The Inheritance of Loss
The Inheritance of Loss, second novel written by Indian-born American author Kiran Desai. Published in 2006, it was hailed by critics and readers and was awarded the Booker Prize.
The Inheritance of Loss is set in the mid-1980s both in India and in New York City, with the British colonial past casting long shadows over the present. In Kalimpong, in India’s sub-Himalayan Siwalik Range, the orphaned teenage girl Sai lives with her Cambridge-educated grandfather, a retired judge. Although largely ignored by her grandfather, Sai is cherished by the cook, whose son, Biju, subsists as an undocumented immigrant in New York. The narrative moves between the two locations to interweave human stories with the politics of bourgeois neocolonialism, globalization, multiculturalism, and terrorist insurgency.
The judge’s education at the University of Cambridge was made possible by the dowry he received when he married a 14-year-old girl. Although he never fit in in Britain, the judge returned to join India’s civil service with a firm belief that British civilization was superior to that of India. He badly mistreated his wife, eventually returning her to her family, and she died shortly after giving birth to a daughter. This daughter is the mother of Sai. When she and her husband were fatally hit by a bus, the convent where Sai attended boarding school sent her to live with the judge, her only living relative.
Sai is tutored by Noni, a neighbor, until she is 16 years old, and then the judge hires Gyan, a young Nepali man, to continue Sai’s education. Sai and Gyan begin a romance, which continues until Gyan becomes caught up in a violent movement to create a new state for Nepali-speaking Indians. Meanwhile, the cook’s son, Biju, moves from restaurant to restaurant, losing some jobs because of his undocumented status and others because Americans claim that he has a disturbing odor. Eventually he returns to India, where the ongoing Nepali uprising has destroyed the privileged status of many of the residents of the town. Biju loses all of his belongings as he returns to his father, where a crisis has erupted stemming from the theft of the judge’s pet dog.
The judge and Biju offer insights into different migrant experiences. Yet both have been indoctrinated with a firm belief in the inherent superiority of the West. The judge’s sense of internal exile results from the humiliation of his colonial encounter, leaving him with a festering hatred for his culture. Biju’s experience of cultural dislocation within the New York underclass is equally destructive. Local ethnic tensions are dramatized through Sai’s doomed romance with Gyan. However, the novel’s pessimistic vision is peppered with penetrating humor. Through the immediacy of comic dialogue, Desai explores colonial history and postcolonial tensions. Beneath those tensions, though, The Inheritance of Loss is essentially a novel about longing and belonging.