Kiran Desai can pinpoint her re-entry to the world almost to the minute. It was at about 11.30am New York time on Thursday and as she was getting slowly, creekily as she puts it, out of bed, the phone rang. It was her publisher. When she put the phone down, another call came in swiftly behind it, this time from an agent. And then there was another call, and another, and another, about 20 in all. And that was when she knew it. Almost eight years of literary hermitage were over.
“For all those years, nobody calls you,” she says. “You get no attention from anybody; completely forgotten. The publishers forget you and move on... . And then suddenly it’s actually useful to have a phone for one day in your life.”
The trigger for this unruly scramble to talk to her was the decision, taken 4,828km away in London, to place her on the shortlist for the Booker prize. After the surprise culling of several of the big-name favorites from the long list, such as Peter Carey and Howard Jacobson, Desai is now down to the final six for an honor that carries with it a ?50,000 (US$95,000) check and instant literary recognition.
PHOTO: AP
The book that has brought her thus far, The Inheritance of Loss, has been a long time in the offing. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was enthusiastically received by the critics, but that was way back in 1998. Desai was all too aware of the pressure on her to ride the success and strike rapidly with a second novel, but it simply didn’t happen.
“The publishers and agents always tell you that you must do something in two or three years. It’s the general knowledge that floats overhead, that you had better do something in a few years or else you are not going to get anywhere,” she explains. “I didn’t do anything in three years, four years, five years, it was almost eight years! I was living in a completely different time frame, completely isolated. It was my entire life. I wouldn’t answer the phone in all those years; I was scared of it. I was too terrified to pick it up.”
The news that she has been Booker short-listed may have come as a rude re-awakening, but the sensation is not exactly unfamiliar. Desai has been here before, caught in a flurry of phone calls and the rush of public approbation. She has experienced it three times already — vicariously, through her mother, Anita. Three of Anita Desai’s 14 novels — Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting — have reached the Booker shortlist, though she has yet to win the prize.
That gives Kiran Desai a degree of sangfroid: “It is nice, but I don’t take this hugely seriously. I have seen my mother go through this three times. It’s not startling for the family at all.”
Although Anita is mentioned only once in the book, in the dedication, she played no small part in the lengthy creation of The Inheritance of Loss. Prosaically, large chunks of it were written in Anita’s house overlooking the Hudson river at Cold Spring in upstate New York, and on five or six long writing trips to Mexico that mother and daughter made together.
The younger Desai has also inherited if not a style, then at least a technique of writing from Anita. “I grew up well aware of her reading taste, and surrounded by her way of writing, and I find that I write very much in the same way. Our styles are very different, but the way I work and think feeds so much off her.”
Most profoundly, some of the core themes running through the book — immigration, dislocation, isolation — draw on episodes in Kiran’s life that were experienced with and alongside her mother, and also crop up in Anita’s novels.
Kiran was 14 when Anita was offered work first in England and then in America, so they left India hand in hand. “When she left India to teach, I was the youngest child so I was taken along to be with her,” Kiran explains. “We went through that whole odd immigrant thing together. She had to learn how to drive, learn how to get a phone; I had to go to high school, she had to go and teach.”
The emotional impact of lives uprooted and transplanted is central to The Inheritance of Loss. The story switches backwards and forwards between two settings seemingly at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum: the first-world cityscape of Manhattan and the third-world harsh beauty of rural northern India. As Desai flips between the two, her language changes just as radically. In New York the dialogue is clipped and tight, while in India the writing takes on a lushness and expansiveness to match the scenery.
It is in India that the novel begins, in a colonial house in Kalimpong, high up in the Himalayas, which is clearly modeled on Desai’s childhood experiences of staying at her aunt’s mountain retreat. A young girl called Sai is sitting on the veranda reading a magazine article about giant squid. “No human had ever seen an adult giant squid alive,” Desai writes, establishing the theme of isolation early on, “and though they had eyes as big as apples to scope the dark of the ocean, theirs was a solitude so profound they might never encounter another of their tribe.”
Sai’s grandfather, a crusty old retired judge, sits playing chess against himself, his dog Mutt snoring under his chair. The judge is snapping at his cook, who is late with his tea. Unbeknown to any of them, a band of Nepalese insurgents is creeping through the forest preparing to raid their house to steal the judge’s guns.
The story then cuts away and we are “all the way in America.” High uptown we find the cook’s son, Biju, trying to evade the immigration authorities by flitting between a succession of grubby kitchen jobs. Here we are in the high-rise capital of the world, and yet in the Manhattan basements we might just as well be back in Kalimpong.
“Biju at the Baby Bistro. Above the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was Mexican and Indian,” Desai writes. “Biju at Le Colonial ... On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. On to the Stars and Stripes Diner. All American flag on top, all Guatemalan flag below.”
“What interests me is the emotional manipulation of it — how people are kept in their position by those only slightly better off than they are,” she says.
The task of weaving these two seemingly disparate but ultimately mirror-image worlds together in one novel is what kept Kiran Desai in her hermitage for so long. She says she found it a difficult book to write: it just grew and grew until it became, in her words, a monster spiralling out of control. Finally, she realized she had to stop writing and start cutting and pulling it together, otherwise there would be no end.
And next? She has a lightning tour ahead, publicizing her novel in Chicago and several other US cities, then on to the Frankfurt book fair.
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