Tags
Contemporary Fiction, dogs, Himalayas, India, Kanchenjunga, Kiran Desai, New York, Popular Penguins, Reading, The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai’s second novel won the Man Booker Prize when it was published in 2006. The New York Times’ review of the book calls The Inheritance of Loss “the best kind of post-9/11 novel”, and goes on to say that “Desai’s novel seems lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender.” A Guardian review from the same time calls the book “bleak but compelling”. I do encourage you to read the New York Times review in particular. It makes a lot of connections and parallels that didn’t occur to me, or that I couldn’t make for you as clearly as reviewer Pankaj Mishra has.
Some of my failure to take in the wider parallels within Desai’s story is Desai’s fault herself. I was too taken up by the melancholy, wistful beauty of her writing. My Civic Library copy is spiky with page flags (I love those things!) marking passages I’ve loved or otherwise wanted to come back to. Let me share with you the first paragraph, in Tea and Penguins tradition:
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.
The opening paragraph sets the mood for The Inheritance of Loss. There is a vast world outside the doors of Cho Oyu where Sai, her grandfather the judge, the cook and Mutt live a precarious life clutching the mountainside while the house crumbles and moulders around them. But that outside world is fierce, harsh and changeable. Perhaps better to stay indoors with the known, no matter how it might crumble beneath you. And their corner of India, wedged between Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Tibet, is becoming more and more unstable.
The known is the last decaying remnants of empire. Sai’s misanthrope grandfather, educated at Cambridge, is too English to be Indian, too Indian to be English. Their neighbours, Noni and Lola, also cling to an anglophile existence that allows them to insist on their small luxuries while ignoring the poverty of the people around them. When Cho Oyu is robbed for its antique guns, the judge is forced into the kitchen for the first time ever, and his rage and humiliation is palpable. More English than the English.
Even Sai, orphaned and dropped unceremoniously into the household of her grandfather, seems unaware of the realities of the world around her. Her mutual infatuation with her Nepali maths tutor Gyan draws him into to her world, not her into his. But he’s a young man looking for an identity and for recognition. He might find it in the admiration of the granddaughter of the wealthy Indian judge, or in the camaraderie of the Nepalese militants who are rising up in Kalimpong.
And then there is Mutt, an Irish Setter, seemingly the only beloved of the judge. A privileged creature in the midst of the underprivileged. She is innocence animated:
A lightening conductor atop Cho Oyu ran a wire into an underground pit of salt, which would save them, but Mutt couldn’t understand. With renewed thunder and a blast upon the tin roof, she sought refuge behind the curtains, under the bed. But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds in the empty soda bottles: whoo hoooo hooo.
‘Don’t be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It’s just rain.’
She tried to smile, but her tail kept folding under and her eyes were those of a soldier in war, finished with caring for silly myths of courage. Her ears strained beyond the horizon, anticipating what didn’t fail to arrive, yet another wave of bombardment, the sound of civilization crumbling—she had never known it was so big—cities and monuments fell—and she fled again.
Unable to understand the vast forces around her, their extent or their limits, poor Mutt has no resources to sustain her when the familiar is rendered strange. Much like the humans around her.
I was most affected by The Inheritance of Loss when the innocents began to suffer. Lola and Noni, with squatters encroaching on the vegetable patch at Mon Ami. Father Booty, sent away because the correct forms have not been lodged, a fact revealed by his childlike photographing of a butterfly. They have had their lives turned upside down and irretrievably changed by actions not their own. But of course they are not blameless and innocent. Their crime is to live in peaceful ignorance of the quiet suffering around them, to take and accept advantage because of their wealth and race, to accept the status quo as their due. Who in white Australia is not guilty of that?
I’ve not even touched on the parallel story of the cook’s son Biju and his underground, hand-to-mouth life in the kitchens of New York. That life, too, is melancholy, highlighting the blissful ignorance of his father back home, who believes only good things, wealth and happiness, can come in America.
There is much to ponder in The Inheritance of Loss. I’m sure you don’t win the Booker Prize for pretty words alone. But the words are lovely also, and there is a wonderful sadness in drifting along with Desai’s prose, waiting, like Sai, Noni, Lola and perhaps also Mutt, for whatever will come next. Holding on in the meantime to the beautiful things we have, taking from them a measure of comfort.