PXylem

Kiran Desai's 'The Inheritance of Loss' is the book of intense thoughts, written with insight, compassion and uncompromising audacity to reveal the vulnerable self of an individual under desperate conditions of human life. The author has dealt with many global problems of today's contemporary world and modern society and thereby managed to stir reader's mind to look into the consequences of problems like globalization, emigration, multiculturalism, economic disparity and insurgency that have influenced the Indian mental attitude and deeply affected the very texture of Indian social system. This original work of her is a realistic novel in which she has vividly depicted the plight and dilemma of Indians living abroad who compromise their culture in the procurement of 'better life', 'high living standard' and 'modernity'.

'The Inheritance of Loss' opens with the story of teenage Indian orphan girl Sai who arrives her grandfather's isolated house 'Cho Oyu' at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in Kalimpong. Sai's grandfather Jemubhai Patel is an anglophile, retired judge living with his beloved dog mutt and his cook who manages the household. He is embittered by the experiences of his past life in Cambridge. Describing his isolation, the author writes, ‘He worked twelve hours at a stretch, late into the night, and in thus with drawing, he failed to make a courageous gesture outward at a critical moment and found, instead, that his pusillanimity and his loneliness had found, fertile soil. He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.’ She further explains his alienation as 'For entire days nobody spoke to him at all, his throat jammed with words unuttered, his throat and mind turned into blunt aching things…’ Sai, on the other hand, is in love with her mathematics tutor Gyan, a Nepali half-educated man who eventually draws back from her in the wake of ethical insurgency in the hills of Kalimpong. The judge’s cook has a son Biju, who is an emigrant in New York and skips one ill - paid job to another, spends his time moving from one gritty restaurant to another in the search of a green card. In the end, Biju arrived back in India but soon engulfed by local insurgency. All the characters in this novel share a common historical legacy and are victims of long subjection by western economic and cultural power.

The style of the novel is incredible. Kiran Desai's descriptive narration has made the novel enchanting, hilarious and pleasurable to read. Her comical way of description is impeccable and vivid depictions to display complex states of mind are meticulous. She has beautifully portrayed the pictures Kalimpong, its people, onset of monsoon in the Himalyas and Kanchenjunga. She describes, 'All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of clean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms as its summit.'

In another description of Kalimpong and its people, she writes, '…There was not a streetlight anywhere in Kalimpong, only as you passed they came up suddenly and disapproved immediately behind. The people who walked by us the black had neither torches nor lanterns...’she has adeptly drawn pictures of immigrant quarters, basement kitchens, gritty restaurants in New York and Visa counter at the US Embassy. Desai is equally superb in depicting abstract emotions and sentiments of her characters, as 'Jamubhai looked at the father, a barely educated man venturing where he should not be, and the love in Jemubhai's heart mingled with pity, the pity with shame. His father felt his own hand rise and cover his mouth: he had failed his son.'

Kiran Desai is truly a terrific writer as remarked by the noted writer Salman Rushdie and this irrefutable truth is clearly expressed in ‘The Inheritance of Loss', winner of the Man Booker Prize 2006.