasts lie towns configured for trade…"

What on earth was all of this? It had nothing to do with what he remembered of his home, of the Patels and their life in the Patel warren, and yet, when he unfolded the map, he found Piphit. There it was – a mosquito speck by the side of a sulky river.

With amazement, he read on, of scurvied sailors arriving, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese. In their care the tomato traveled to India, and also the cashew nut. He read that the East India Company had rented Bombay at ten pounds a year from Charles II who came by it, a jujube in his dowry bag upon his wedding to Catherine of Braganza, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, he learned that mock turtle soup was being trawled on ships through the Suez to feed those who might be pining for it in rice and dal country. An Englishman might sit against a tropical background, yellow yolk of sun, shine spun into the palms, and consume a Yarmouth herring, a Breton oyster. This was all news to him and he felt greedy for a country that was already his.

Mid morning he rose from his books, went to the lavatory for the daily trial of his digestion, where he sat straining upon the pot with pained and prolonged effort. As he heard others shuffling outside, waiting for their turn, he stuck a finger up the hole and excavated within, allowing a backed up load of scropulated goat pellets to rattle down loudly. Had they heard him outside? He tried to catch them before they bulleted the water. His finger emerged covered in excrement and blood, and he washed his hands repeatedly, but the smell persisted, faintly trailing him through his studies. As time went on, Jemubhai worked harder. He measured out a reading calendar, listed each book, each chapter in a complex chart. Topham’s Law of Property, Aristotle, Indian Criminal Procedure, the Penal Code and the Evidence Act.

He worked late into the night back in his rented room, still tailed by the persistent smell of shit, falling from his chair directly into bed, rising in terror a few hours later, and rolling up onto the chair again. He worked eighteen hours a day, over a hundred hours a week, sometimes stopping to feed his landlady’s dog when she begged for a share of pork pie dinner, drooling damp patches onto his lap, raking an insistent paw across his knees and wrecking the pleat of his corduroys. This was his first friendship with an animal, for in Piphit the personalities of dogs were not investigated or encouraged. Three nights before the Probation Finals, he did not sleep at all, but read aloud to himself, rocking back and forth to the rhythm, repeating, repeating.

A journey once begun, has no end. The memory of his ocean trip shone between the words. Below and beyond, the monsters of his unconscious prowled, awaiting the time when they would rise and be proven real and he wondered if he’d dreamt of the drowning power of the sea before his first sight of it.

His landlady brought his dinner tray right to his door. A treat: a quadruplet of handsome oily sausages, confident, gleaming, whizzing with life. Ready already for the age when food would sing on television to advertise itself.

"Don’t work too hard."

"One must, Mrs. Rice."

He had learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay, to keep even himself away from himself like the Queen.

Open Competitive Examination, June 1942

He sat before a row of twelve examiners and the first question was put to him by a professor of London University – Could he tell them how a steam train worked?

Jemubhai’s mind drew a blank.

"Not interested in trains?" The man looked personally disappointed.

"A fascinating field, sir, but one’s been too busy studying the recommended subjects."

"No idea of how a train works?"

Jemu stretched his brain as far as he could – what powered what? – but he had never seen the inside of a railway engine.

"No, sir."

Could he describe then, the burial customs of the ancient Chinese.

He was from the same part of the country as Gandhi. What of the noncooperation movement? What was his opinion of the Congress?

The room was silent. BUY BRITISH – Jemubahi had seen the posters the day of his arrival in England, and it had struck him that if he’d yelled BUY INDIAN in the streets of India, he would be clapped into jail. And all the way back in 1930, when Jemubhai was still a child, Gandhi had marched from Sabarmati ashram to Dandi where, at the ocean’s maw, he had performed the subversive activity of harvesting salt.

" – Where will that get him? Phtoo! His heart may be in the right place but his brain has fallen out of his head" – Jemu’s father had said although the jails were full of Gandhi’s supporters. On the SS Strathnaver, the sea spray had come flying at Jemubhai and dried in taunting dots of salt upon his face and arms… It did seem ridiculous to tax it…

"If one was not committed to the current administration, sir, there would be no question of appearing here today."

Lastly, who was his favorite writer?

A bit nervously for he had none, he replied that one was fond of Sir Walter Scott.

"What have you read?"

"All the printed works, sir."

"Can you recite one of your favorite poems for us?" asked a professor of social anthropology.

Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best

By the time they stood for the ICS, most of the candidates had crisp-ironed their speech, but Jemubhai had barely opened his mouth for whole years and his English still had the rhythm and the form of Gujerati.

