Accidental Blogger

Kiran Desai had won the Man Booker prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss well before I got in the queue for the book at my local library. I was impressed by her achievement (another Arundhati Roy in the making, perhaps). Most of the other Booker prize winners were among my favorites, so my expectations of this book were fairly high.

The first thing that struck me was that Desai leaves no opportunity unused to insert a simile or analogy into her descriptions of  anything and everything.The poetic beauty of  Kalimpong in north-eastern India, where her story is set and the Kanchenjunga mountain(‘golden collar of cloud’) is extolled in perhaps too many lines.  For that matter, there is never any object that does not have a simile/metaphor/analogy attached to it, making for very dense writing – ‘…the ceiling resembled the rib cage of a whale’, ‘ ‘kettle..as battered, as encrusted as something dug up by an archaelogical team’, ‘duck..sitting like a pasha on a cushion of its own fat’ – you get the idea. I suspect that it must be a common failing to all writers schooled in the British school of writing, the essays packed with every known literary flourish, trying to cajole a high 5/10 from miserly teachers. (I know that I myself suffer from excess verbiage. But there’s something to be said for less linguistic gymnastics, even at the risk of sounding like a 2/10 essay student.)

Desai’s heroine is sixteen year old Sai Mistry, orphaned by an accident that kills off her space astronaut father and her mother in distant Russia. Funds paying for her schooling and boarding at a convent school run out and the nuns return her to her sole known relative, her maternal grandfather and retired judge J.P. Patel. Sai settles into a comfortable but loveless routine of life with her grandfather in a stately mouldering home in the hills, with only the nameless cook and the judge’s beloved pedigree canine Mutt for her companions.

She forms a friendship of sorts with the colorful middle-aged Bengali sisters Lola and Noni, who also tutor her till they can no longer handle her educational needs. At this point, young Nepali student Gyan is hired, with predictable romantic results. Rounding off the list of quirky characters are Uncle Potty (always in his cups) and Father Booty, a Swiss curate who has adopted the Kalimpong countryside as his home. (Is it just me, or do all these names sound as though they were carefully chosen to roll off the average Western reader’s tongue without too much difficulty? No, probably just a coincidence.) Colorful as the characters are, some descriptions end up more jarring than the others. For instance, Lola suffers from the author’s excessive simile-mania,  reminiscing aloud about "monasteries limpeted to rocks" and the like. Who in the world talks like a National Geographic blurb on the landscape of Tibet?

Interwoven with the coming of age tale of Sai as she awakens to youth and love in the guise of her tutor Gyan,is the hardscrabble existence of Biju the cook’s son in distant New York. Desai brings a deft touch for the minutiae of everyday life and situations in Sai’s life, and an unerring feel for the earthy and raunchy realities of life in the lowest rungs of the immigrant pool. It in turns delights and wearies the reader. This is a sharp incisive humor, relentless in its scrutiny, not always cleaving to ‘political correctness’ for the sake of pleasing the reader. One artfully tossed example: When the Everest peak shows up in a ‘coy triangle’ – "A tourist began to generously scream as if she had caught sight of a pop star." 

Scatological references abound, with a particularly funny incident (as in my wanting to ask the author "How would you know about these details?") tracking the dour anglophile judge’s early days as a student in England.There is the usual post-colonial preoccupation with naked rear-ends of people defecating near train tracks, pervasive references to bodily functions and disgust that Sai and the judge feel at various points in the story. The squalor of the populace of Kalimpong, among whom Gyan lives, is emphasized with the references to holes cut in children’s clothing to permit them to relieve themselves freely. One could call it ‘truth in reporting’ ,but the tenor of the language leaves no doubt of the intent to evoke disgust in the reader.This preoccupation seems a little odd for a writer far removed from the generations of anglophiles.

The story of the judge’s early life and his rise from humble peasant origins to the lower ranks of the Indian Civil service form perhaps the most compelling of the three main narratives. Married to a wife he doesn’t like,the judge finds little time for conjugal bliss before he is shipped off to England for higher studies. He returns irrevocably changed and disgusted with everything ‘native’ that he finds at home. This hatred and disgust spill over into his treatment of his wife, who is eventually sent back to her paternal family, never to return to him. She is pregnant at the time with the judge’s only offspring and lives out the rest of her life dependent on her relatives’ charity. In a powerfully terse description of her final fate

(SPOILER AHEAD) ….

"The judge chose to believe it was an accident", when he receives a telegram that "A woman had caught fire over a stove"…..

(END SPOILER).

Had this spareness had been more in evidence earlier in the book, it would have shortened the book by a third and made for more compelling reading.

Life rolls along peacefully, and is rudely thrown off track by the events of 1986, when dissatisfied Nepalis form their own group and agitate for the establishment of ‘Gorkhaland’. The hotbloods of the newly formed GNLF (Gorkha National Liberation Front), Gyan among them, engage in acts of disruption, thievery and worse to achieve their ends. Sai and her near and dear are caught up in this, none more so than Gyan who is now engaged in a tug of war between puppy love and ‘nobler stirrings’ in the call to arms on the behalf of Gorkhaland. Sai must now choose between her longing for Gyan and staying true to her own feelings about the betrayal of her world.

Biju, stranded in his New York life like a fish out of water, is seized by a longing to see his father the cook, uneasy after communications break down between Kalimpong and the rest of the world as the agitation erupts into full-blown anarchy. While his other friends, randy and garrulous African immigrant Saeed Saeed, for instance, have moved on to briskly climbing up the immigrant ladder, Biju packs up and heads for home. There is a humorous chapter dedicated to the trip back via the usual torture chamber of a Gulf Air flight improbably (perhaps wryly) routed  through NY-London-Frankfurt-AbuDhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Delhi-Calcutta.(Why Gulf Air, when the descriptions sound more like an Air India Black Hole? I suspect that there’s been a judicious replacement of at least one un-PC reference.)

My anachronism detector went off a few times reading this novel, which is set largely in 1986.There are references to events like the ‘computer boys making millions’ in an otherwise picture-perfect description of the chaotic scenes at the airport and on the flight teeming with expatriates on their way home, makes it seem too close to a 1990’s or 2000’s airport scene. ‘Computer boys making millions’ didn’t come into the picture until the early 1990’s. Similarly, a casually thrown reference to the popularity of Prozac which wasn’t in the US market till early 1988 and peaked in popularity in the mid-90’s. What the publishing industry needs is more sharp-eyed editors, for this isn’t the first time that I’ve seen errors of this kind in such writings.But these are minor quibbles.

Did this book merit the Man Booker prize? In comparison with previous winners set in Indian backdrops, it does stack up fairly well against say, The God of Small Things or Life of Pi. Was it a completely satisfying read? Not to me. But then the mix of expatriates writing in English and trying to convey the nuances of life in India has always proved to be a difficult task. It is rarely handled with truth, sensitivity and humor, one quality usually predominates at the expense of the others.

Kiran Desai’s writing shows promise, and while this novel proved a mixed bag in some respects, I shall look forward to her next novel to see if she develops the power tempered by gentleness that could come with experience.