The Inheritance of Loss

Forty-one

The sky over Manhattan was messy, lots of stuff in it, branches and pigeons and choppy clouds lit with weird yellow light. The wind blew strongly and the pink pom-poms of the cherry trees in Riverside Park swished against the unsettled mix.

The unease that had followed Biju’s phone call to Kalimpong was no longer something in the pit of his stomach; it had grown so big, he was in its stomach.

He had tried to telephone again the next day and the day after, but the line was quite dead now.

"More trouble," said Mr. Iype. "It will go on for a while. Very violent people. All those army types…"

Along the Hudson, great waves of water were torn up and ripped forward, the wind propelling the gusts upriver.

"Look at that. It’s getting fucking Biblical," said someone next to him at the rails. "Fucking Job. Why? Why?"

Biju moved farther down the rails, but the man shifted down as well.

"You know what the name of this river really is?" Face fat from McDonald’s, scant hair, he was like so many in this city, a mad and intelligent person camping out at the Barnes amp; Noble bookstore. The gale took his words and whipped them away; they reached Biju’s ears strangely clipped, on their way to somewhere else. The man turned his face in toward Biju to save the wind from thus slicing their conversation. "Muhheakunnuk, Muh-heakunnuk – the river that flows both ways," he added with significant eyebrows, "both ways. That is the real fucking name." Sentences spilled out of the face along with juicy saliva. He was smiling and slavering over his information, gobbling and dispelling at the same time.

But what was the false name then? Biju possessed no name at all for this black water. It was not his history.

And then came fucking Moby Dick. The river full of dead fucking whales. The fucking carcasses were hauled up the river, fucking pulverised in the factories.

"Oil, you know," he said with intense internal frustration. "It’s always been fucking oil. And underwear."

Eyebrows and saliva spray.

"Corsets!!" he said suddenly.

"No speak English," said Biju through a tunnel made from his hands and began to walk quickly away.

"No speak English," he always said to mad people starting up conversations in this city, to the irascible ornery bums and Bible folk dressed in ornate bargain-basement suits and hats, waiting on street corners, getting their moral and physical exercise chasing after infidels. Devotees of the Church of Christ and the Holy Zion, born-agains handing out pamphlets that gave him up-to-date million-dollar news of the devil’s activities: "SATAN IS WAITING TO BURN YOU ALIVE," screamed the headlines. "YOU DON’T HAVE A MOMENT TO LOSE."

Once, he had been accosted by a Lithuanian Hare Krishna, New York via Vilnius and Vrindavan. A reproachful veggie look accompanied the brochure to the former beef cook. Biju looked at him and had to avert his gaze as if from an obscenity. In its own way it was like a prostitute – it showed too much. The book in his hand had a cover of Krishna on the battlefield in lurid colors, the same ones used in movie posters.

What was India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?

What was he doing and why?

It hadn’t even been a question before he left. Of course, if you could go, you went. And if you went, of course, if you could, you stayed…

The park lamps had come on by the time Biju climbed the urine-stinking stone steps to the street, and the lights were dissolving in the gloaming – to look at them made everyone feel like they were crying. In front of the stage-set night-light of the city, he saw the homeless man walking stiffly, as if on artificial legs, crossing with his grocery cart of rubbish to his plastic igloo where he would wait out the storm.

Biju walked back to the Gandhi Café, thinking he was emptying out. Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air. And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity – oh the tediousness of it. Clumsy in America, a giant-sized midget, a bigfat-sized helping of small… Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

And if he continued on here? What would happen? Would he, like Harish-Harry, manufacture a fake version of himself and using what he had created as clues, understand himself backward? Life was not about life for him anymore, and death – what would even that mean to him? It would have nothing to do with death.

The proprietor of the newly opened Shangri-la Travel in the same block as the Gandhi Café ordered a "nonveg" lunch special each day: lamb curry, dal, vegetable pilau, and kheer. Mr. Kakkar was his name.

"Arre, Biju," he greeted him, for Biju had just been given the task of delivering his food. "Again you saved me from my wife’s cooking, ha ha. We will throw her food down the toilet!"

"Why don’t you give it to that dirty bum," said Biju trying to help the homeless man and insult him at the same time.

