Chapter – III
The Inheritance of Lossand the Loss of Female Voice
While Hullabaloo in The Guava Orchard is a brassy and somewhat whimsical novel, Kiran Desai’s next novel,The Inheritance of Loss, is a dark and ambitious glimpse at globalization and its discontents. It was published by Penguin India in early 2006 and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize 2006, for providing “a distinctive original voice and audacious imagination” (The Indian Express 12) to the world of modern literature. Kiran Desai created literary history by becoming the youngest ever woman to win the prestigious prize at the age of thirty-five, eclipsing the works of five other short-listed authors.
The Inheritance of Loss created a hullabaloo in the literary orchard and brought Kiran Desaimuch accolades and world-wide recognition. The fact that Kiran Desai could finally make it to the short-list of six from the long-list of 112 books was itself a wonder. The bookmakers had initially dismissed her as the 7/1 outsider. But the novel made a triumphant comeback as the judges’ panel that included poet and novelist Simon Armitage, novelist Candia Mc William, critic Anthony Quinn and actress Piono Shaw - held a different opinion. After a session that lasted about two hours, the panel unanimously chose Kiran Desai’s novel over five other short-listed books including the bookmakers’ favourite, Sarah Walter’s TheNight Watch.
Prof. Hermione Lee, chairperson of the Judge and Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford, said about The Inheritance of Loss: “This is a magnificent novel of human breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and political astuteness.”(The Independent 14). Remembering Anita Desai, the noted Indian English novelistwho is Kiran Desai’s mother, she enthused:
I think her mother would be proud. It is clear to those of us who have read Anita Desai that Kiran Desai has learned from her mother’s work. Both write not just about India but about Indian communities in the world. (The Independent 14).
Highlighting Kiran Desai’s originality and the strength of her novel, Prof. Lee added :
The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Indo-Anglian inheritance … but she does something pioneering. She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely her own. The book is movingly strong in its humanity, and I think that in the end is why it won. (The Independent 14)
Despite parental prediction, Kiran Desai was not prepared for the surprise. Accepting the award at a ceremony held at the Guild Hall, London, on 11th October, 2006, she said, “I didn’t expect to win. I don’t have a speech.” (India Today 12) After thanking her publisher, editor and agent, she added: “I’m Indian and so I’m going to thank my parents.”(India Today 12) Of her mother Anita Desai, to whom The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated, she said :
I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness in cold winters in her house … One minute is not enough to convey it. (India Today 12)
In The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai treats with tremendous insight, sensitivity, and often piercing irony, topical issues related to politics and terrorism as well as immigration, globalization, multiculturalism, colonial neurosis, identity-formation and subjectivity, and the nationalist, gender, cultural, ethnic and class differences that inform these processes. From a supremely funny and engaging novel in her joyous debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), Kiran Desai moved on to write The Inheritance of Loss where the prevailing mood is one of implacable bitterness and despair.
The Inheritance of Loss spans two continents and three generations. The story moves between New York and Kalimpong with scenes that contrast the life of illegal immigrants in New York and the growing unrest in Kalimpong. Full of pathos and tenderness, the novel presents its characters as ultimately frail human beings struggling in a search of love and happiness.
Kiran Desai, by setting her narrative in two parallel venues - New York of contemporary America and Kalimpong, a small Indian town at the foothills of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayan ranges - brings into relief the commonality of problems of the two hub of human insurgency, one tacit and the other vocal and strident. The aptness of the poem by Jorge Luis Borges,“Boast of Quietness” which Kiran Desai chooses as the epigraph to The Inheritance of Loss, adds immeasurably to the impact of the depiction of immigrants in the narrative. These immigrants have lost their homelands and have lost their identity and cannot hope ‘to arrive’ anywhere :
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar,a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me . . .
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to
arrive.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
Diaspora can be defined as a community of people who have settled outside their natal country but acknowledge their loyalties towards the ties with the country of their origin by voicing or implying a sense of co-ethnicity with the people of their country back home or as fellow members of theirdiaspora. Diaspora refers not only to geographical dispersal but also brings in the issues of identity, memory and home which such dispersal causes. Thereis no denying the fact that migration is a global phenomenon of the contemporary time. Crossing national boundaries has been a recurrent issue of the writers of postmodern literature. In his essay, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture”, Amitav Ghosh, the noted writer, rightly observes, “The modern Indian diaspora ... is not merely one of the most important demographic dislocations of modern times; it now represents important force in world-culture”. (Ghosh 243)
The Inheritance of Loss is set partly in India and partly in the U.S.A. Kiran Desai describes it as a book that “tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant. (India Today 14). The book also explores, at a deeper level, the consequences of the introduction of a western element into a non-western country. The novel also examines what happens when a person from a poor and undeveloped country migrates to a rich and developed one: “How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person’s thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time?” (India Today 14). These are, however, not new themes but old ones which continue to be relevant in today’s fast-changing globalized worldwhere the past informs the present and the present unveils the past.
