No room for isolation

Kiran Desai overturns the old, radical, chic credo of personal is political into political is personal in this prize-winning novel

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr Delhi

Kiran Desai winning the 2006 Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss would seem an obvious thing for anyone who has read her second novel, before and after the prize was announced. It is an accomplished novel in terms of narrative and

language. One of the pleasures of reading a novel is always the language, and Kiran Desai does not disappoint. It is not overwrought prose. But there is enough fine texturing that makes the reader enjoy the sentences.

The novel starts off on a luminous note: “ All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.” The description is evocative. It does not become picturesque. There are more important things happening in a novel, and a good writer does not spend too much time writing just fine sentences.

The book has many narrative threads, and Desai skillfully, knits them all following one strand, and another next, without getting mixed up, without losing the thread, coming back to the first narrative before catching up with the third and fourth. It is an ambitious book, where the writer tells to get the big picture and place the individual lives, voices, faces in proper focus. A good, painterly act.

So we have Biju, the cook’s son, who goes off to the US and stays there as an illegal immigrant; the judge, who was born in pre-Independence times, sent to England by his semi-literate father, a tout in a  local court in Gujarat, and who returns as an ICS officer; a man who is not at home with himself and his orphaned granddaughter Sai, Uncle Booty, the foreigner-turned-native through long years of stay; Noni and her sister Lola, the genteel sisters living on the verge of penury; Gyan, the Nepali boy who cannot decide between the legitimate Nepalis-in-India’s demands of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) movement; Mutt, the dog; and Mustafa, the cat.

And the houses — Cho Oyu, where the judge, Sai and the cook lived; Mon Ami, the house of Lola’s and Noni’s. There is New York as well, the many different restaurants where Biju worked as a cook, including Gandhi Café, where he landed after deciding he would not cook beef any more.

The novel goes a step further. It tells about life journeys mixed with journeys across countries, within the country, across class, religion, race divides, and what it does to people: the confusion, the helplessness, the novelty of it all. But all this intermingling does not seem to enrich. People remain cocooned in the old prejudices that are mostly harmless except when there is a violent

outbreak, as in the political movement of the

GNLF boys.

Sai’s experience in the convent is summed up at the moment she is leaving it forever: “The system might be obsessed with purity, but it excelled in defining the flavour of sin. There was a titillation to unearthing the  forces of guilt and desire, needling and prodding the results. This Sai has learned. This underneath, and on top a flat creed: cake was better than laddoo, fork spoon knife better than hands, sipping the blood of Christ and consuming a wafer of his body was more civilised than garlanding a phallic symbol with marigolds, English was better than Hindi.”