Inheritance of Loss [Paperback]

The oxymoron, “Boast of Quietness”, is the title of a poem by Borges, and serves as an epigraph to Kiran Desai’s equally paradoxical novel, The Inheritance of Loss, winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize. The silent burst of Borges’s title prepares the reader for his opening line: “Writings of light assault the darkness,” for the blind poet contrasts his humanity with that of the multitude, even as he differentiates his own hermetic world from Whitman’s openness. In contrast to Whitman’s opening line in “Song of the Open Road”-“Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road”-Borges ends his “Boast” with “I walk slowly, like one who comes from afar, so he doesn’t expect to arrive.” Kiran Desai incorporates both poets in The Inheritance of Loss, as she explores the “open road” in a global context that combines America and India during the Nepalese border conflicts of 1986.
“My name is someone and anyone,” writes Borges; Desai’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, Sai Mistry, takes part of her name from Desai and part from Rohinton Mistry, but she also partakes of the “sigh” of love and fatalism, as well as the mist and mystery that dominate the atmosphere of Kanchenjunga, the mountainous border region between India and Nepal, where much of the novel is set. Desai’s opening paragraph hints at the Sublime: “All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.” Desai observes a fine balance in these sentences, as well as in the overall structure of her novel, divided between this remote retreat in the Himalayas and the bustle of New York. Constantly oscillating between inner and outer, upper and lower, she brings the Sublime down to earth.
Just as the “inheritance of loss” works through an affirmation of negatives, so her descriptions of the mountains combine substantial and ethereal elements-like photographs developed through their negatives. With plume in hand, Desai paints light and darkness, height and depth in her poetic prose. The vastness of the first paragraph gives way to a domestic scene: “Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic.” In her seeming isolation, Sai reaches out to the larger world through her global magazine, where the giant squid extends its tentacles towards Kanchenjunga’s “wizard phosphorescence”-two macrocosmic creatures in a surreal cosmos.
Meanwhile, to complete the domestic scene, Sai’s grandfather, the judge, sits in a corner playing chess, his dog Mutt under his chair, and the cook tries to light a fire in the “cavernous kitchen” with kindling where scorpions nest.
Smoke from the kitchen mingles with the mist outside, obscuring everything; even the diagram of the giant squid coalesces with the murky vapors. Waiting for her mathematics tutor, Gyan, whom she loves, Sai contemplates the giant squid’s solitude and melancholy. “Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?” She decides that love resides in the lack, not the contentment-hence the inheritance of loss for Sai and other characters in this novel, who have been orphaned in one way or another.
The giant squid, National Geographic, and the omnipresent mist transcend this isolated region, rising towards universals: “They sipped and ate, all of existence passed over by non-existence, the gate leading nowhere, and they watched the tea spill copious ribbons of vapor, watched their breath join the mist slowly twisting and turning, twisting and turning.”
That twisting and turning applies not only to the Dickensian fog transported to the former British colony, but also to an “Inflatable Globe” that Sai receives as a gift from National Geographic. Desai recreates the twists and turns of fate and history, for the open road closes when a gang of young Indian-Nepalese insurgents ransack the judge’s house. In contrast to National Geographic’s order, this territory was always part of “a messy map . . . despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders.” (The Dickensian note is unmistakable.) The open road continually narrows: optimistic frontiers turn to postcolonial doubts and diasporic labyrinths.
With a vision of romantic adventure, a Scotsman had built the judge’s house, but in reality it was built by the back-breaking work of Indian porters, “faces being bent slowly to look always at the ground-up to this site chosen for a view that could raise the human heart to spiritual heights.” Postcolonialism levels the earlier sense of the Sublime, as Desai resigns herself to a fatalism that plagues India: “It was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed.”
On the other side of the globe, the cook’s son, Biju, tries to find his way in America in a number of fast-food joints. Displaced in the Diaspora, Biju cannot participate in Whitman’s light-hearted song; in a world where all roads are dead ends, he can merely join Borges, “like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.” Desai’s “boast of quietness” extends to Biju’s father back in India: “A poverty stricken man growing into an ancient in fast-forward. Compressed childhood, lingering old age.” With such compression and compassion, Desai captures an entire life, and that life can be multiplied a million times over.
Down and out, Biju lives in a basement at the bottom of Harlem. “Biju joined a shifting population of men camping out near the fuse box, behind the boiler, in the cubby holes,” as far removed from the heights of Kalimpong as possible. By the end of the novel, Biju returns to his father, who has been stripped of his few possessions, a mere figure in a nightgown, a phantom against the mountainous backdrop.
If America represents a contemporary escape route for Indians abroad, England may be seen as the more traditional haven for the educated classes seeking opportunity in the larger world. The judge’s training at Cambridge includes forms of discrimination. His two neighbours, Lola and Noni, also Anglophiles, fill their bookshelves with Jane Austen’s novels and eat jam “By appointment to Her Majesty the queen.” The jam’s coat of arms, supported by a crowned lion and a unicorn contrasts with the spiders, scorpions, and snakes in the vicinity. Their domestic scene further highlights the imperial invasion of the remote mountainous zone, for Desai literally sees through the colonial enterprise with exact irony: “Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spenser panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favored with views of Kanchenjunga collared by cloud.” These sisters praise England’s cosmopolitan society where chicken tikka masala has overtaken fish and chips as the national dish.
By the end of the novel Sai again contemplates her world of National Geographic: “Of the judge’s journey, of the cook’s journey, of Biju’s. Of the globe turning on its axis.” Such a long journey is circular, as it spirals downward from mountains to characters downtrodden by fate and history. The open road narrows and closes in The Inheritance of Loss, but as the daughter of Anita Desai, Kiran has inherited considerable gains in the world of fiction.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Starred Review. This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is?at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a better life, when one person's wealth means another's poverty.
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Copyright© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.