The Inheritance of Loss is, to a large extent, a story of migration and lives being made over. In page after page, one finds the stories of Indian village life and of her people’s attempts to grapple with modernity side by side with the stories of illegal immigrants in a modern centre of globalized economy and politics like New York. The question of migration has always bothered Kiran Desai. She admits in an interview :
It is something that has been going on forever. I did not realize it at first. There are so many interlinked patterns that it becomes important to examine it. It is quite a pertinent issue. Politicians are still talking of taking non-westerners to western countries, people from poor countries to rich ones. It has a darker side. There is a reverse journey happening too, like in my grandfather’s time, when they went abroad to study and then returned. (India Today 14)
Both Kiran Desai and her mother write about the Indian experience of migration. There is a common thread because the mother and the daughter have gone through the same experience. As Kiran Desai says :
There is a parallel thread … My mother is half German and her father was from Bangladesh. I didn’t see the connection until much later, especially with her Fasting, Feasting. So, there are connections and parallels, the process of leaving India together. (India Today 14)
The novel, which took eight years to complete, draws on Kiran Desai’s own experience of leaving India. While talking of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss and her own life, she remarks :
The characters of my story are entirely fictional, but these journeys (of her grandparents) as well as my own provided insight into what it means to travel between East and West and this is what I wanted to capture. The fact that I live this particular life is no accident. It was my inheritance. (India Today 14)
Writers of the diaspora often rewrite history and frame new narratives of family, society and nation with a desire to revisit the past. It is here that memory and nostalgia play a very important role. The diasporic writer occupies a kind of space that is one of exile and cultural solitude. While immigrant and expatriate writings are more inclined towards the contemporary experience in the host society, diasporic works are more preocupied with the idea of the deserted or imagined homeland. Kiran Desai, in The Inheritance of Loss, has skillfully blended immigrant and diasporic sensibilities.Alienation and estrangement are inherent aspects of the migrant situation in which the individual’s identity is torn between the old and the new worlds of experience and “a major feature of post-colonial literature is the concern with placement and displacement” (Ashcroft 1989:8).
Set in 1980s of India, The Inheritance of Loss recounts an intensely absorbing story. At its centre is the family of a retired judge and widower, Jemubhai Patel. InKalimpong, a hill-station in the Himalayan foothills, the retired judge, who was once a student at the CambridgeUniversity, presently lives with his sixteen year old orphaned grand-daughter, Sai. In a painful incident Sai’s parents died in an accident in Moscow when she was only five.
Jemubhai lives in Cho Oyu, a large delapidated house built by a Scotsman but now owned by him. Jemubhai lives in this house with his chatty cook whose only son, Biju, works as an illegal immigrant in a restaurant in New Yorkto fulfil a materialistic longing for prosperity. It is really interesting that while the cook always thinks proudly of his son doing job in New York, a metropolis in America, the son more often sadly remembers his father and childhood days in a village in India. As for Sai, she passionately falls in love with her mathematics tutor, Gyan, a Nepali Gorkha. But Gyan gets involved in the violent Nepali insurgency for the autonomy of Gorkhaland and is forced to back out from his commitment to love. After undergoing an agonising experience in New York restaurants as a drab immigrant and embittered with the American dream of success, Biju eventually decides to return to his father in India with the humble dream of buying a taxi and a home of his own.
Two generations ago the judge, Jemubhai Patel, had humble beginnings. He could arrange finances for his higher education in England by marrying a girl who could bring in a handsome dowry. The life of Jemubhai’s wife, Nimi, who is dead, is revealed to us vividly as Jemubhai relives his past through memory.
