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thummarukudy, April 14, 2007

So when I picked up The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, Booker prize winner for this year, I was still chasing the same dream. I knew she had even more famous lineage and literary contacts than Arundhathi Roy, but I wanted to check out the book anyway.

Well, it turned out that this book is very bad too, both in story and style. However, there is no trick either. Bad story is told in the very old style of narration, though occasionally going back through flashbacks in the mind of the cook and the judge.

The story is set in the foothills of Himalaya around the time of the Gurkha agitation. The main characters are the judge Jumunbhai Patel (a former Indian Civil Service officer), his granddaughter Sai, his cook, the son of the cook (who is an illegal immigrant in the US). Into the rather empty and meaningless existence of the Judge’s family comes Gyan, the science tutor for Sai. Then there are some peripheral charetecters who live both in the hills and in the US. The story is not developed in any direction, neither the full story of the judge (why did he leave the civil service), nor that of the Gurkha agitation (where it came from and where it ended) is taken to its logical conclusion. The romance between Sai and Gyan is cut off abrubptly for the most unlikeliest of the reasons. In the end, only closure in the book is that of the cook as his son returns to him in the very last scene of the book.

On second thoughts I shouldn’t have read the book, not at least when Siddharth was away and Babu was down with chicken pox. The atmosphere a home was already gloomy and the book did not help. Page after page, the book produced volumes of negativity. Everything and everybody in the book was a failure and a disaster. Not that they were failing in real life. Jumunbhai Patel, born into a poor family, survived on 10 pounds a month in the UK and passed Indian Civil Service successfully. A most laudable achievement by any standard. However Kiran manages to pour ice water (shall I say liquid nitrogen) over it and demeans the achievement by first saying he was not in the first list, then saying he was in the extended list meant only for Indians and finally making him the last in the list.

Every other character, their love, their desires are all painted black, blacker and blackest. Bijus struggle for survival is portrayed as meaningless existence. The wonderful affection which brings him back to India to see his father as the hills of Siliguri are burning due to Gurkha agitation is painted black with luggage delays and mean behaviour of Air France staff. In the end he is not even given decent clothes to go home to.

The fate of Indians is painted in blackest possible terms everywhere. In Nigeria, In Tanzania, in South Africa and so on. In the end the author falls to the same mindset which she is trying to expose, one of inferiority and helplessness. Now I must make a confession here. This is a period novel, of a time around 1986. I first came out of India in 1995 and the fate and repute of Indians have changed dramatically since. People no longer want Indians out, they want Indians in. Germany wants them, UK wants them, Finland wants them and so on. Not only that, others are now coming to India too. But I escaped the blackest of the periods I think.

The only positive character in the whole book is Saeed Saeed, the guy from Zanzibar (and not Tanzania). He manages to outwit the fathers of pretty and not so pretty girls in Zanzibar, he outsmarts the immigration officer with forged passports, he go around with all sort of women white, black, good and ugly, he move from job to job with ease. I must thank the author for not letting him die of aids in the end. White amount of black ink she had, that would have been an easy stroke.

Anyway, as I finished the book, I felt depressed. I felt like a person who have been peeling black onions, with other peel coming off as black, hoping finally some bright stuff will emerge. Well in this particular case nothing emerged. Only black, black and then emptiness. And probably it is this blackness which gave her the award. How black could one go

I don’t have a word of good thing yet to say about Inheritance of Loss. I have inherited a small loss, GBP 12.95. I am now looking for a victim to pass on this inheritance.

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