The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

He couldn’t conceive of punishment great enough for humanity. A man wasn’t equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone any harm.

while the residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all. Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of as they sat at home with nothing to do, and found that it was possible, faced with the stench of unimaginable evil, for a human being to grow bored, yawn, be absorbed by the problem of a missing sock, by neighborly irritations, to feel hunger skipping like a little mouse inside a tummy and return, once again, to the pressing matter of what to eat.... There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice—the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event.

Sweet drabness of home— he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing—that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.

a human can be transformed into anything. It was possible to forget and sometimes essential to do so.

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.

“What is this all about?” asked Sai, but her mouth couldn’t address her ear in the tumult; her heart lying in pieces, didn’t seem able to address her mind; her mind couldn’t talk to her heart. “Shame on myself...” she said.... Who was she ... she with her self-importance, her demand for happiness, yelling it at fate, at the deaf heavens, screaming for her joy to be brought forth ... ? How dare.... How dare you not... ? Why shouldn’t I have ...?... How dare.... I deserve.... Her small greedy soul.... Her tantrums and fits.... Her mean tears.... Her crying, enough for all the sadness in the world, was only for herself. Life wasn’t single in its purpose ... or even in its direction.... The simplicity of what she’d been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it.