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.”

And this soul dissatisfaction is played out in other lives as well. The judge preparing for his ICS in England in the early decades of the 20th century feels as much ill at ease as Biju, the cook’s son in the 1980s New York. The agony of the aspiring ICS officer is summed up: “He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.”

Desai grapples with the political problem of the Nepalis-in-India, of the judge who had to go through the rites of being anglicised, of Sai and Gyan and Biju trying to make sense of politics through their personal lives. Without saying so, Desai delineates through the novel the maxim of “Political is personal”, overturning the old fashionable protest credo of  the 1960s’ feminists and counter-culturists: “Personal is political”.

With the authorial luxury of a mere chronicler, she airs the deep prejudices that the best and worst of people harbour within themselves. So Lola freely rants against “Neps”, and Uncle Potty against “Amul” cheese, which is preferred in a Darjeeling restaurant over his home-made one. Gyan mocks Sai’s anglicised status, and Sai hits back at him,

saying anglicised life provides the standard against which to judge oneself. But no one is sure.

They are reacting in anger, in helplessness. Because all they want is not political certainty as much as emotional solace. And that is not to be had.

That is the harsh truth.

It is this novelist’s poise to state the viewpoints of different people clashing with each other that makes this book worth reading. The author’s strict neutrality about the pros and cons of the issues at stake in the lives of the people of her novel enables her to present the clashing world views. The world is complex, people have to make so many compromises to live in it and prejudice is one of the ways of coming to terms with it. So, she does not judge the apparently unjust violent acts and attitudes of the GNLF boys. She does not hold a brief for the Nepalis-in-India. She shows that the eruption was inevitable because the old hierarchies do not work any more.

Sai comes to terms with life, too. But she takes a different route. There is a growing awareness that she is not alone in the world, and that her story is not too important. And that her sense of self-importance and self-pity was misplaced. But Desai makes the only mistake in the whole novel. She lets Sai philosophise: “The simplicity of what she’d been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it.”

She has shown enough before this about Sai’s growing awareness of her self-absorption and its inadequacies. There was no need for an explicit declaration. What should have been left to the reader to conclude, is proclaimed by Sai herself. However, this is not a major flaw. The novel has its own strengths of authenticity and conviction of the individuals who people its landscape.

The Inheritance of Loss is a political novel as any good novel should be, but there is no insignia to declare its politics. Desai takes care to focus on the lives of the people, and politics enters it like dust and mist and aroma. It suffuses the lives of the people, and the people are enveloped in it without being aware of it. They are bust facing the crises of their little lives.