Free The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Page B

you into a fool. How the other cooks and maids, watchmen and gardeners on the hillside laughed, boasting meanwhile how well they were treated by their employers—money, comfort, even pensions in special bank accounts. In fact, so beloved were some of these servants that they were actually begged not to work; their employers pleaded with them to eat cream and ghee, to look after their chilblains and sun themselves like monitor lizards on winter afternoons. The MetalBox watchman assured him that each morning he consumed a fried egg—
    with white toast, when white bread had been fashionable, and now that brown bread was most in vogue, with brown.
    So serious was this rivalry that the cook found himself telling lies. Mostly about the past since the present could too easily be picked apart. He fanned a rumor of the judge’s lost glory, and therefore of his own, so it flamed and prospered up and down the market. A great statesman, he told them, a wealthy landowner who gave his family property away, a

    freedom fighter who left a position of immense power in court as he did not wish to pass judgment on his fellow men—he could not, not with his brand of patriotic zest, jail congresswallahs, or stamp out demonstrations. A man so inspiring, but brought to his knees, to austerity and philosophy, by sorrow at his wife’s death, the wife herself a martyred and religious mother of the kind that makes a Hindu weak in the knees. "That is why he sits by himself all day and every day."
    The cook had never known the judge’s wife, but he claimed that his information had been handed down from the older servants in the household, and eventually, he had grown to believe his own marvelous story. It gave him a feeling of self-respect even as he picked over the vegetables being sold cheap and considered rebate melons with caving pates.
    "He was completely different," he told Sai, too, when she first came to Kalimpong. "You cannot believe. He was born a rich man."
    "Where was he born?"
    "Into one of the top families of Gujarat. Ahmedabad. Or was it Bar-oda?
    Huge haveli like a palace."
    Sai liked to keep him company in the kitchen as he told her stories. He gave her bits of dough to roll into chapatis and showed her how to make them perfectly round, but hers came out in all kinds of shapes. "Map of India," he would say, dismissing one. "Oof ho, now you’ve made the map of Pakistan," he tossed out the next. Finally he’d let her put one of them on the fire to puff up and if it didn’t, "Well, Dog Special Roti," he would say.
    "But tell me more," she would ask, as he allowed her to spread jam on a tart or grate cheese into a sauce.
    "They sent him to England and ten thousand people saw him off at the station. He went on top of an elephant! He had won, you see, a scholarship from the maharaja. . . ."

    ________

    The sound of the cook talking reached the judge’s ears as he sat over chess in the drawing room. When he thought of his past, he began, mysteriously, to itch.
    Every bit of him filled with a burning sensation. It roiled within until he could barely stand it.

    ________

    Jemubhai Popatlal Patel had, in fact, been born to a family of the peasant caste, in a tentative structure under a palm roof scuffling with rats, at the outskirts of Piphit where the town took on the aspect of a village again. The year was 1919 and the Patels could still remember the time when Piphit had seemed ageless. First it had been owned by the Gaekwad kings of Baroda and then the British, but though the revenue headed for one owner and then another, the landscape had remained unaffected; a temple stood at its heart, and by its side, a several-legged banyan tree; in its pillared shade, white-bearded men regurgitated their memories; cows mooed oo aaw, oo aaw; women walked through the cotton fields to collect water at the mud-muddled river, a slow river, practically asleep.
    But then tracks had been laid across the salt pans to bring steam trains from the docks at