But ere he alighted at Netherby gate

The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

For a laggard in love and a dastard in war

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar…

When he looked up, he saw they were all chuckling.

While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,

And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume…

The judge shook himself. "Damn fool," he said out loud, pushed his chair back, stood up, brought his fork and knife down in devastating judgment upon himself and left the table. His strength, that mental steel, was weakening. His memory seemed triggered by the tiniest thing – Gyan’s unease, his reciting that absurd poem… Soon all the judge had worked so hard to separate would soften and envelop him in its nightmare, and the barrier between this life and eternity would in the end, no doubt, be just another such failing construct.

Mutt followed him to his room. As he sat brooding, she leaned against him with the ease that children have when leaning against their parents.

"I am sorry," said Sai, hot with shame. "It’s impossible to tell how my grandfather will behave."

Gyan didn’t appear to hear her.

"Sorry," said Sai again, mortified, but again he didn’t appear to have heard. For the first time his eyes rested directly upon her as if he were eating her alive in an orgy of the imagination – aha! At last the proof.

The cook cleared away the dirty dishes and shut the quarter cup of leftover peas into the cupboard. The cupboard looked like a coop, with its wire netting around a wooden frame and its four feet standing in bowls of water to deter ants and other vermin. He topped the water in these bowls from one of the buckets placed under the leaks, emptied the other buckets out of the window, and returned them to their appointed spots.

He made up the bed in an extra room, which was actually filled with rubbish but contained a bed placed in the very center, and he fixed pale virginal candles into saucers for Sai and Gyan to take to their rooms. "Your bed is ready for you, masterji," he said and sniffed:

Was there a strange atmosphere in the room?

But Sai and Gyan seemed immersed in the newspapers again, and he confused their sense of ripening anticipation with his own, because that morning, two letters from Biju had arrived in the post. They were lying under an empty tuna fish tin by his bed, saved for the end of the day, and all evening he’d been savoring the thought of them. He rolled up his pants and departed with an umbrella as it had begun to pour again.

In the drawing room, sitting with the newspapers, Sai and Gyan were left alone, quite alone, for the first time.

Kiki De Costa’s recipe column: marvels with potatoes. Tasty treat with meat. Noodles with doodles and doodles of sauce and oodles and oodles of cheese.

Fleur Hussein’s beauty tips.

The handsome baldy competition at the Calcutta Gymkhana Club had given out prizes to Mr. Sunshine, Mr. Moonshine, and Mr. Will Shine.

Their eyes read on industriously, but their thoughts didn’t cleave to such discipline, and finally Gyan, unable to bear this any longer, this tightrope tension between them, put down his paper with a crashing sound, turned abruptly toward her, and blurted:

"Do you put oil in your hair?"

"No," she said, startled. "I never do."

After a bit of silence, "Why?" she asked. Was there something wrong with her hair?

"I can’t hear you – the rain is so loud," he said, moving closer. "What?"

"Why?"

"It looks so shiny I thought you might."

"No."

"It looks very soft," he observed. "Do you wash it with shampoo?"

"Yes."

"What kind?"

"Sunsilk."

Oh, the unbearable intimacy of brand names, the boldness of the questions.

"What soap?" Lux.

"Beauty bar of the film stars?"

But they were too scared to laugh.

More silence.

"You?"

"Whatever is in the house. It doesn’t matter for boys."

He couldn’t admit that his mother bought the homemade brown soap that was sold in large rectangles in the market, blocks sliced off and sold cheap.

The questions grew worse: "Let me see your hands. They are so small."

"Are they?"

"Yes." He held his own out by hers. "See?"

Fingers. Nails.

"Hm. What long fingers. Little nails. But look, you bite them."

He weighed her hand.

"Light as a sparrow. The bones must be hollow."

These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the de-liberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.

Rainy season beetles flew by in many colors. From each hole in the floor came a mouse as if tailored for size, tiny mice from the tiny holes, big mice from big holes, and the termites came teeming forth from the furniture, so many of them that when you looked, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, all seemed to be wobbling.

But Gyan did not see them. His gaze itself was a mouse; it disappeared into the belladonna sleeve of Sai’s kimono and spotted her elbow.

"A sharp point," he commented. "You could do some harm with that."

Arms they measured and legs. Catching sight of her foot – Let me see.

He took off his own shoe and then the threadbare sock of which he immediately felt ashamed and which he bundled into his pocket. They examined the nakedness side by side of those little tubers in the semidark.