Originally, Jemubhai belonged to a small place called Piphit. His father was a poor man but had an ambition ofsending his son to England for higher studies. Not having enough money to send Jemu to England, he went to severalmoneylenders but in vain. An idea came to his mind that money can be got if Jemu got married. The dowry will be usedto send Jemu to England. He was so passionate to send his son to England that he was ready to compromise with any girl only ifhe got a huge amount of money :
Jemu would be the first boy of their community to go to an English university. The dowry bids poured in and his father began an exhilarated weighing and tallying: ugly face-a little more gold, a pale skin-a little less. A dark and ugly daughter of a rich man seemed their best bet. (89).
Jemu was lucky that theoffer came from a rich merchant of Piphit. The merchantthought if Jemu succeeded, he would be the father-in-law ofone of the most powerful men in India, perhaps a bargain to enhance his business. So the merchant, Boman Bhai Patel,went to Jemu’s house with the offer of his most beautiful daughter, Bela. Years later recalling Bela’s exceptional beauty, Jemubhai’s cook tells Sai :
You could tell from her features, which were delicate; her toes, nose, ears, and fingers were all very fine and small, and she was very fair-just like milk. Complexion-wise, they said, you could have mistaken her for a foreigner. Her family only married among fifteen families, but an exception was made for your grandfather because he was in the ICS.(88)
Theoffer was accepted and the bride brought a huge amount of dowry with her:
Thedowryincludedcash,gold,emeraldsfromVenezuela, rubies from Burma, uncut kundan diamonds,a watch on watch chain, lengths of woolen cloth for her new husband to make into suits in which to travel to England, and in a crisp envelope, a ticket for passage on the SS Strathnavar from Bombay to Liverpool (91).
The bride Bela who was carefully ‘locked up behind the high walls of the haveli’ in her parental home was handed over like a commodity from her patriarchal father’s custody to that of Jemubhai’s. The consent or opinion of the bride or groom was not at all important. Her only ‘value’ lay in her dowry otherwise she was a ‘valueless’ person.
Vandana Pathak observes :
She had just left one suffocating, male dominated bastion to enter into another androcentric home for a loveless, unsuccessful marriage. Perhaps she was one of those girls in India who were taught since childhood (and some girls are being taught even now) not to question their father’s authority, and are told repeatedly that marriage, hearth, and motherhood are three key events, roles, and goals of their life. She was too young to comprehend the significance and intricacies of marriage. (Pathak 133)
When Bela married, “her name was changed into the one chosen by Jemubhai’s family, and in a few hours, Bela became Nimi Patel”. (91) As Jemubhai attempted to pull off his wife’s gold-embroidered Sari, he could feel “The fourteen-year-old crying in terror : “Save me”.(91)
Jemubhai’s family members, particularly his younger uncles, were very keen for the consummation of his marriage. They even advised him to use force and pin his wife down if she did not cooperate :
Next morning, the uncles laughed. “What happened? Nothing?” They gestured at the bed.
More laughter the next day.
The third day, worry.
“Force her,” the uncles urged him. “Insist. Don’t let her behave badly.”
“Other families would not be so patient”, they warned Nimi.
“Chase her and pin her down,” the uncles ordered Jemubhai . . .
“Spoiled,” they said to Nimi. “Putting on airs.”
How could she not be happy with their brainy Jemu, the first boy fron their community to go to England? (91-92)
One day as the family was out selling the jewels for extra money, Jemubhai offered his young bride a ride on his father’s Hercules cycle to which she agreed :
When he rode up, a child’s curiosity conquered her commitment to tears and she climbed on sideways. “Stick your legs out”, he instructed and worked away at the pedals. They went faster and faster, between the trees and cows, whizzing through the cow pats. Jemubhai turned, caught quick sight of her eyes-oh, no man had eyes like these or looked out on the world this way . . . He pedaled harder. The ground sloped, and as they flew down the incline, their hearts were left behind for an instant, levitating amid green leaves, blue sky. (92)
The family sold the jewels to get money to send Jemu to England. At the time of marriage, Jemu was twenty years old. When he returned after five years he was a totally changed person, thinking himself as a foreigner in his own home. While everyone was curious and excited at his return, he behaved in a strange manner shouting wildly and making fuss over his smallest possessions. The relatives, with whom he had a rapport, became strangers to him. He could not tolerate any one. His wife, who attracted him at the time of marriage, did not attract him any more. In fact, he forgot that he was a married man: “What would he do with her? He had forgotten he had a wife”. (166)
Nimi, on the other hand, during all these past five years remembered her bicycle ride with her husband as the happiest moment of her marital life :
All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart-how lovely she must have appeared to him. … He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. (166)