The Inheritance of Loss: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The narrative slips back to Sai’s arrival at Cho Oyu, when she is eight years old. The cook asks where she’s from, and she says Dehra Dun. He asks why she didn’t come before, if she’s been so close. She tells him her parents are dead; Sai’s father was a space pilot, and he and Sai’s mother both died in Russia. The cook asks how they died.

The narrative jumps back even further, explaining the circumstances of Sai’s parents’ deaths. Sai’s father had been a resident at the Society for Interplanetary Travel in Moscow, during “the last days of Indo-USSR romance.”

Sai’s mother and father (referred to as Mrs. and Mr. Mistry) had met in a public park in Delhi, when her father had been stopped in his tracks on a jog by her mother’s beauty. Less than a year later, he proposed. She wished to “be an adult” and said yes.

As space exploration grew, a visiting Soviet team had been instructed by the government to find candidates to send to space in India. They had been impressed by Mr. Mistry and asked him to come to Moscow. Sai, only six at the time, was left in India and entrusted to the same convent her mother had attended. But one day as Mr. and Mrs. Mistry were crossing the street, they were crushed by a local bus, in which thirty ladies were speeding from the provinces to barter and sell their nesting dolls.

Hearing the news at the convent, Sai has a hard time picturing Moscow. The nuns try to console her, but she admits to herself that she couldn’t really remember her mother and father, because she had not seen them in two years. She finds herself unable to cry about their deaths.

The nuns worry about what to do with Sai. Under the emergency contact information in their register, they find the judge’s name and address, and remember that he was the one paying for her to stay at the convent. Sai had never met him.

Meanwhile, the Scotsman who built Cho Oyu is showing the judge the home. The judge finds the house appealing because he could live in it as a “shell,” and would take solace in “being a foreigner in his own country.”

Sai says goodbye to the nuns at the convent, who had taught her fear and humiliation but who had also defined sin for her in a way that made it tantalizing. She describes other lessons she had learned: cake is better than laddoos, silverware is better than hands, worshipping Jesus is better than worshipping a phallic symbol. English is better than Hindi.

A nun delivers Sai to Cho Oyu. On the train they see a panorama of village life, and on the railway tracks they see dozens of people defecating. The nun calls these people dirty, but a scholar seated next to her tells her that it’s because the ground drops to the railway track, so it’s a good place to do that.

The nun and Sai part ways at the base of the mountains, just as night falls. Sai travels the rest of the way in a car, terrified because of the dangerous turns on the path and the fact that there are no streetlights in Kalimpong.