The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfill-ment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

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

At home, his mother was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of good-bye and the briefness of the last moment.

The very fact that they were sitting in the train, the speed of it, rendered his world trivial, indicated through each window evidence of emptiness that stood eager to claim an unguarded heart.

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

He was furious that his mother had considered the possibility of his humiliation and thereby, he thought, precipitated it. In her attempt to cancel out one humiliation she had only succeeded in adding another.

The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow. But shadows, after all, create their own unease, and despite his attempts to hide, he merely emphasized something that unsettled others.

He was proud of his ability to influence and corrupt the path of justice, exchange right for wrong or wrong for right; he felt no guilt.

So fantastic was their dreaming, it thrilled them like a fairy tale, and perhaps because this dream sailed too high in the sky to be tackled by logic, it took form, began to exert palpable pressure.

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.

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

She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility.

This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed an awe of white people, who arguably had done India great harm, and a lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else, who had never done a single harmful thing to India.

Anyway, he said to himself, money wasn’t everything. There was that simple happiness of looking after someone and having someone look after you.

for there are many ways of showing love, not just the way of the movies—which is all you know. You are a very foolish girl. 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.”

You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement.

“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.

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.

One should not give up one’s religion, the principles of one’s parents and their parents before them. No, no matter what. You had to live according to something. You had to find your dignity. The meat charred on the grill, the blood beaded on the surface, and then the blood also began to bubble and boil. Those who could see a difference between a holy cow and an unholy cow would win. Those who couldn’t see it would lose.

That support for a cow shelter was in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true and that, when he died, he was put through the Hindu machinations of the beyond. What, though, if other gods sat upon the throne? He tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any.

It was only the recollection of the money he was making that calmed him. Within this thought he found a perfectly reasonable reason for being here, a morality to agree on, a bridge over the split—and this single fact that didn’t seem a contradiction between nations he blazoned forth.

As he floated through the market, Gyan had a feeling of history being wrought, its wheels churning under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a documentary of war, and Gyan could not help but look on the scene already from the angle of nostalgia, the position of a revolutionary. But then he was pulled out of the feeling, by the ancient and usual scene, the worried shopkeepers watching from their monsoon-stained grottos. Then he shouted along with the crowd, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he’d never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history.

The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable. And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug.

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.

Don’t you have any pride? Trying to be so Westernized. They don’t want you!!!! Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms.

Still, Gyan was absolutely sure that she was proud of her behavior; masqueraded it about as shame at her lack of Indianness, maybe, but it marked her status. Oh yes. It allowed her that perverse luxury, the titillation of putting yourself down, criticizing yourself and having the opposite happen—you did not fall, you mystically rose.

But so fluid a thing was love. It wasn’t firm, he was learning, it wasn’t a scripture; it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal, taking the mold of whatever he poured it into. And in fact, it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels. It could be used for all kinds of purposes....

for they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful: the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx.

Lola, Noni, Sai, and Father Booty were unanimous in the opinion that they didn’t like English writers writing about India; it turned the stomach; delirium and fever somehow went with temples and snakes and perverse romance, spilled blood, and miscarriage; it didn’t correspond to the truth.

It was unwise to read old books; the fury they ignited wasn’t old; it was new.

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?

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell.

“Time passes, things change,” said the judge, feeling claustrophobia and embarrassment. “But what is in the past remains unchanged, doesn’t it?” “I think it does change. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind, Bose.”

When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. He couldn’t knock down the lies or else the past would crumble, and therefore the present....

“They should kick the bastards back to Nepal,” continued Mr. Iype. “Bangladeshis to Bangladesh, Afghans to Afghanistan, all Muslims to Pakistan, Tibetans, Bhutanese, why are they sitting in our country?” “Why are we sitting here?” “This country is different,” he said without shame. “Without us what would they do?”

He tried to shake the gadget back into life, wishing for at least the customary words of good-bye. After all, even on clichéd phrases, you could hoist true emotion.

What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.

But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away.

He had anticipated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art; the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than any simple bovine happiness.

Was her affection for Gyan just a habit? How on earth could she think of someone so much? The more she did, the more she did, the more she did. Summoning her strength, she spoke directly to her heart. “Oh why must you behave so badly?” But it wouldn’t soften its stance. There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to—everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life.

There were houses like this everywhere, of course, common to those who had struggled to the far edge of the middle class—just to the edge, only just, holding on desperately—but were at every moment being undone, the house slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal—modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next.

They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn’t believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring coziness of family as much as to abandon it forever.

Every single contradiction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction.

how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly?

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.

She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favored her she would, perhaps, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth in their own image, a perfect devilish student to the devil gods....

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.

He wasn’t a bad person. He didn’t want to fight. The trouble was that he’d tried to be part of the larger questions, tried to become part of politics and history. Happiness had a smaller location, though this wasn’t something to flaunt, of course; very few would stand up and announce, “Actually I’m a coward,” but his timidity might be disguised, well, in a perfectly ordinary existence situated between meek contours.