The Inheritance of Loss

Twenty-eight

The judge was thinking of his hate.

When he returned from England, he had been greeted by the same geriatric brass band that had seen him off on his journey, but it was invisible this time because of the billows of smoke and dust raised by the fireworks that had been thrown on the railway track, exploding as the train drew into the station. Whistles and whoops went up from the two thousand people who had gathered to witness this historic event, the first son of the community to join the ICS. He was smothered with garlands; flower petals settled on the brim of his hat. And there, standing in a knife’s width of shade at the end of the station, was someone else who looked vaguely familiar; not a sister, not a cousin; it was Nimi, his wife, who had been returned from her father’s house, where she’d spent the intervening time. Except for exchanges with landladies and "How do you do?" in shops, he hadn’t spoken to a woman in years.

She came toward him with a garland. They didn’t look at each other as she lifted it over his head. Up went his eyes, down went hers. He was twenty-five, she was nineteen.

"So shy, so shy" – the delighted crowd was sure of having witnessed the terror of love. (What amazing hope the audience has – always refusing to believe the nonexistence of romance.)

What would he do with her?

He had forgotten he had a wife.

Well, he knew, of course, but she had drifted away like everything in his past, a series of facts that no longer had relevance. This one, though, it would follow him as wives in those days followed their husbands.

All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart – how lovely she must have appeared to him… He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. She rummaged in the toilet case Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge and found a jar of green salve, a hairbrush and comb set in silver, a pom-pom with a loop of silk in a round container of powder – and, coming at her exquisitely, her first whiff of lavender. The crisp light scents that rose from his new possessions were all of a foreign place. Piphit smelled of dust and once in a while there was the startling fragrance of rain. Piphit’s perfumes were intoxicants, rich and dizzying. She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.

"Shorts!" said a young uncle.

"Underwear," the ladies insisted.

Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?

She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed.

The afternoons in Piphit lasted so long, the Patels were resting, trying to efface the fear that time would never move again, all except for Jemubhai who had grown unused to such surrender.

He sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner – a foreigner – every bit of him screamed. Only his digestion dissented and told him he was home: squatting painfully in that cramped outhouse, his gentleman’s knees creaking, swearing "Bloody hell," he felt his digestion work as super efficient as – as Western transportation.

Idly deciding to check on his belongings, he uncovered the loss.

"Where is my powder puff?" shouted Jemubhai at the Patel ladies spread-eagled on mats in the veranda shade.

"What?" they asked, raising their heads, shielding their eyes against the detonating light.

"Someone has been through my belongings."

Actually, by then, almost everyone in the house had been through his belongings and they failed to see why this was a problem. His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable; why did he mind and how did this coincide with stealing?

"But what is missing?"

"My puff."

"What is that?"

He tried to explain.

"But what on earth is it for, baba?" They looked at him bemused.

"Pink and white what? That you put on your skin? Why?"

"Pink?"

His mother began to worry. "Is anything wrong with your skin?" she asked, concerned.

But, "Ha ha," laughed a sister who was listening carefully, "we sent you abroad to become a gentleman, and instead you have become a lady!"

The excitement spread, and from farther houses in the Patel clan, relatives began to arrive. The kakas kakis masas masis phuas phois. Children horrible all together, a clump that could not be separated child into child, for they resembled a composite monster with multiple arms and legs that came cartwheeling in, raising the dust, screaming; hundreds of hands were held over the monster’s hundreds of giggling mouths. Who had stolen what?

"His powder puff is missing," said Jemubhai’s father, who seemed to think this thing must be crucial to his son’s work.

They all said powder puff in English, for, naturally, there was no Gujarati word for this invention. Their very accents rankled the judge. "Pauvdar Paaf," sounding like some Parsi dish.

They pulled out all the items in the cupboard, turned them upside down, exclaiming over and examining each one, his suits, his underwear, his opera glasses, through which he had viewed the tutus of ballerinas dancing a delicate sideways scuttle in Giselle, unfolding in pastry patterns and cake decorations.

But no, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the kitchen either, or in the veranda. It wasn’t anywhere.

His mother questioned the naughtiest cousins.

"Did you see it?"

"What?"

"The paudar paaf."

"What is a paudur poff? Paudaar paaf?"

"To protect the skin."

"To protect the skin from what?"

