'Nowhere is pure': Kiran Desai and The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai “Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?” Kiran Desai asks in the opening pages of her Man Booker Prize winning novel. The Inheritance of Loss meditates on loss as an emotional location, a sentiment shared by a set of characters continually torn and fragmented by their encounters with the modern world. During her appearance at Shanghai’s Literary Festival, Desai’s humor and candid observations were as relentlessly honest as her prose, and her talk similarly offered little reassurance or sanctuary, exposing uneasy tensions in familiar conceptions about home, identity and modernity.

While much critical acclaim surrounding The Inheritance of Loss focuses on Desai’s treatment of wider global issues – globalization, multiculturalism, fundamentalism and terrorist violence, Desai immediately turned the discussion away from looming discourses of post-colonial theory, and situated the writing of novel in an intensely personal space.

For Desai, born in India but educated in the West, the immigrant experience is one that involves the inexorable narration of identity. “As an immigrant you tell yourself a story that you’d like to believe,” she said “and you keep reinventing yourself through a process that involves many stories.” In order to tap into this narrative becoming, and what Desai termed the “emotional location of the Indian Diaspora” she found she had to reach back to a historical moment of fracture in India, a place close to her own family’s history.

Desai spent long periods in India during the research and writing of The Inheritance of Loss, drawing sensual inspiration for her richly descriptive prose. Some passages are so evocative the page virtually sweats with India’s stifling heat or grows limp from monsoon humidity. Oddly, the fertility of Desai’s prose, and the distilled sense of place created ultimately serve to unravel faith in locality. Desai addressed this tension with a characteristically sardonic laugh: “a book about the senselessness of believing in place still requires a description of it.”

Indeed, the fanatical insistence on place and belonging is one way in which Desai’s characters handle their frustrating and humiliating encounters with a world that continually assaults their notions of order and dignity. The alternate action is to flee. Neither results in redemption, but instead further exposes the veneration of place, whether historically imagined or projected onto the western stage, as fundamentally flawed and destructive.

The insistence on order and justice is portrayed as similarly fruitless, as Desai continually exposes the messy realities that thwart theoretical notions of truth and integrity. When a western-educated judge returns to India to administer justice without proper command of local languages, Desai aptly remarks: “Nobody could be sure how much of the truth had fallen between languages, between languages and illiteracy; the clarity that justice demanded was nonexistent.” The Inheritance of Loss exposes a connection between the smallest of corruptions with those of global scale, hinting at the infinite layers of power relationships that render judicial structures inept: “the great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed, because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization.”

Few traces of hope survive harsh reality in The Inheritance of Loss. From its opening pages, benevolence becomes relegated to severity; softer, gentler gestures become clouded in contempt. The fog that first rolls down from the Himalayas, turning “trees into silhouettes,” “solid objects to shadow” uniting the surroundings in an ephemeral, vapor-like fabric, becomes suddenly particularized by the arrival of Nepalese insurgents, whose presence makes visible the unyielding divisions of territories, borders and lines. “It had always been a messy map” Desai writes, “the papers sounded resigned. A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred; between Nepal, England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling stolen from here, Kalimpong plucked from there – despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders.”

The novel, which spans 1980’s India and America, opens in the town of Kalimpong located on the Indian side of the Himalayas, where Sai, an orphaned teenager has come to live with her grandfather, a retired, Western-educated judge. Sai initially becomes romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, but the social and economic chasm dividing them eventually becomes too clear, distilled, causing him to withdraw and fall in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. This narrative is foiled by that of Biju, the son of Sai’s cook, an illegal American immigrant who lives a scant existence as part of New York’s underclass, moving from one shady job to another.

The judge’s story, comprised of ruthlessly suppressed memories, also surfaces sporadically, and together these disparate tales create an uneven but compelling narrative architecture. A structure Desai defined not in terms of overarching design, but rather as an effect produced by the psychology of her characters, “there’s no structure other than these emotional parallels – it’s more of an emotional pattern.” These characters are bound by the common experience of alienation, affected by the west, through which their adverse positions in the world become all too clarified.

Desai spoke of her own hybrid identity as one that contains both extraordinary richness and a terribly difficult perspective; “it teaches you to clarify your place in the world; you are forced to see yourself from the outside.” In the novel, the judge’s journey to racist England as a student follows the agonizing process by which he becomes alien even to himself. He feels "barely human at all" and leaps "when touched on the arm as if from an unbearable intimacy." On his return to India, he finds himself despising his culture, family and inadvertently attempting to "colonize" his backward wife. “'Take those absurd trinkets off,' he instructed her, annoyed by the tinkle-tonk of her bangles. ‘Why do you have to dress in such a gaudy manner? Yellow and pink? Are you mad?' He threw the hair oil bottles away and her long hairs escaped no matter how tidily she made her bun.” In this manner, Desai carefully threads the private and personal into a wider political framework. The hostility between a husband and wife becomes globally proportioned: “they belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced anger with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.”

Characters are also constantly aware of the fine balance between those with and without power and influence, as the identity of each rests ever so delicately on the other. Noni, poised in her position of privilege, is excruciatingly aware of its tenuousness, attempting with every motion to re-inscribe the border dividing her from the underclass: “It was important to draw the lines properly between classes or it harmed everyone on both sides of the great divide.” Desai often subtly sets characters up against one another, and their difference becomes increasingly threatening when exposed. This is perhaps most gruelingly apparent in the eventual toxicity and disintegration of Gyan and Sai’s relationship.

Arguably, Desai’s gregarious presence offered a sense of relief and buoyancy absent from her novel. Her humor and occasionally self-effacing remarks managed to maintain lightness in the room despite the gravity of the topics discussed. Particularly refreshing was her response to questions and remarks about the recent success of Indian writers. Rather than letting herself be added to a lineage of Indian legacy, Desai pointed to the unsettling politics of the publishing market, which currently regards young Indian authors as hot commodities. The success of Indian writing in the West, Desai estimates, is due to the fact that these popular Indian authors are versed in Western conventions. “I grew up reading English Literature and learned a certain emotional vocabulary that translates to Western audiences.” Many of these Indian authors popular in the West, Desai reminded the audience, are greeted with troubled reception in India. “We are not representing modern India. We are a particular class of writers representing India through a Western perspective”.

The final question of the evening drew Desai back to the question of home. Interestingly, the audience seemed to desire a definitive, personal answer to one of the book’s most evasive issues. Desai’s reply was, again, delightfully complex and indefinite: “That is a very difficult question. Home is a place we choose. Nowhere is pure. The idea is a simplification. There is no pure location – there’s no returning to a firm place.”

-Sophie Kalkreuth



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