The
inheritance of Kiran Desai got recognition of the world on October 10th, the birth centenary of R. K. Narayan whose preponderant
influence is quite obvious in her novels. Fortuitously, her mother, Anita Desai, whose writerly legacy has made her a name, was too far to be informed of the prize- into a Tibetan settlement, the same implacable landscape that forms the backdrop of Kiran’s
The Inheritance of Loss; Almost a homage to an important and majestic character in the story. The towering and uncompromising peaks of Himalayan splendour stand like the great Gods watching the story of petty human beings unfold in the spirit of a Grecian tragedy.It is a narrative of the harsh colonial truth and the consequent dysfunctional and troubled present lurching towards an uncertain future. The shadow of a man, Jemubhai Patel, is a colonial relic having no claim to the postcolonial world, and hiding behind the insipid moves of fake chess-games. His hideous past reveals an exotic animal that is not sociable enough to form humane bonds with anybody. When his grand-daughter, Sai, lands at his ‘castle’, she finds relief in the cook’s chattering and febrile excitement in her
adolescent Nepalese tutor, Gyan, whose adolescent idealism suddenly begins to crave for the mantle of a martyr under the momentary but powerful influence of the separatist forces. Thus their fragile love is sacrificed: not in dignity of the sacrificial rituals, but paradoxically, in the mean cock-fight bickering even as the snow-muffled peaks of lofty splendour witness the rise of insurgent struggle to a crescendo, the tremors of which bring a disillusioned immigrant, Biju, back to the folds of these angry, coruscating mountains. Amid this landscape of timeless antiquity unfolds the theme of eternal concern: the humble and humiliating poverty and the consequent migration of the deprived and unprivileged.