Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

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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.
***
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states – Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet – meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

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For a moment all the different pretences he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him – all these things joined together to form a single truth.

The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.

And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor.

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk -

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement take the harshest route possible.

Twenty-seven

Moody and restless, Gyan arrived at Cho Oyu the next day, upset at having to undertake that long walk in the cold for the small amount of money the judge paid him. It maddened him that people lived here in this enormous house and property, taking hot baths, sleeping alone in spacious rooms, and he suddenly remembered the cutlets and boiled peas dinner with Sai and the judge, the judge’s "Common sense seems to have evaded you, young man."

"How late you are," said Sai when she saw him, and he was angry in a different way from the night before when, indignant in war paint, he had stuck his bottom out one way and his chest the other way and discovered a self-righteous posturing, a new way of talking. This was a petty anger that pulled him back, curtailed his spirit, made him feel peevish. The annoyance was different from any he’d felt with Sai before.

***

To cheer him up, Sai told him of the Christmas party -

You know, three times we tried to light the soup ladle full of brandy and pour it over the pudding -

Gyan ignored her, opened up the physics book. Oh, if only she would shut up – that bright silliness he had not noticed in her before – he was too irritated to stand it.

She turned reluctantly to its pages; it was a long time since they had properly looked at physics.

"If two objects, one weighing… and the other weighing… are dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa, at which time and at what speed will they fall to the ground?"

"You’re in an unpleasant mood," she said and yawned with luxury to indicate other, better, options.

He pretended he hadn’t heard her.

Then he yawned, too, despite himself.

She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward.

Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.

She did -

He did.

"Bored by physics?" she asked, encouraged by the apparent reconciliation.

"No. Not at all."

"Why are you yawning then?"

"BECAUSE I’M BORED TO DEATH BY YOU, THAT’S WHY."

Stunned silence.

"I am not interested in Christmas!" he shouted. "Why do you celebrate Christmas? You’re Hindus and you don’t celebrate Id or Guru Nanak’s birthday or even Durga Puja or Dussehra or Tibetan New Year."

She considered it: Why? She always had. Not because of the convent, her hatred of it was so deep, but…

"You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It’s because of people like you we never get anywhere."

Stung by his unexpected venom, "No," she said, "that’s not it."

"Then what?"

"If I want to celebrate Christmas, I will, and if I don’t want to celebrate Diwali then I won’t. Nothing wrong in a bit of fun and Christmas is an Indian holiday as much as any other."

This tagged on to make him feel antisecular and anti-Gandhian.

"Do what you will," he shrugged, "it’s nothing to me – it only shows to the whole world that you are a FOOL."

He uttered the words deliberately, eager to see that hurt cross her face.

"Well, why don’t you go home then, if I’m such a fool? What is the point of teaching me?"

"All right, I will. You’re right. What is the point of teaching you? It’s clear all you want to do is copy. Can’t think for yourself. Copycat, copycat. Don’t you know, these people you copy like a copycat, THEY DON’T WANT YOU!!!!"

"I’m not copying anyone!"

"You think you are the original person celebrating Christmas? Come on, don’t tell me you’re as stupid as that?"

"Well, if you’re so clever," she said, "how come you can’t even find a proper job? Fail, fail, fail. Every single interview."

" Because of people like you! "

"Oh, because of me… and you’re telling me that I am stupid? Who’s stupid? Go put it before a judge and we’ll see who he says is the stupid one."

She picked up her glass and the water in it sloshed over before it reached her lips, she was trembling so.

Twenty-eight

The judge was thinking of his hate.

***

When he returned from England, he had been greeted by the same geriatric brass band that had seen him off on his journey, but it was invisible this time because of the billows of smoke and dust raised by the fireworks that had been thrown on the railway track, exploding as the train drew into the station. Whistles and whoops went up from the two thousand people who had gathered to witness this historic event, the first son of the community to join the ICS. He was smothered with garlands; flower petals settled on the brim of his hat. And there, standing in a knife’s width of shade at the end of the station, was someone else who looked vaguely familiar; not a sister, not a cousin; it was Nimi, his wife, who had been returned from her father’s house, where she’d spent the intervening time. Except for exchanges with landladies and "How do you do?" in shops, he hadn’t spoken to a woman in years.

She came toward him with a garland. They didn’t look at each other as she lifted it over his head. Up went his eyes, down went hers. He was twenty-five, she was nineteen.

"So shy, so shy" – the delighted crowd was sure of having witnessed the terror of love. (What amazing hope the audience has – always refusing to believe the nonexistence of romance.)

What would he do with her?

He had forgotten he had a wife.

Well, he knew, of course, but she had drifted away like everything in his past, a series of facts that no longer had relevance. This one, though, it would follow him as wives in those days followed their husbands.

***

All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart – how lovely she must have appeared to him… He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. She rummaged in the toilet case Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge and found a jar of green salve, a hairbrush and comb set in silver, a pom-pom with a loop of silk in a round container of powder – and, coming at her exquisitely, her first whiff of lavender. The crisp light scents that rose from his new possessions were all of a foreign place. Piphit smelled of dust and once in a while there was the startling fragrance of rain. Piphit’s perfumes were intoxicants, rich and dizzying. She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.

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