Her eyes, he noted, were extraordinarily glamorous: huge, wet, full of theater, capturing all the light in the room.

But he couldn’t bring himself to mention them; it was easier to stick to what moved him less, to a more scientific approach.

With the palm of his hand, he cupped her head…

"Is it flat or is it curved?"

With an unsteady finger, he embarked on the arch of an eyebrow…

Oh, he could not believe his bravery; it drove him on and wouldn’t heed the fear that called him back; he was brave despite himself. His finger moved down her nose.

The sound of water came from every direction: fat upon the window, a popgun off the bananas and the tin roof, lighter and messier on the patio stones, a low-throated gurgle in the gutter that surrounded the house like a moat. There was the sound of the jhora rushing and of water drowning itself in this water, of drainpipes disgorging into the rain barrels, the rain barrels brimming over, little sipping sounds from the moss.

The growing impossibility of speech would make other intimacies easier.

As his finger was about to leap from the tip of Sai’s nose to her perfectly arched lips -

Up she jumped.

"Owwaaa," she shouted.

He thought it was a mouse.

It wasn’t. She was used to mice.

"Oooph," she said. She couldn’t stand a moment longer, that peppery feeling of being traced by another’s finger and all that green romance burgeoning forth. Wiping her face bluntly with her hands, she shook out her kimono, as if to rid the evening of this trembling delicacy.

"Well, good night," she said formally, taking Gyan by surprise. Placing her feet one before the other with the deliberateness of a drunk, she made her way toward the door, reached the rectangle of the doorway, and dove into the merciful dark with Gyan’s bereft eyes following her.

She didn’t return.

But the mice did. It was quite extraordinary how tenacious they were – you’d think their fragile hearts would shatter, but their timidity was misleading; their fear was without memory.

In his bed slung like a hammock on broken springs, leaks all around, the judge lay pinned by layers of fusty blankets. His underwear lay on top of the lamp to dry and his watch sat below so the mist under the dial might lift – a sad state for the civilized man. The air was spiked with pinpricks of moisture that made it feel as if it were raining indoors as well, yet this didn’t freshen it. It bore down thick enough to smother, an odiferous yeasty mix of spore and fungi, wood smoke and mice droppings, kerosene and chill. He got out of bed to search for a pair of socks and a woolen skull cap. As he was putting them on, he saw the unmistakable silhouette of a scorpion, bold against the dingy wall, and lurched at it with a fly swatter, but it sensed his presence, bristled, the tail went up, and it began to run. It vanished into the crack between the bottom of the wall and the floorboard. "Drat!" he said. His false teeth leered at him with a skeleton grin from a jar of water. He rummaged about for a Calmpose and swallowed it with a gulp of water from the top of the jar, so cold, always cold – the water in Kalimpong was directly from Himalayan snow – and it transformed his gums to pure pain. "Good night, my darling mutton chop," he said to Mutt when he could manipulate his tongue again. She was already dreaming, but oh the weakness of an aged man, even the pill could not chase the unpleasant thoughts unleashed at dinner back into their holes.

When the results of the viva voce had been posted, he found his performance had earned him one hundred out of three hundred, the lowest qualifying mark. The written portion of the test had brought up his score and he was listed at forty-eight, but only the top forty-two had been included for admission to the ICS. Shaking, almost fainting, he was about to stumble away when a man came out with a supplementary announcement: a new list had been conceived in accordance with attempts to Indianize the service. The crowd of students rushed forward, and in between the lurching, he caught sight of the name, Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, at the very bottom of the page.

Looking neither right nor left, the newest member, practically unwelcome, of the heaven-born, ran home with his arms folded and got immediately into bed, all his clothes on, even his shoes, and soaked his pillow with his weeping. Tears sheeted his cheeks, eddied about his nose, cascaded into his neck, and he found he was quite unable to control his tormented ragged nerves. He lay there crying for three days and three nights.

"James," rattled the landlady. "Are you all right?"

"Just tired. Not to worry." Jamesr

"Mrs. Rice," he said. "One is done. One is finally through."

"Good for you, James," she said generously, and told herself she was glad. How progressive, how bold and brave the world was. It would always surprise her.

Not the first position, nor the second. But there he was. He sent a telegram home.

"Result unequivocal."

"What," asked everyone, "does that mean?" It sounded as if there was a problem, because "un" words were negative words, those basically competent in English agreed. But then, Jemubhai’s father consulted the assistant magistrate and they exploded with joy, his father transformed into a king holding court, as neighbors, acquaintances, even strangers, streamed by to eat syrup-soaked sweets and offer congratulations in envy-soaked voices.

