Desai, Kiran;
The Inheritance of Loss
Penguin Books 2006 / Penguin India 2006 [gbook]
ISBN 0143101226
topics: | fiction | india
This far-ranging book braids several threads of narrative, from pre-independence India to the underbelly of New York City along with he main story of the coming of age of Sai in her grandfather's home. Of these, the vignettes from the life of the down and out diaspora in New York is perhaps the most sharply wrought. The pre-independence affluent life in India is also well-sketched. It is the present that at times does not kick in sufficiently strongly. It is possible as the next Booker from India after Arundhati Roy, one had unusually high expectations of the book, either in terms of language or narrative structure or even the plot, IofH is not a patch on GOST. While the story takes you into the lives of the illegal Indian lifestyle in America, it cannot enter the homes of the Indian servant class; it waits outside, and peeps in through the door. Despite her deep love for GYAN, he remains a distant, alien character, whose life is completely unknown once he disappears from her presence. On the other hand, BIJU, who is somewhat peripheral to the story, is followed with far greater interest.
Wonder if the feelings on love (p.2, 87, esp. friendship, 250) are personal. "Cruel scotch" - a fine turn of phrase. ... love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself. 2-3 [thought by Sai - in her first love - seems a bit unlikely in retrospect] Do restaurants in Paris have cellars full of Mexicans, desis, and Pakis? No, they do not. What are you thinking? They have cellars full of Algerians, Senegalese, Moroccans. 25 [Jemubhai]... however, in memory of the closeness of female flesh, his penis reached up in the dark and waved about, a simple blind sea creature but refusing to be refused. He found his own organ odd: insistent but cowardly; pleading but pompous. 38
[Biju:] From other kitchens, he was learning what the world thought of Indians: - In Tanzania, if they could, they would throw them out like they did in Uganda - In Madgascar, if they could, they would throw them out. - In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out. - In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out. - In China, they hate them. - In Hong Kong. - In Germany. - In Italy. - In Japan. - In Guam. - In Singapore. - Burma - South Africa - They don't like them. - In Guadeloupe -- they love us there? - No. 77 When Sai became interested in love, she became interested in other people's love affairs. 87 [Cook and Sai picking ticks off Mutt.] The large khaki bag ones were always easiest to dispatch, but the tiny brown ticks were hard to kill, they flattened against the depressions in the rock, so when you hit them with a stone, they didn't die but in a flash were up and running. 88 [see Chinese biting lice - in Dragon Empress] [Saeed's villagers are here, expecting to be helped by him. He is hiding in the shop.] "They say they will try your home address now." He felt a measure of pride in delivering this vital news. Realized he missed playing this sort of role that was common in India. One's involvement in other people's lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance. 97 Drinking Whisky is Risky. [Gorkhaland slogan] 126
she had heard the story so many times before: Indira Gandhi had maneuvered a
plebiscite and all the Nepalis who had flooded Sikkim voted against the
king. India had swallowed the jewel-colored kindom, whose blue hills they
could see in the distance, where the wonderful oranges came from and the
Black Cat that was smuggled to them by Major Aloo. 128
[This last sentence, an unusual ellipsis]
[Mrs. Sen, about Muslims:] Five times a day bums up to God. 130
Allah-hu-Akbar. Through the crackle of tape from the top of the minaret came
ancient sand-weathered words, that KEENING cry from the desert offering
sustenance to create a man's strength... 136 [keen = v. lament]
[Harish-Harry's daughter - loose end? 149]
her skin was a SQUAMOUS pattern of draught 151
Gyan: Tenzing was certainly first, or else he was made to wait with the bags
so Hilary could take the first step on behalf of that colonial
enterprise of sticking your flag on what was not yours. 155
[judge's wife Nimi is enamoured with, and steals his powder puff]
She rummaged in the toilet case Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge and
found a jar of green salve, a hairbrush and comb set 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...
