The Inheritance of Loss: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Across the hall from Sai’s room, the judge lies awake in bed as well. He realizes that Sai’s arrival has upset him. He thinks of his own journey. The judge had left home at the age of twenty, with a black tin trunk just like the one Sai had. It was 1939, and he had traveled from his ancestral home of Piphit to the Bombay dock, then to Liverpool, and finally arrived at Cambridge.

The judge (then called Jemubhai) had been accompanied by his father to his departure point. His mother stayed weeping at home. With him, Jemubhai had a sweater that she had knit him, a new Oxford English Dictionary, and a decorated coconut to be tossed as an offering into the waves, so that his journey could be blessed by the gods.

Jemubhai thought of his fourteen-year-old wife, Nimi, whom he had married only a month ago, and whom he would not see for many more years. He had not properly seen her face before leaving.

As the judge departed on the ship, the judge’s father yelled at him to toss the coconut. Jemubhai was embarrassed by his father, a barely educated man. He didn’t throw the coconut, and felt that he would never know love for a human being that wasn’t also tempered by other, contradictory emotions.

The judge continues to remember his journey. Jemubhai had discovered spoiled food that his mother had packed him—in case he lacked the courage to go to the dining salon in the ship because he couldn’t eat with knife and fork. His cabinmate was disgusted by the smell of the food, and Jemubhai felt humiliated.

Jemubhai arrived at Cambridge, and when he tried to look for a room to rent, he was turned away several times. One woman, Mrs. Rice, finally accepted him, desperate for the money. Twice a day she gave him cold food. Eventually he worked up the courage to ask her for a proper hot dinner. She told him that she and her husband don’t eat much for dinner either, but that evening he found baked beans on toast that she had left for him.

Jemubhai began his studies at Fitzwilliam, spending most of the day working so as to avoid the humiliations of being a foreigner. He grew completely solitary, barely speaking. He began to find his own skin odd, and his own accent strange. He forgot how to laugh. He washed obsessively, trying to keep from being accused of smelling strange. He felt barely human. In the present, the judge turns on the light, frustrated that he cannot fall asleep and instead is reliving a nightmare.

In the morning, the judge instructs the cook to bring Sai to meet her new tutor, Noni. On the road to Noni’s house, the cook points out the neighbors’ houses to Sai. Their nearest neighbor is Uncle Potty, a gentleman farmer and an alcoholic. There is also his friend Father Booty, who runs a Swiss dairy, and who drinks each night with Uncle Potty. Lower down the hill live two Afghan princesses who were given refuge by Nehru when the British ousted their father. In another smaller house lives Mrs. Sen, whose daughter, Mun Mun, had gone to America.

Finally, they reach Noni’s house. Noni lives with her sister Lola in a rose-covered cottage named Mon Ami. Lola’s husband Joydeep had died of a heart attack, and so Noni moved in with her sister. They live on Lola’s husband’s pension, but still needed more money to pay all of the people who work in their house—a maid, sweeper, watchman, and gardener. So, Noni agrees to become Sai’s tutor, and over the years, the two sisters grow very fond of her.