The Inheritance of Loss

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Authors: Kiran Desai
Tags: Fiction
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altercation. "Big pasty things. Good thing they’ve started wearing pants now."
    But Lola was too dizzy to listen. Her suitcases were stuffed with Marmite, Oxo bouillon cubes, Knorr soup packets, After Eights, daffodil bulbs, and renewed supplies of Boots cucumber lotion and Marks and Spencer underwear—the essence, quintessence, of Englishness as she understood it. Surely the queen donned this superior hosiery:

    She was solid.
    It was solid.
    She was plain.
    It was plain.
    She was strong.
    It was strong.
    She was no-nonsense.

    It was no-nonsense.
    They prevailed.

    It was Pixie who inspired the nightly ritual of listening to the radio.
    "Budhoo?" Huzoor.
    "Good evening . . . this is Piyali Bannerji with the BBC news."
    All over India, people hearing the Indian name announced in pucca British accent laughed and laughed so hard their stomachs hurt.
    Disease. War. Famine. Noni exclaimed and was outraged, but Lola purred with pride and heard nothing but the sanitized elegance of her daughter’s voice, triumphant over any horrors the world might thrust upon others. "Better leave sooner rather than later," she had advised Pixie long ago, "India is a sinking ship.
    Don’t want to be pushy, darling, sweetie, thinking of your happiness only, but the doors won’t stay open forever. . . ."

    Ten

    Biju had started his second year in America at Pinocchio’s Italian Restaurant, stirring vats of spluttering Bolognese, as over a speaker an opera singer sang of love and murder, revenge and heartbreak.
    "He smells," said the owner’s wife. "I think I’m allergic to his hair oil." She had hoped for men from the poorer parts of Europe—Bulgarians perhaps, or Czechoslovakians. At least they might have something in common with them like religion and skin color, grandfathers who ate cured sausages and looked like them, too, but they weren’t coming in numbers great enough or they weren’t coming desperate enough, she wasn’t sure. . . .
    The owner bought soap and toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo plus conditioner, Q-tips, nail clippers, and most important of all, deodorant, and told Biju he’d picked up some things he might need.
    They stood there embarrassed by the intimacy of the products that lay between them.
    He tried another tactic: "What do they think of the pope in India?"
    By showing his respect for Biju’s mind he would raise Biju’s self-respect, for the boy was clearly lacking in that department.
    "You’ve tried," his wife said, comforting him a few days later when they couldn’t detect any difference in Biju. "You even bought the soap," she said.

    ________

    Biju approached Tom & Tomoko’s—"No jobs." McSweeney’s Pub—"Not hiring."
    Freddy’s Wok—"Can you ride a bicycle?" Yes, he could.

    ________

    Szechuan wings and French fries, just $3.00. Fried rice $1.35 and $1.00 for pan-fried dumplings fat and tight as babies—slice them open and flood your plate with a run of luscious oil. In this country poor people eat like kings! General Tso’s chicken, emperor’s pork, and Biju on a bicycle with the delivery bag on his handlebars, a tremulous figure between heaving buses, regurgitating taxis—what growls, what sounds of flatulence came from this traffic. Biju pounded at the pedals, heckled by taxi drivers direct from Punjab—a man is not a caged thing, a man is wild wild and he must drive as such, in a bucking yodeling taxi. They harassed Biju with such blows from their horns as could split the world into whey and solids:
    paaaaaWWW!
    One evening, Biju was sent to deliver hot-and-sour soups and egg foo yong to three Indian girls, students, new additions to the neighborhood in an apartment just opened under reviewed city laws to raised rents. Banners reading
    "Antigentrification Day" had been hauled up over the street by the longtime residents for a festival earlier in the afternoon when they had played music, grilled hot dogs in the street, and sold all their gritty junk. One day the Indian girls hoped to be

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