And the entire embarrassment of explaining had to be gone through again.

"Pink and white? What for?"

"What the hell do all of you know?" said Jemubhai. Thieving, ignorant people.

He had thought they would have the good taste to be impressed and even a little awed by what he had become, but instead they were laughing.

"You must know something," the judge finally accused Nimi.

"I haven’t seen it. Why should I pay it any attention?" she said. Her heart pounded beneath her two lavender-powdered pink and white breasts, beneath her husband’s England-returned puff.

He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty, dismissed it. Once it had been a terrifying beckoning thing that had made his heart turn to water, but now it seemed beside the point. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one.

Just then, as he was turning away, he saw it -

Sticking out between the hooks, a few thin and tender filaments.

"You filth!" he shouted and, from between her sad breasts, pulled forth, like a ridiculous flower, or else a bursting ruined heart -

His dandy puff.

"Break the bed," shouted an ancient aunt, hearing the scuffle inside the room, and they all began to giggle and nod in satisfaction.

"Now she will settle down," said another medicine-voiced hag. "That girl has too much spirit."

Inside the room, specially vacated of all who normally slept there, Jemubhai, his face apuff with anger, grabbed at his wife.

She slipped from his grasp and his anger flew.

She who had stolen. She who had made them laugh at him. This illiterate village girl. He grabbed at her again.

She was running and he was chasing her.

She ran to the door.

But the door was locked.

She tried again.

It didn’t budge.

The aunt had locked it – just in case. All the stories of brides trying to escape – now and then even an account of a husband sidling out. Shameshameshameshame to the family.

He came at her with a look of murder.

She ran for the window.

He blocked her.

Without thinking, she picked up the powder container from the table near the door and threw it at his face, terrified of what she was doing, but the terror had joined irreversibly with the gesture, and in a second it was done -

The container broke apart, the powder lurched up filtered down.

Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury – penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of – he stuffed his way ungracefully into her.

An aging uncle, wizened bird man in dhoti and spectacles, watching through a crack in the wall outside, felt his own lust ripen and – pop – it sent him hopping about the courtyard.

Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury – this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas – but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevo-lency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run – it turned his civilized stomach.

Yet he repeated the gutter act again and again. Even in tedium, on and on, a habit he could not stand in himself. This distaste and his persistence made him angrier than ever and any cruelty to her became irresistible. He would teach her the same lessons of loneliness and shame he had learned himself. In public, he never spoke to or looked in her direction.

She grew accustomed to his detached expression as he pushed into her, that gaze off into middle distance, entirely involved with itself, the same blank look of a dog or monkey humping in the bazaar; until all of a sudden he seemed to skid from control and his expression slid right off his face. A moment later, before anything was revealed, it settled back again and he withdrew to spend a long fiddly time in the bathroom with soap, hot water, and Dettol. He followed his ablutions with a clinical measure of whiskey, as if consuming a disinfectant.

The judge and Nimi traveled two days by train and by car, and when they arrived in Bonda, the judge rented a bungalow at the edge of the civil lines for thirty-five rupees a month, without water or electricity. He could afford nothing better until he repaid his debts, but still, he kept money aside to hire a companion for Nimi. A Miss Enid Pott who looked like a bulldog with a hat on top. Her previous employment had been governess to the children of Mr. Singh, the commissioner, and she had brought up her charges to call their mother Mam, their father Fa, had given them cod-liver oil for their collywobbles, and taught them to recite "Nellie Bly." A photograph in her purse showed her with two dark little girls in sailor frocks; their socks were sharp but their faces drooped.

Nimi learned no English, and it was out of stubbornness, the judge thought.

"What is this?" he questioned her angrily, holding aloft a pear.

"What is this?" – pointing at the gravy boat bought in a secondhand shop, sold by a family whose monogram had happily matched, JPP, in an extravagance of flourishes. He had bought it secretly and hidden it within another bag, so his painful pretension and his thrift would not be detected. James Peter Peterson or Jemubhai Popatlal Patel. IF you please.

"What is this?" he asked holding up the bread roll.

Silence.

"If you can’t say the word, you can’t eat it."

More silence.

He removed it from her plate.

Later that evening, he snatched the Ovaltine from her tentative sipping: "And if you don’t like it, don’t drink it."

