The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Author:Kiran Desai [Desai, Kiran]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Azizex666@TPB, General
ISBN: 9780141925738
Google: psHzNetWBDsC
Amazon: 0802142818
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2006-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

______

Later, Chhang, Bhang, Owl, Donkey, and many others sat in the cramped shack of Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen on Ringkingpong Road. A small handwritten sign painted on the side said “Broiler Chicken.” A carom game board was balanced on an oil barrel outside and two creaky tattered soldiers, on bowlegs, originally of the Eighth Gurkha Rifles, played as the clouds shifted and billowed through their knees. The mountains sliced sharply and tumbled down at either side to bamboo thickets gray with distilled vapor.

The air grew colder and the evening progressed. Gyan, who had been gathered up accidentally in the procession, who had shouted half facetiously, half in earnest, who had half played, half lived a part, found the fervor had affected him. 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 told the story of his great grandfather, his great uncles, “And do you think they got the same pension as the English of equal rank? They fought to death, but did they earn the same salary?”

All the other anger in the canteen greeted his, clapped his anger on the back. It suddenly became clear why he had no money and no real job had come his way, why he couldn’t fly to college in America, why he was ashamed to let anyone see his home. He thought of how he had kept Sai away the day she had suggested visiting his family. Most of all, he realized why his father’s meekness infuriated him, and why he found himself unable to speak of him, 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. Gyan wanted to shake him, but what satisfaction could be received from shaking a sock? To accost such a person—it just came back to frustrate you twice over….

For a moment all the different pretences he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him—all these things joined together to form a single truth.

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. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor.

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk—

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

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