Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss"- The Sisyphean Task in an Indian Context?

" Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?...Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again..." A bleak world view amid a beauteous but smoldering setting.

Kiran Desai at thirty five is perhaps the youngest recipient of the Booker Prize with only one other novel preceding "The Inheritance of Loss". This novel took her some seven years to research and write as its story straddles between three countries: Great Britain, United States of America, and India. Ms. Desai currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and cites her FMA from Columbia as a formative experience in her writing career. Ms. Desai left India when she was eight, lived in Great Britain for a very short time, and then moved to Massachusetts, USA where she finished her high school and the rest of her formal education. All this time her father remained in India, and she would visit him frequently. Her mother, Anita Desai, a writer herself, provided Ms. Desai with an environment that lent itself to creativity; that could perhaps explain how the character of the tree climbing hermit was born in her first novel. Also this could be why Desai, in only her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss has displayed such an elan of objectivity wherein she holds up a mirror to our conflict ridden world and lets the reader choose the reflection he wants to see in it!

The Inheritance of Loss made for some engrossing reading with its rich and poetic language, its wide range of characters entwined neatly in a complex plot line, but narrated with the ease and dexterity of a master writer. Sai, the chief protagonist holds the center stage with an apparent misanthrope for a grandfather, also her only living relative. Sai's love interest is her young and frustrated Nepalese math tutor who is unable to guage his real feelings for Sai, and in the frenzy of nationalistic propaganda, accuses her of being "like slaves...running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It's because of people like you we never get anywhere." Despite its sombre tone, the novel does provide for some comic relief with characters such as Lola and Noni, the pathetic and delusional remnants of the British Raj. There is also the melodramatic cook without a name, perhaps to bring home his insignificance in the Indian caste ladder, who lightens the atmosphere at the most unexpected moments in the story: in the midst of a terrorist take over of their bungalow where he pleads with the terrorist and turns on his ever ready faucets since "he knew instinctively how to cry", and readily admits, "I am a fool' at the terrorists reckoning. The cook has a son, Biju, an illegal immigrant in the USA, who is extremely homesick while struggling to make a near decent life in the US, only to find his "heart always in another place." The Judge, another pivotal character to the plot, is an abusive husband, a tyrant of a master, and a reluctant and cold grandfather, who in 1986, still diplays behaviour disorders resulting from his humiliation during the British Raj . Finally, there is Sai, the central character in the novel who has recently finished high school where she received a typically British colonial education and who "could speak no other language but English...could not eat with her hands; could not squat down on the ground...had never been to a temple...left a Bollwood film so exhausted...used paper to clean her botom", and she becomes the readers guide into Desai's India in "The Inheritance of Loss".

Desai's colorful cast of characters takes the reader through a medley of themes: the after effects of colonialsm, the ills of capitalism, the downside of globalization, immigration - the family and morale breaker, the myth of multiculturalism... just to name a few. As the novel progresses, the author surreptiously has the reader share the chief protagonist's understanding of life: it " wasn't single in its purpose...Never again would she think there was but one narrative and that narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it."

The novel with a title like "The Inheritance of Loss", could well have sunk into despondency and pessimism but for its tantalizing plot and the colorful characterization. All the characters have suffered in some major way, and though survivors of sorts, carry bleeding wounds that need healing. It is to Ms. Desai's credit that the novel reads with zest despite its hurting cast. She leaves it to the reader to decide what mood he wants to walk away with; "The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with a luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent." What 'truth' is made 'apparent' here, is again for each reader to figure out for himself.

A thought provoking saga of beings who 'hurt' horribly but don't give up 'living', and the reader walks away wondering why!