Half-lives in a bubble

WHEN Anita Desai’s daughter first appeared on the literary scene with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, reviewers lined up to appraise the offspring of the First Lady of Indo-Anglian Literature. The novel was light —in tone, execution and, perhaps, literary significance—but that didn’t deter the literary community from expending much energy and column inches on it. Desai Junior’s choice of title, with its happy echo of ‘storm in a teacup’, seemed wonderfully prescient, since the only person who didn’t seem to be joining in the critical hullabaloo was the author herself.

The Inheritance of Loss is a far weightier proposition—in title, size and, most definitely, literary significance. If Hullabaloo was like a pianist practicing her scales, Inheritance is the resultant concerto. Kiran Desai wears her literary inheritance lightly, and with this novel proves herself to be an artist in her own right. Where Anita Desai is quiet and composed, Kiran is altogether more robust and dashing: where her mother’s prose hearkens back to the nineteenth century, hers accelerates forward into the twenty-first.

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.

Story continues below this ad


‘It’s a story that could happen anywhere in India’ In Delhi for the release of The Inheritance Of Loss, Kiran Desai speaks to Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan* on the second-book syndrome and the serious business of writing* Did you find this book harder to write than your first? It was much harder than the first one. My first book was rather frivolous, but it did teach me that I love writing. But at the end of that one, I felt I had taken the easy way out. Of course, I was much younger then, and I had just left India so I wrote about everything I missed most. But I learnt that you can’t write completely light-hearted. A lot of writers suffer from the second-book syndrome, this book took me forever to write! How much of your writing is influenced by your mother Anita Desai? I wrote my first book in college, so I didn’t draw so much from her, but for this one I relied on her advice. What time period is The Inheritance Of Loss set in? It’s set in 1986-87, but it’s a story that could happen anywhere in India and at any time. This was the one way I could match my experiences and I really wanted to write this story, the last time around I was very self-indulgent. And now we’re focused so much on relations with the West, there’s a huge amount of culpability among Indians like me. Why culpability? Well, this is a time when there’s lots of money to be had in the West and yet poverty is being allowed to flourish. We blame it all on something else, like third world countries or whatever, so there’s a great feeling of self-righteousness. And every single bit of food you put in your mouth is being taken away from someone else, and the clothes you buy are made by someone much poorer. What made you locate your book in Kalimpong? Well, for several reasons. My aunt lived there, she still does, I went and stayed with her for a while as I was writing. I also went to school there — St Joseph’s Convent — when I was about 14. The foreign presence in my book I drew from other hill stations as well, for instance, there really was a Father Booty, as there is in the book, who lived in Kalimpong and who started a Swiss dairy farm. How many more of the characters are drawn from real life? The Afghani princesses lived there as well. There was one woman I wanted to use, but she was too colourful a character. She claimed to be the love child of Hitler and a Spanish nun! What made you pick the title? It does sound rather depressing, doesn’t it? Actually, I wanted to convey the sense of all these people who had to live half-lives of hypocrisy. I was also thinking about my life and how I left India at 14 or 15.

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.’’

Story continues below this ad

‘‘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.

Tags:

Half-lives in a bubble

...