Reviews and Essays

Perched in the Eastern Himalayas, Kalimpong, where Kiran Desai's second novel begins, is a surprisingly cosmopolitan town. In the 1980s, when the novel is set, it has a varied population made up of several nationalities, a large underpaid labour force and many decaying Raj-style abodes. In the morose vision of The Inheritance of Loss , the place reflects modernity as an indistinguishable mass of commercialism, oppression and suffering.

Kalimpong is home to Sai, an orphaned teenager who lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, their poor cook, whose son Biju is in New York, and the dog, Mutt, the judge's sole source of joy. The quartet's lugubrious routine of reading the National Geographic and eating high tea is interrupted when their house is broken into by young men from the Gorkha National Liberation Front, an actual political party that seeks to empower West Bengal's ethnic Nepalis and once led a separatist uprising. The men threaten and humiliate the family and steal the judge's rusty guns and meagre liquor supply. The Liberation Front also draws in Gyan, Sai's tutor and lover, who is frustrated by his future as a marginalized Nepali in India , and he betrays Sai because of her Westernized ways. It was he who suggested that the judge's house would be an easy target for burglary. Kalimpong is in chaos: bands of insurgents invade the town and and the police respond by deporting foreigners, confiscating books and detaining and torturing the innocent.

An ambitious writer with a far-reaching scope, Kiran Desai offers an interpretation of the globalized world which stands out among her contemporaries as complex and sensitive. She artfully unravels the personal and political strands that have brought her characters to their dismal present, and journeys with ease through Gujarat , New York and Britain . We learn that when the judge left home to study at Cambridge University in 1939, he developed a lasting disdain for his Indian heritage: "he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar". His self-loathing propels him on a path of unending misery and loneliness, and once back in India , he banishes his wife because of her un-English ways.

Unlike Salman Rushdie's playful depictions of colonialism and migration, Desai's macabre realism paints a grim portrait of these forces. In her novel, there is no quixotic prescription for the fallout of migration, as there is in The Satanic Verses . Nor is her book an archetypal immigrant tale. Desai portrays migration as a universal, multifaceted experience, rescuing it from the clutches of myth and fetishism. Almost fifty years after the judge went to England , Biju, the cook's son, survives a grueling existence as an illegal immigrant in New York. Life there unfolds in a series of vignettes that expose the hidden disparities of Western cities, where restaurants are "perfectly firstworld on top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps below". New York has many minority communities, and Biju assuages his homesickness by taking a job in the Gandhi Café. The owner allows him to sleep in the rat-infested kitchen and pays him below the minimum wage. Despite having attained a slice of home, Biju becomes increasingly distraught and burdened by his expanded "self-consciousness". "He tried to keep on the right side of power", writes Desai, "tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn't tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any."

Such instructive narration offers insights into Biju's dilemma over his identity, but it fails to penetrate his personality. At times in The Inheritance of Loss , characters are ascribed thoughts by the narrator, instead of being given their own voice. Representing distant and disparate individuals is challenging, though, and Desai's picture of those who inhabit the world's underbelly is convincing because of her uncommon and vindicating self-awareness. She acknowledges the gulf between Green Card holders and undocumented workers, rich and poor and herself and her subjects. Sai, who was educated in a convent school, is close to the semi-literate cook. But when she visits his quarters, "he was ill at ease and so was she, something about their closeness being exposed in the end as fake, their friendship composed of shallow things conducted in a broken language, for she was an English-speaker and he was a Hindi-speaker".

One of Desai's great strengths as a writer is her haunting lyrical description, her ability discern beauty in an otherwise bleak landscape. She writes of Manhattan

On the Hudson, the ice cracked loudly into pieces, and within the contours of this gray, broken river it seemed as if the city's inhabitants were being provided with a glimpse of something far and forlorn that they might use to consider their own loneliness.

Elsewhere, her incisive cynical gaze is fearless. Her cool scrutiny of society's cruelties has an unabashedly critical and unsentimental edge. And it is not just a case of launching diatribes against the West or elitism. She makes it clear that India is wrought by disparity, Biju is full of prejudice and the Liberation Front consists of boys "taking their style from Rambo".

At the end of the novel, there is no formulaic redemption for the characters, no facile solutions to the world's problems. "Slowly, painstakingly, like ants", Desai writes, "men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again." Such honesty is unusual, and it indicates an evolved engagement with the modern world's failures. Unflinchingly stark, The Inheritance of Loss scrutinizes the current preoccupations of society and literature – globalization, nationhood, migration, poverty and political violence. Published eight years after the author's light, satirical debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , this serious novel is an antidote to the simplistic suppositions of our age.