The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

Boast of Quietness Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity. My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls. Time is living me. More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. My name is someone and anyone. I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive. —Jorge Luis Borges

Loved it.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment.

Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

crick was never cracked, the itch was never scratched;

In a country so full of relatives, Sai suffered a dearth.

The system might be obsessed with purity, but it excelled in defining the flavor of sin.

In her attempt to cancel out one humiliation she had only succeeded in adding another.

eventually, he had grown to believe his own marvelous story. It gave him a feeling of self-respect

Purity of answer was a false quest. How far back could you go, straightening things out?

Without naïveté, father and son would have been defeated; had they aimed lower, according to the logic of probability, they would have failed.

Nobody could be sure how much of the truth had fallen between languages, between languages and illiteracy; the clarity that justice demanded was nonexistent.

He realized truth was best looked at in tiny aggregates, for many baby truths could yet add up to one big size unsavory lie.

Before one knew it one could slide into areas of the heart that should be referred to only between social equals.

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

A petition improved your status.

The greatest love is love that’s never shown.”

“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.”

The growing impossibility of speech would make other intimacies easier.

Then the story stopped. “What about your father? What is he like?” Sai asked, but she didn’t press him. After all, she knew about stories having to stop.

White people looked clean because they were whiter; the darker you were, Biju thought, the dirtier you looked.

But the child shouldn’t be blamed for a father’s crime, she tried to reason with herself, then. But should the child therefore also enjoy the father’s illicit gain?

“I think it does change. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind, Bose.”

it did matter that others could not.

He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation

But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn’t leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?

In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself.

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. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.