Half-lives in a bubble

Set in the 1980s, Inheritance of Loss centres around the tale of a young girl, Sai, who is sent to live with her grandfather, a retired judge, when her parents are killed in a freak accident in Russia. She arrives, freed of the confines of the convent with its ‘‘sweet sweety pastel angels and the bloodied Christ, presented together in disturbing contrast… Good-bye to four years of learning the weight of humiliation and fear, the art of subterfuge, of being uncovered by black-habited detectives and trembling before the rule of law that treated ordinary everyday slips and confusions with the seriousness of first-degree crime.’’

The Judge, his cook and their dog, Mutt, live in a grand isolation in an old colonial house high in the Himalayan foothills of Kalimpong. Here, afternoon tea is served with cheese straws or scones, and dinner is eaten with knives and forks and considered incomplete without pudding. A fish out of water— his brown skin marking him an alien in England, and his English affectations utterly at odds with his surroundings back in India—the judge finds the house a perfect match. When he first entered, he felt that ‘‘he had entered a sensibility rather than a house…. (he) could live here, in this shell, this skull, with the solace of being a foreigner in his own country, for this time he would not learn the language.’’

Sai appears in this still, mist-shrouded world, like a time-traveller, stepping into a bubble of the past. But this bubble is highly permeable; its fragile skin cannot withstand the onrush of outside world. The more the judge tries to forget and deny the humiliations of his past life, the more they return to haunt him. Very contemporary troubles come knocking at the door in the shape of local hoodlums in search of guns and supplies with which to carry out their terrorist activities. And as for Sai, her sexual awakening and romantic longings can be curbed neither by the dry strictures of her grandfather nor the parental fussing of the cook, and blossom into a full-fledged love affair with her idealistic young physics tutor, Gyan.

Biju, the cook’s son, is working in the US. But far from living out his father’s fond first-world fantasy, he ends up as one of the ‘shadow class’: one of the army of illegal immigrants invisibles who toil in the restaurants and coffee shops, bakeries and fast-food joints of America. Sending letters home to their families full of bright lies, they hanker after that sacred document that will grant them legitimacy: The green card…that was not even green.’’

If ever a novel gave credence to the old saw that ‘‘colonialism is a state of mind’’, this is it. I have rarely read such an accurate and acute description of the post-colonial condition—or I should say ‘conditions’ since they come in many varieties.

The passionate struggle of the local Ghorkas for their own separate state is seeded in the resentment of the past, where their fathers and grandfathers had fought and died defending British interests. Escaping a lowly background for the glamour of the West, only to find that glamour tainted, tarnished, forever out of reach, Biju and the Judge have much in common—though, separated by caste and class, each would hotly deny it.

The relative merits of England vs America are hotly debated by the Judge’s neighbours, each of whom has a daughter in each country:

Lola: ‘‘But don’t you find them very simple people?’’

Mrs Sen: ‘‘No hang-ups, na, very friendly.’’

‘‘But a fake friendliness I’ve heard, hi-bye and no meaning to it.’’

‘‘Better than England, ji, where they laugh at you behind your back-’’

‘‘Perhaps England and America didn’t know they were in a fight to the death,’’ writes Desai, wryly, ‘‘but it was being fought on their behalf, anyway, by these two spirited widows of Kalimpong.’’

Desai’s acute observations and wicked sense of humour match her instinct for the mot juste, and she seems to have taken to heart Mark Twain’s injunction to ‘‘use the right word, not its second cousin.’’ Her descriptions of the mountains and the people of Kalimpong, the changing seasons, and the inner mindscapes of her characters are mesmerizing; her use of language virtuoso, and her ideas sparkle. I think Mark Twain would have approved, on all counts.