She picked up the judge's powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered
her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so
silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown up for childish thieving, she
knew, but she was filled with greed. 166
The description of the visa process at the US embassy is narrated from Biju's perspective (182-184). Here is the question session: - Why are you going? - I would like to go as a tourist. - How do we know you will come back? - My family, wife, and son are here. And my shop. - What shop? - Camera shop. (Could the man really believe this?) - Where are you going to stay? - With my friend in New York. Nandu is his name and here is his address if you would like to see. - How long? - Two weeks, if that is suitable to you. - Do you have funds to cover your trip? He showed the fake bank statement procured by the cook from a corrupt state bank clerk in exchange for two bottles of Black Label. - Pay at the window around the corner and you can collect your visa after five PM. 186 [Contrast with Jemubhai's father's dishonest profession - training false witnesses ] He trained the poor, the desperate, the scoundrels, rehearsed them strictly: "What do you know about Manubhai's buffalo?" "Manubhai, in fact, never had a buffalo at all." 57 [Image of the Indian as a crafty, lying creature] ... they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay in between that was distasteful; the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx. 194 [contrast with Tagore: uttam nishchinte chale adhamer sAthe, tini-i madhyam Jini chalen tafAte the high walks easily with the low/ it is the middle who keeps apart.] [Lola:] Buddha died of greed for pork. 196 H. Hardless, The Indian Gentleman's guide to etiquette: The Indian gentleman, with all self-respect to himself, should not enter into a compartment reserved for Europeans, any more than he should enter a carriage set apart for ladies. Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European, have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian, and in all such cases, identify yourself with the race to which you belong. [Makes Sai angry. She wants to kill Hardless, or his descendants... but should the child be blamed?] 199 cashews - brought to india by Europeans Calcutta Gymkhana club [error] after Bose's visit, he was forced to confront the fact that he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. 210 When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. 210 ... tourists from Calcutta in hilarious layers as if preparing for the Antarctic, weaving the cauterizing smell of mothballs through the town. 237 "I don't have to listen to this," he said jumping up and storming off abruptly just as she was in powerful flow. And Sai had cried, for it was the unjust truth. Marooned during curfew, sick about Gyan, and sick with the desire to be desired, she still hoped for his return. She was bereft of her former skills at solitude. 250 *** ... smiled, [Uncle Potty] saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love. ... friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away. 250 Uncle Potty scratched his feet so the dead skin flew: "Once you start scratching my dear, you cannot stop..." 251 The incidents of horror grew... If you were Bengali, people who had known you your whole life wouldn't acknowledge you on the street. Even the Biharis, Tibetans, Lepchas, and Sikkimese didn't acknowledge you. They, the unimportant shoals of a minority population, the small powerless numbers that might be caught up in either net, wanted to put the Bengalis on the other side of the argument from themseles... 279 while the residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all. Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of ... the most ordinary [were] swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event. 295
Santa and Banta joke: see airforce plane fly by and suddenly men parachute out of it, and go away in military jeeps waiting for them. "This is the life," they say and they sign up for the army. And then they are on the airplane and jump. "Arre Banta," says Santa, "this sala parachute isn't opening." "Neither does mine," says Banta. Typical government issue. Just you wait and see - when we get to the bottom the bhenchoot jeep won't be there." 287 he poured himself a cruel shimmer of Scotch 303 Old hatreds are endlessly retrievable,... [they are] purer . . . because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating.
KIRAN DESAI says no one wanted her book initially London, Oct 15: http://world.rediff.com/news/article/www/news/2006/oct/15kiran.htm "No one wanted it. No one cared," says the 35-year-old Kiran Desai, the youngest person to win the prestigious award for her book the 'Inheritance of Loss'. The book had become a "monster", growing out of control. "I wrote 1,500 pages and cut it down to 300," she told the told the Sunday Times. The 'Inheritance of Loss', which moves in split settings between the Himalayas and the basement kitchens of Manhattan, had sold only 2,396 copies when it entered the award's long-list, rising to 500 copies a week when she was short-listed. It can now expect the 15-fold sales bounce of a Man Booker winner. Transformed from obscurity to international fame in an instant, Desai, whose debut novel was 'Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard', has her Indian childhood to thank. The book is modelled on her experiences of staying at an aunt's Himalayan retreat. Her grandfather was a judge who studied at Cambridge, just like her leading fictional character, although the latter was consumed by self-hatred of his Indianness. Born in Delhi, Desai is a daughter of a businessman. Her mother, noted writer Anita Desai, who had a Bengali father and a German mother, went on to win five literary awards and wrote 14 novels, one of which was adapted into the Merchant Ivory Film. When Desai was 14, her parents separated and she followed her mother to Britain, where the latter became a visiting fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, for a year. Desai says walking England's streets was scary. "I was surprised by the hostility. "I grew up thinking the English must feel so bad about the colonial years that they'll be nice to me when I go there. Instead they shouted, 'Go home!' Even now they do it when I go outside London." "I went to the local state school, and of course it was easier than the aggressive education of the Indian school system," she said. "All I ever did was read - Jane Austen, The Brontes, Huckleberry Finn." She was shocked by the differences between India and the rest of the world. "Suddenly I understood what it meant to come from a poor country." Mother and daughter moved to America, where Desai went to high school in Massachusetts and Hollins University in Virginia. On the surface, her immigrant experience was beguilingly different, but she came to see it as a sham. As a penniless writer in Brooklyn, Desai shared a small apartment with a former clown, a fashion designer and a waitress. Their noise drove her to distraction and into the kitchen, where she wrote and nibbled biscuits. Eight years passed. "I was completely isolated. I wouldn't answer the phone in all those years. I was scared of it." Few people called anyway. The publishers had forgotten her and moved on. But one day last month the phone rang and an instinct made her pick it up. It was her publisher. Twenty calls followed in quick succession. The dizzy whirligig of recognition had begun. The other finalists were * "In The Country Of Men," Hisham Matar`s semi-autobiographical first novel about childhood in Moammar Gadhafi`s Libya; * "The Secret River," Kate Grenville`s tale of life in a 19th-century Australian penal colony; * "Carry Me Down," the story of an unusual boy, by Irish-Australian novelist M.J. Hyland; and * "Mother`s Milk," a portrait of a rich but dysfunctional family by English writer Edward St. Aubyn. Educated in India, England and the United States, Desai published her first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," in 1998.