The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

When I read John Keay's India (review here), I was perhaps most struck by the immense diversity of cultures on the subcontinent, particularly in the northern regions which saw constant migrations from virtually every direction. The many thousands of years of Indian civilization saw the rise and fall of hundreds of kingdoms, tribes, dynasties, clans, and the like, led by both the indigenous and the foreign-born. Of course the West's great contribution to this recurring cycle was the British Raj, the end of which saw not the emergence of a unified independent India, but an immediate partition, followed by a second partition, and the subdivision of the remaining Indian nation into a bevy of states and territories, based largely on linguistic boundaries.

One area that has seen more than its share of multi-ethnic traffic is the Indian state of West Bengal. Just by its name one can infer that it itself is a subdivision of the Bengal region, split during the 1947 partition. In addition to the long border with Bangladesh, the state also abuts Bhutan and Nepal, and it saw an influx of Tibetan refugees after the Chinese invasion of that country. The northernmost district in West Bengal is called Darjeeling, most famous perhaps for its namesake tea. With its shared border with Nepal, there is a substantial ethnic Nepalese population in the district, including many Gorkhas, who fought a border war with the British in the early 19th-century. The ethnic tensions never fully dissipated, and in the years following Indian independence there was a movement for a Gorkhaland state to be carved out, a movement that turned extremely violent for several years in the late 1980s with the rise of the Gorkha National Liberation Front:

"This state-making," Lola continue, "biggest mistake that fool Nehru made. Under his rules any group of idiots can stand up demanding a new state and get it too. How many new ones keep appearing? From fifteen we went to sixteen, sixteen to seventeen, seventeen to twenty-two...." Lola made a line with a finger from above her ear and drew noodles in the air to demonstrate her opinion of such madness.

It is in this tumultuous time and place that Kiran Desai set her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, which was awarded both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006. The opening chapter finds Sai, an orphaned teenager, waiting at her home in Kalimpong (a subdivision of the Darjeeling district) for her mathematics tutor, Gyan. The home actually belongs to her grandfather, Jemubhai Patel, who retired to the district after a career as judge in the British and then Indian civil service. Residing nearby is their cook, whose son Buji emigrated (illegally) to America:

Out of his depth, he was almost relieved when the manager of their branch received a memo instructing him to do a green card check on his employees.

"Nothing I can do," the manager said, pink from having to dole out humiliation to these men. A kind man. His name was Frank--funny for a man who managed frankfurters all day. "Just disappear quietly is my advice...."

So they disappeared.

While the main story centers on Sai, her budding relationship with Gyan, and the consequences of his enchantment with the growing Gorkha independence movement, there are also two other important plot lines. The book is interspersed with chapters that follow Buji's struggling life as an illegal immigrant in America, shuffled from job to job, living on a cot in a crowded basement with others similarly situated, and greatly conflicted between his Indian heritage and his efforts to make a life in the New World. And, periodically, the retired judge's memory is sparked and we travel discursively into his time as a student in Britain or his extremely troubled return to India:

The he remembered a worse incident. Another Indian, a boy he didn't know, but no doubt someone just like himself, just like Bose, was being kicked and beaten behind the pub at the corner. One of the boy's attackers had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a crowd of jeering red-faced men. And the future judge, walking by, on his way home with a pork pie for his dinner--what had he done? He hadn't said anything. He hadn't done anything. He hadn't called for help. He'd turned and fled, run up to his rented room and sat there.

All these plot lines seem to be rooted in the alienation of the characters, each grasping at some sense of self-identity in a world in which competing forces are pulling them either towards materialistic multiculturalism or xenophobic nationalism. It was quite telling that Buji's crisis about his Indian identity in America was not all that different from Gyan's struggle about his Gurkha ancestry in Kalimpong, perhaps an acknowledgment that such issues are not unique to immigrants in the West (though to the extent the Indo-Nepalese conflict is partially a result of British colonial line-drawing, it all might be traced back to us):

Gyan, who had been gathered up accidentally in the procession, who had shouted half facetiously, half in earnest, who had half played, half lived a part, found the fervor had affected him. His sarcasm and his embarrassment were gone. Fired by alcohol, he finally submitted to the compelling pull of history and found his pulse leaping to something that felt entirely authentic...

It suddenly became clear why had no money and no real job had come his way, why he couldn't fly to college in America, why he was ashamed to let anyone see his home. He thought of how he had kept Sai away the day she had suggested visiting his family. Most of all, he realized why his father's meekness infuriated him, and why he found himself unable to speak of him, h who had so modest an idea of happiness that even the daily irritant of fifty-two screaming boys in his plantation schoolroom, even the distance of his own family, the loneliness of his work, didn't upset him. Gyan wanted to shake him, but what satisfaction could be received from shaking a sock? To accost such a person--it just came back to frustrate you twice over....

As the above excerpts suggest, this novel descends into almost relentless bleakness. Every point at which the characters have a chance at happiness, hope or redemption is inevitably crushed. Each opportunity for moral choice finds the actor lacking. In each story line, from New York to Britain to India, nearly every revelation exposes further suffering, further cruelty. The modern world can be a bitter and lonely place, but surely it is better than this, no? But maybe that is Desai's point, to shake us from that belief. The book's review in The New York Times points out that "as Orhan Pamuk wrote soon after 9/11, people in the West are 'scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population,' which 'neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom.'"