He couldn’t take her anywhere and squirmed when Mrs. Singh waggled her finger at him and said, "Where is your wife, Mr. Patel? None of that purdah business, I hope?" In playing her part in her husband’s career, Mrs. Singh had attempted to mimic what she considered a typical Englishwoman’s balance between briskly pleasant and firmly no-nonsense, and had thus succeeded in quashing the spirits of so many of the locals who prided themselves on being mostly nonsense.

Nimi did not accompany her husband on tour, unlike the other wives, who went along on horseback or elephantback or camelback or in palkis upheld by porters (all of whom would, because of the ladies’ fat bottoms, die young), as rattling behind came the pots and pans and the bottle of whiskey and the bottle of port, Geiger counter and Scintillometre, the tuna fish tin and the mad-with-anxiety live chicken. Nobody had ever told it, but it knew; it was in its soul, that anticipation of the hatchet.

Nimi was left to sit alone in Bonda; three weeks out of four, she paced the house, the garden. She had spent nineteen years within the confines of her father’s compound and she was still unable to contemplate the idea of walking through the gate. The way it stood open for her to come and go – the sight filled her with loneliness. She was uncared for, her freedom useless, her husband disregarded his duty.

She climbed up the stairs to the flat roof in the slow civility of summer dusks, and watched the Jamuna flowing through a scene tenderly co-cooned in dust. Cows were on their way home; bells were ringing in the temple; she could see birds testing first one tree as a roost for the night, then another, all the while making an overexcited noise like women in a sari shop. Across the river, in the distance, she could see the ruins of a hunting lodge that dated to the Mughal emperor Jehangir: just a few pale arches still upholding carvings of irises. The Mughals had descended from the mountains to invade India but, despite their talent in waging war, were softhearted enough to weep for the loss of this flower in the heat; the persistent dream of the iris was carved everywhere, by craftsman who felt the nostalgia, saw the beauty of what they had made and never known.

The sight of this scene, of history passing and continuing, touched Nimi in a desolate way. She had fallen out of life altogether. Weeks went by and she spoke to nobody, the servants thumped their own leftovers on the table for her to eat, stole the supplies without fear, allowed the house to grow filthy without guilt until the day before Jemubhai’s arrival when suddenly it was brought to luster again, the clock set to a timetable, water to a twenty-minute boil, fruit soaked for the prescribed number of minutes in solutions of potassium permanganate. Finally Jemubhai’s new secondhand car – that looked more like a friendly stout cow than an automobile – would come belching through the gate.

He entered the house briskly, and when he found his wife rudely contradicting his ambition -

Well, his irritation was too much to bear.

Even her expressions annoyed him, but as they were gradually replaced by a blankness, he became upset by their absence.

What would he do with her? She without enterprise, unable to entertain herself, made of nothing, yet with a disruptive presence.

She had been abandoned by Miss Enid Pott who said, "Nimi seems to have made up her mind not to learn. You have a swaraji right under your nose, Mr. Patel. She will not argue – that way one might respond and have a dialogue – she just goes limp."

Then there was her typically Indian bum – lazy, wide as a buffalo. The pungency of her red hair oil that he experienced as a physical touch.

"Take those absurd trinkets off," he instructed her, riled by the tinkle-tonk of her bangles.

"Why do you have to dress in such a gaudy manner? Yellow and pink? Are you mad?" He threw the hair oil bottles away and her long hairs escaped no matter how tidily she made her bun. The judge found them winging their way across the room, treading air; he found one strangling a mushroom in his cream of mushroom soup.

One day he found footprints on the toilet seat – she was squatting on it, she was squatting on it! – he could barely contain his outrage, took her head and pushed it into the toilet bowl, and after a point, Nimi, made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. She peered out at the world but could not focus on it, never went to the mirror, because she couldn’t see herself in it, and anyway she couldn’t bear to spend a moment in dressing and combing, activities that were only for the happy and the loved.

When Jemubhai saw her, cheeks erupting in pustules, he took her fallen beauty as a further affront and felt concerned the skin disease would infect him as well. He instructed the servants to wipe everything with Dettol to kill germs. He powdered himself extra carefully with his new puff, each time remembering the one that had been cushioned between his wife’s obscene, clown-nosed breasts.

"Don’t show your face outside," he said to her. "People might run from you screaming." By year’s end the dread they had for each other was so severe it was as if they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.