The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn’t adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.

He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.

Oh yes, he awaited modernity and knew that if you invested in it, it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.

She’d have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed.

where he could see a few lights on already and some others besides himself making a start on miniature lives.

They sat outside his quarter and smoked; and it felt good to be two old men sitting together, talking of young men.

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.

“Your father came to my country and took my bread and now I have come to your country to get my bread back.”

Mostly he sat on a folding chair, silently moving an expressionless face like a sunflower, a blank handicapped insistence following the sun, the only goal left in his life to match the two, the orb of his face and the orb of light.

His sarcasm and his embarrassment were gone. Fired by alcohol, he finally submitted to the compelling pull of history and found his pulse leaping to something that felt entirely authentic.

he who had so modest an idea of happiness that even the daily irritant of fifty-two screaming boys in his plantation schoolroom, even the distance of his own family, the loneliness of his work, didn’t upset him.

But this light was too brief for real succor and it seemed more the visitation of a beautiful memory than the real thing.

Such wilderness could not incite a gentle love—he loved it fiercely, intensely.

Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization.

Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one ….

After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence.

Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.

Bible folk dressed in ornate bargain-basement suits and hats, waiting on street corners, getting their moral and physical exercise chasing after infidels.

This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate. The space between life and death, in the end, too small to measure.

He seemed unaware of what was going on; stared out without curiosity or ambition, without worry, developing a quality devoid of qualities to get him through this life.

This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time.