Lives being made over

What8217;s the symbolism behind Desai8217;s Booker? Happily, may be none at all

Look first at two other novels that were in quiet contention for the Booker Prize this year. In Hisham Matar8217;s In the Country of Men, a young boy is rudely prepared for exile as the politics of 1979 Libya come streaming into his family home. In Kate Grenville8217;s The Secret River, a British convict makes a home in 19th-century Australia, anticipating the guilt of later centuries as he places his new life in the midst of aborigines.

If it is to be even presumed that the Booker Prize for Kiran Desai means anything more than acknowledgement for a humane story very well told, it is because it labels together the interconnected themes of the year 8212; and who knows, even the Nobel prize for literature, in case Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk or Arab poet Adonis win today, as they are once again the favourites to do. 8220;Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them,8221; she says in The Inheritance of Loss about her large and varied cast of characters.

Migrations and lives being made over are the staples of quality fiction. In Desai8217;s telling of the insurgency uprooting the settled 8212; though only recently 8212; rhythms of life on Kalimpong hillsides in the 1980s, however, a pessimism is palpable. By this account, there is no evading the wages of these movements, movements of one8217;s own choosing or on account of others8217; compulsions. To belong or to unbelong is beyond our choosing. Displacement is the dominant paradigm.

Strangely, in this cheerfully 8212; sometimes disconcertingly so 8212; narrative, the writer who comes to mind is V.S. Naipaul, even more so because two characters given to lively analysing dwell on him. In Naipaul8217;s body of work, finding one8217;s centre is an exercise in peeling through past movements. Desai8217;s stories leave one with the conjecture that perhaps that exercise is less centripetal; the effect of finding one8217;s roots, or of having those in close proximity lay claim to theirs, is to be scattered. The only way to stop being fragmented is to paper the growing gaps with self-justification, ideology, rage, stories, dreams, theorising, delusion, plans, regrets.

Sai, at 17 at the heart of the novel, knows it even in her cheerfulness. 8220;Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these rainy months,8221; writes Desai, 8220;the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense and she could experience the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible. She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail.8221;

Modernity 8212; each one8217;s sense of it 8212; is what the men and women of The Inheritance of Loss have spent their lifetimes trying to attain and come to terms with. There is Sai8217;s grandfather, a retired judge, who studied his way out of the pettiness of family circumstances in Gujarat, and found 8212; by way of a lonely stint in Cambridge 8212; prestigious employment in British India. But he never really acquired the self-assurance to be comfortable in colonial high office. Desai8217;s ironic prose is now being toasted with an honour sustained by that colonial heritage. The judge, withdrawn from the niceties of social interaction but clinging to the fraying inheritance of that old life like scones for tea, seeks comfort in the unfamiliar. It is to be found in Kalimpong, in this home abandoned by a Scotsman.

Sai had come to him some years ago, orphaned and expelled from her boarding school at the other end of the Himalayas, when her cosmonaut parents died in the Soviet Union. You know Kiran Desai is accomplished as a teller of stories when she pulls off this little detail without sounding facetious. Sai lattices to life on the hillside, finding romance with her Nepali tutor who will soon plunge into the chaotic insurgency and companionship with sisters Noni and Lola. The sisters hold the stories together with a chatter born of security at having settled Lola8217;s daughter into a high-profile assignment with the BBC in London. Their impatience with the post-colonial rage of Naipaul will keep them in denial about the political ferment sweeping them out of genteel retirement. But depletions in their larder will nevertheless keep them alert to this ferment born of a desperation to somehow settle the historical ledger.

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Interleaved with dispatches from the hillside are the meanderings of Biju, son of the judge8217;s cook, through illegal employment in a succession of restaurants in America. Biju8217;s possibilities abroad mean the world to the cook. He must suspect that it is a wretched life, but back in Kalimpong, the prospect of having a son settled in the West, gives him a unique sense of mooring.

Great achievements will be claimed on behalf of Kiran Desai now. At 35, she is the youngest women to win the Booker, reinvented almost officially this year as a launching board for new voices once heavyweights like David Mitchell and Peter Carey were excluded from the shortlist. Her mother Anita was nominated thrice, but never got it. She is only the third Indian to fetch it, after Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

That last detail could prove to be diversionary. Rushdie8217;s Midnight8217;s Children 1981 liberated Indian writing in English from inherited voices. Roy8217;s The God of Small Things 1997 marked a separate bookshelf for Indian novels in English. What is the symbolism of Desai8217;s Booker? Happily, the answer could in the end be, none at all. We can enjoy a book for its own sake, can we not?