Not long after the results were declared, Jemubhai with his trunk that read "Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver," drove in a hired cab away from the house on Thornton Road and turned back to wave for the sake of the dog with pork pies in its eyes. It was watching him out of a window and he felt an echo of the old heartbreak of leaving Piphit.

Jemubhai, who had lived on ten pounds a month, could now expect to be paid three hundred pounds a year by the secretary of state for India for the two years of probation. He had found more expensive lodgings which he could now afford, closer to the university.

The new boardinghouse boasted several rooms for rent, and here, among the other lodgers, he was to find his only friend in England: Bose.

They had similar inadequate clothes, similar forlornly empty rooms, similar poor native’s trunks. A look of recognition had passed between them at first sight, but also the assurance that they wouldn’t reveal one another’s secrets, not even to each other.

Bose was different from the judge in one crucial aspect, though. He was an optimist. There was only one way to go now and that was forward. He was further along in the process: "Cheeri-o, right-o, tickety boo, simply smashing, chin-chin, no siree, how’s that, bottom’s up, I say!" he liked to say. Together they punted clumsily down the glacéed river to Grantchester and had tea among the jam-sozzled wasps just as you were supposed to, enjoying themselves (but not really) as the heavy wasps fell from flight into their laps with a low-battery buzz.

They had better luck in London, where they watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, avoided the other Indian students at Veeraswamy’s, ate shepherd’s pie instead, and agreed on the train home that Trafalgar Square was not quite up to British standards of hygiene – all those defecating pigeons, one of which had done a masala-colored doodle on Bose. It was Bose who showed Jemubhai what records to buy for his new gramophone: Caruso and Gigli. He also corrected his pro-nunciation: Jheelee, not Giggly. Yorksher. Edinburrah. Jane Aae, a word let loose and lost like the wind on the Bronte heath, never to be found and ended; not Jane Aiyer like a South Indian. Together they read A Brief History of Western Art, A Brief History of Philosophy, A Brief History of France, etc., a whole series. An essay on how a sonnet was constructed, the variations on the form. A book on china and glass: Waterford, Salviati, Spode, Meissen, and Limoges. Crumpets they investigated and scones, jams, and preserves.

Thus it was that the judge eventually took revenge on his early confusions, his embarrassments gloved in something called "keeping up standards," his accent behind a mask of a quiet. He found he began to be mistaken for something he wasn’t – a man of dignity This accidental poise became more important than any other thing. He envied the English. He loathed Indians. He worked at being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become, he would be despised by absolutely everyone, English and Indians, both.

At the end of their probation, the judge and Bose signed the covenant of service, swore to obey His Majesty and the viceroy, collected circulars giving up-to-date information on snakebites and tents, and received the list of supplies they were required to purchase: breeches, riding boots, tennis racket, twelve-bore gun. It made them feel as if they were embarking on a giant Boy Scout expedition.

On board the Strathnaver on his way back, the judge sipped beef tea and read How to Speak Hindustani, since he had been posted to a part of India where he did not speak the language. He sat alone because he still felt ill at ease in the company of the English.

His granddaughter walked by his door, went into her bathroom, and he heard the eery whistle of half water – half air in the tap.

Sai washed her feet with whatever piddled into the bucket, but she forgot her face, wandered out, remembered her face, went back in and wondered why, remembered her teeth, put the toothbrush into her pocket, came out again, remembered her face and her teeth, went back, rewashed her feet, reemerged -

Paced up and down, bit off her fingernails -

She prided herself on being able to take anything -

Anything but gentleness.

Had she washed her face? She went back into the bathroom and washed her feet again.

The cook sat with a letter in front of him; blue ink waves lapped the paper and every word had vanished, as so often happened in the monsoon season.

He opened the second letter to find the same basic fact reiterated: there was literally an ocean between him and his son. Then, once again, he shifted the burden of hope from this day to the next and got into his bed, hooked onto his pillow – he had recently had the cotton replaced – and he mistook its softness for serenity.

In the spare room, Gyan was wondering what he had done – had he done the right thing or the wrong, what courage had entered his foolish heart and enticed him beyond the boundaries of propriety? It was the bit of rum he had drunk, it was the strange food. It couldn’t be real, but incredibly, it was. He felt frightened but also a little proud. "Ai yai yai ai yai yai," he said to himself.

All four inhabitants lay awake as outside the rain and wind whooshed and banged, the trees heaved and sighed, and the lightning shamelessly unzipped the sky over Cho Oyu.