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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