SOME COMMENTS ON THE
INHERITANCE OF LOSS BY KIRAN DESAI (2006)
It is very good book and it not a very good book. One is
torn between the two point of views. I should think that if I were an Indian
reader, I might not like it that much because by and large it paints a kind of
sorry picture of India and Indians in the USA. Just about all the characters in
the book are of the unusual sort and somewhat clichéd. Take the judge as a
central protagonist: poor village boy makes good only to become a quite insane
character: goes off to England and becomes a weird Indian student: comes back
to India to become an even stranger judge and husband, abusing his wife,
alienated from all his family: ends up in a ramshackle grand villa on the
slopes of the Himalayas, with his cook and a pathetic attachment to his dog:
and finally his grand-daughter arrives as an orphan only to undergo an
upbringing that is less than satisfactory, given all the bizarre circumstances
that arise, like a local uprising of the local Nepalese. The cook’s son too
fares not very well once shipped off to the USA: as an illegal immigrant he is
shunted from menial to more menial jobs in Indian restaurant kitchens,
contending with his hapless peers (apart from a funny one from Zanzibar) and
with the Indians that have the green card. When the cook’s son returns to India
to his father he is robbed of all his possessions he brought with him as some
sort of trophy from the USA and he lands in his father’s arms in a woman’s
nightgown. And that’s the end.
On the other hand it’s all so true: there are these
unfortunate individuals – not just Indians, hence the appeal to an
international audience – who with their lives manage to concoct a story of
perpetual misery, be they poor or not so poor, with the former of course
providing less drama and opportunity to shine with literary gems. Desai
certainly does the latter a great service, evoking the life of the educated
classes as permanent witty dialogue, what with all the foibles and
contradictions one encounters when being an Indian educated in the West –
England most likely, but latterly in the USA. Given that India combines all
imaginable human conditions, one would have hoped that the occasional average character comes into play. The
problem with introducing a wide range of idiosyncrasies, one cannot quite
believe the author – as the Olympic narrator – to have access to all thoughts
in the heads of the protagonists, thereby often giving lesser souls – like the
cook – an appearance of being an intellectual in his own right. By
‘intellectual’ I mean the sort of language that educated middle/upper-class
people use these days, Kiran Desai included. Sure, the cook could be a true
intellectual, much more so than the mentally off-balance judge but that would
have required a different style of writing, perhaps akin to some of the other
masters of the Indian genre like Vikram Chandra, Aravind Adiga and Arundhati
Roy. The scenario of the Gorkhaland up-rising is also a bit flawed: while
seemingly sympathetic on some pages, the overall description favours the
middle-class characters who are all inconvenienced by the goings-on, plus – as
one of the main protagonists –Gyan seems to recant in the end just to get back
to Sai. While we do learn of local police brutality there is also the
perception that the GNLF is a bunch of terrorist hoodlums even less desirable
than a bit of random terrorism by the police.
The whole idea of poor Nepali boy –Gyan – and well-to-do
orphan Sai – as an essentially confused Indian girl who was brought up in a
Catholic convent reading Wuthering
Heights twice while waiting for Gyan to return – having a sweet love affair
is essentially a Mills and Boons plot that lacks credibility. A similar
scenario in Roy’s The God of small things
where the Kerala-Syrian solo-mother falls in love with the Hindu gardener
is on the other hand a real gem and totally believable.
The misery of illegal immigrants in the USA is of course
well-drawn in the manner of the classic tragicomedy, perhaps with some
exaggeration towards the laughable, especially with the Moslem-Zanzibar
character who becomes Biju’s best friend at times, playing out the absurdities
that arise when a Hindu boy like Biju, having been brought up with a hatred and
loathing of Muslims, has to admit that a real Muslim boy from Zanzibar isn’t
that bad after all. The idea that the flamboyant Zanzibar boy takes advantage
of the ‘ethnic chic’ prevalent in some quarters of US society, and thus shags
all the teenage college girls – is also a bit of a cliché. That the Indian
restaurant owner makes money from selling fake vegetarian food to new-age
customers who are attracted by the restaurant’s name – Gandhi – is also a bit
of a low point, especially if you are an Indian reader, I would think.
I am struggling to understand the colonial hangover some
Indians, like Desai, surely carry around with them: I work in an educational
institute where many of the students are Indian and a few of the tutors are too
(some migrated to NZ, some were born here). To be totally dismissive of one’s
so-called home country is not all too common but for example, I as a German
citizen (in name) living in NZ, have no compunction to rail against Germany.
For the expatriate Indian to rubbish India is another matter: it is a sort of
betrayal that is very difficult to explain. Many an Indian is simply an
economic migrant seeking a ‘better life’ and ‘better education for their
children’ – a dreadful cliché nevertheless. They would gladly return to India
if they could get a well-paid job and a guarantee that their children receive a
world-class education. The English – and other Europeans – are after all prime
examples of large-scale economic migration. Of course they did it in such
numbers as to create English colonies in their wake. No other group of peoples
has achieved this dubious honour in modern times. Certainly not the Indians
which must be to their credit. Still, there are Indians everywhere, a bit like
the Chinese, having left their home countries in search of a often very elusive
better life. Of course I may be blind to the real lives of the Indians I see on
a daily basis but none strike me as characters of The Inheritance of Loss
scenarios, hence my earlier criticism that just about all the characters
of the novel are a bit unusual to say the least. On the other hand what would a
novel be without them? A boring tale of everyday life where nothing unusual
ever happens?
Desai tried her best to make it as exciting as possible, and
there is a lot in her novel that merits praise. She does very well to evoke the
landscape of the Himalayan region around Darjeeling, a region of stunning
beauty if not eccentricity – and it is perhaps not surprising that certain
equally eccentric characters are drawn to it, living through the extreme
seasonal changes, paying a high price for the occasional glimpses of
Kanchenjunga.
