KIRAN Desai, author of “The Inheritance of Loss,” is the 2006 winner of the Man Booker Prize. It is one of the world’s most prestigious awards and represents the very best in contemporary fiction. Desai, born in India in 1971, is the youngest female winner of the prize. She dedicated the novel to her mother and fellow novelist, Anita Desai, who has herself been nominated three times for the Booker Prize but has never won. In an interview with the BBC, Kiran said that she wrote this novel “so much in her company it feels almost like her book.”
“The Inheritance of Loss” opens with a poem by Jorge Luis Borges. In powerful and concise language, the poet speaks about man’s never ending ambitions and greed and the need to be reconciled with the true meaning of humanity “feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.” These few verses of poetry shed some light on the author’s ideas. Before reading the novel, I imagined Kiran Desai as a poetic soul. The first lines of the novel reinforced my vision: “All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the winds at its summit.”
When I finished the novel I felt that Desai had produced a work beyond time and place. Her sharp observation skills are coupled with a vivid imagination and an open heart. Her writing is pure magic. Pankaj Mishra wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Desai “can describe the onset of the monsoon in the Himalayas and a rat in the slums of Manhattan with equal skill” and that is true. Her choice of words is astounding and in the space of just one page, she can make us smile, laugh, wonder or shudder with disgust.
The novel’s main characters live at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas and in the United States. “The Inheritance of Loss” highlights the complexities of life in post-colonial countries. People from different nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, religions, political parties, rich and poor, wish to retain their cushioned lives or they are struggling for a better life. This blind craving for more materialistic comfort churns up civil unrest in the region and leads the younger generation, such as Biju, to join the ranks of NRIs seeking employment abroad.
Kiran Desai who has herself lived in the United Kingdom and the United States gives us a regal description of NRIs queuing at airports. Brimming with money which brings them more money, they can’t wait for shopping: “While the shopping was converted into dollars, tips to the servants could be calculated in local currency...discovering the first germ of leprous, all-consuming hatred that would in time rot the family irreversibly from within.”
From the beginning till the end of the novel, Desai moves from one continent to the other, scrutinizing different worlds, depicting all the artifices which are used to separate the rich from the poor and the privileged from the unlucky. Through the magnificent and profound analysis of her characters, she leads us into their personalities and confronts us, the readers with timeless issues set in disturbing times.
The retired judge, Sai’s grandfather, who employs the submissive cook, Biju’s father, is the most unlikable character. His stay in England only brought out the worst in him. His main motto is to stop thinking if you wish to remain intact, or guilt and pity will take everything from you, even yourself from yourself. His sick misanthropy has rendered him oblivious to human suffering. He showers the last shreds of love he possesses on a dog.
Sai, the sixteen year old protagonist, wonders in the first pages if fulfillment can ever be felt as deeply as loss. Toward the end, she reproaches herself for her egoistical pursuit of self happiness as she realizes that “life wasn’t single in its purpose... or even in its direction. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it.”
Through Biju who stays illegally in the United States for a better life, Desai touches the problems created by absence. In a touching paragraph, she brings up the sad reality facing thousands of foreign workers living abroad: “It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the façade; it had been eaten from the inside.”
“The Inheritance of Loss” touches all our senses and heightens our emotions. This compelling story is a blend of drama and lighter moments. Kiran Desai not only writes superbly but she also manages to bring her readers into the novel. When we reach the final pages, we see Kanchenjunga capped with gold light “the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent” and we feel like the young heroine Sai that its up to each one of us to “reach out and pluck it.”