The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I had this book sitting on my desk for the past two months and had not got a chance to read it. I happened to finally read it over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. This post is not a review. I have linked two excellent reviews for your reading pleasure; one by NY Times and the other by my blogging buddy Lotus. Kiran Desai's mother Anita Desai is a prolific Indian writer, whose work I had read years ago in India. I was curious about this book for two reasons; one because this book has won the Man Booker prize and the other because I had heard her interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air and was quite impressed.

I absolutely love the author's writing. The book has melancholy and sadness in it, which is interspersed with humor and wit. She has wonderfully depicted the different classes of Indian society in post colonial India. Being of the same generation as the author I share a lot of observations with her. Having grown up in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai (formerly Bombay), which has its share of "brown sahibs," who are Oxbridge educated anglophiles whose formative years were in pre-independance India. Therefore they have a chip on their shoulder and are more English than the British themselves. My generation, however is confident about our Indian identity and can step back and look objectively at such pretentious elitists!

She has also poignantly depicted how poverty and helplessness and a feudal mindset gnaws away the dignity of the lower classes of society. Although the book is set against the backdrop of the Gorkhaland movement, it is not at all political. It is more anecdotal as it describes the effect it had on the lives of the people living along the Indo-Nepal border. One of the characters, Gyan with slight education joins the movement without really identfying with it but more as an outlet to his anger and frustration. Though not directly, I can draw parallels to the religious fundamentalism in India in the nineties, where some impressionable youth fell for the hatred spewed under the name of faith!

She has also described the lives of illegal immigrants in New York, who are lured by the ambition of earning dollars. They live like cattle under inhuman conditions and since they don't have proper paperwork, they are taken advantage of by their employers. In her interview on Fresh Air, she mentioned that she had actually walked into the kitchens of restaurants in New York and interviewed these members of the shadow economy. The book is sad and has honestly painted the grim reality of life in the developing world (I HATE the word "Third World") yet she has beautifully managed to not let the reader feel depressed at the end!

All in all I enjoyed the book thoroughly as you could move those characters out of the colonial town at the foothills of Himalayas and place them in Mumbai (built by the British). It reminded me of quite a number of Bombayites (not Mumbaikars) with their affected accents and cute weekend homes with picket fences, their high teas with dainty cucumber sandwiches and pastries! Their sense of privilege over their servants, who always feel deferential to their employers. Also living in the city are the sons of the soil "Shiv Sainiks" who are against anything that is perceived as "western," without even understanding the philosophy of Hinduism!