"Oh no," he said, "bitch-witch, she is the type, she will coming walking down the road on a surprise visit and catch him eating it, that kind of coincidence is always happening to her, and that will be the end of yours truly."

A minute later, "You are sure you want to go back??" he said alarmed, eyes popping. "You’re making a big mistake. Thirty years in this country, hassle-free except for the bitch-witch, of course, and I have never gone back. Just even see the plumbing," he indicated the sound of the gurgling toilet behind him. "They should put their plumbing on their flag, just like we have the spinning wheel – top-class facility in this country.

"Going back?" he continued, "don’t be completely crazy – all those relatives asking for money! Even strangers are asking for money – maybe they just try, you know, maybe you shit and dollars come out. I’m telling you, my friend, they will get you; if they won’t, the robbers will; if the robbers won’t, some disease will; if not some disease, the heat will; if not the heat, those mad Sardarjis will bring down your plane before you even arrive."

While Biju had been away, Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by the Sikhs in the name of their homeland; Rajiv Gandhi had taken over -

"Only a matter of time. Someone will get him, too," said Mr. Kakkar.

But Biju said: "I have to go. My father…"

"Ah, soft feelings, they will get you nowhere. My father, so long as he was alive, he always told me, ‘Good, stay away, don’t come back to this shitty place.’"

Mr. Kakkar gnashed ice cubes with his teeth, lifting them from his Diet Coke with the help of his ballpoint pen, which had a plane modeled at its rear end.

Nevertheless, he sold Biju a ticket on Gulf Air: New York-London-Frankfurt-Abu Dhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-Delhi-Calcutta. The cheapest they could find. It was like a bus in the sky.

"Don’t say I didn’t warn you."

Then he grew more thoughtful. "You know," he said, "America is in the process of buying up the world. Go back, you’ll find they own the businesses. One day, you’ll be working for an American company there or here. Think of your children. If you stay here, your son will earn a hundred thousand dollars for the same company he could be working for in India but making one thousand dollars. How, then, can you send your children to the best international college? You are making a big mistake. Still a world, my friend, where one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king. You want your son to be on this side or that side?

"Ah," he said, waggling his pen, "the minute you arrive, Biju, you will start to think of how to get the bloody hell out."

But Biju went to Jackson Heights, and from a store like a hangar he bought: a TV and VCR, a camera, sunglasses, baseball caps that said "NYC" and "Yankees" and "I Like My Beer Cold and My Women Hot," a digital two-time clock and radio and cassette player, waterproof watches, calculators, an electric razor, a toaster oven, a winter coat, nylon sweaters, polyester-cotton-blend shirts, a polyurethane quilt, a rain jacket, a folding umbrella, suede shoes, a leather wallet, a Japanese-made heater, a set of sharp knives, a hot water bottle, Fixodent, saffron, cashews and raisins, aftershave, T-shirts with "I love NY" and "Born in the USA" picked out in shiny stones, whiskey, and, after a moment of hesitation, a bottle of perfume called Windsong… who was that for? He didn’t yet know her face.

While he shopped, he remembered that as a child he’d been part of a pack of boys who played so hard they’d come home exhausted. They’d thrown stones and slippers into trees to bring down ber and jamun; chased lizards until their tails fell off and tossed the leaping bits on little girls; they’d stolen chooran pellets from the shop, that looked like goat droppings but were so, so tasty with a bit of sandy crunch. He remembered bathing in the river, feeling his body against the cool firm river muscle, and sitting on a rock with his feet in the water, gnawing on sugarcane, working out the sweetness no matter how his jaw hurt, completely absorbed. He had played cricket cricket cricket. Biju found himself smiling at the memory of the time the whole village had watched India win a test match against Australia on a television running off a car battery because the transformer in the village had burned out. All over India the crops had been rotting in the fields, the nation’s prostitutes complaining about lack of business because every male in the country had his eyes glued to the screen. He thought of samosas adjoining a spill of chutney coming by on a leaf plate. A place where he could never be the only one in a photograph.

Of course, he didn’t go over his memories of the village school, of the schoolmaster who failed the children unless paid off by the parents. He didn’t think of the roof that flew off each monsoon season or of the fact that not only his mother, but now also his grandmother, were dead. He didn’t think of any of the things that had made him leave in the first place.