In this haunting yet life changing story, Desai wastes no time showing the reader that her characters are mere people and that all of them will inevitably lose everything or inherit loss, as the title suggests. The characters are all rich with description, some with more complex lives than others, but they all share one similar trait. All of them have struggled to be where they are, and none of them belong there.
Writing Style
Desai's prose is beautiful and eloquent. It takes the reader a few pages, if not paragraphs, to get into the ebb and flow of The Inheritance of Loss. Once there, it is a sea of beautiful chapters. Her descriptions of places are absolute and clear. The reader will shift around uncomfortably as he or she reads about the bugs, the rodents, and encroaching vines that take over the house. One can almost hear the wood swelling beneath as the house, which itself shouldn't have been in Kalimpong, battles with nature.
Desai's writing is almost grand enough to mask the sadness and desperation of her characters. Even those with success are all miserable. Just when she builds someone up, she throws them on the ground and steps on them, just before robbing them of everything they have spitting on them and laughing in their face (or perhaps the laughing is after stepping on them).
It is this method of writing that inherently parallels the characters in the book with the real people in the world whose lives aren't that far off. Immigrants in the West are often ridiculed and are humbled to less than they deserve. Desai is not afraid to voice this fact in her narrative, and it gives the book a fresh take on the scent of reality.
The Judge and Status Stripping
When Jemubhai, the judge, leaves home for the first time he is praised by his family. He is their pride, their salvation, their first born going off to do grand things in England. it is an honor that not many have. Once he's on the ship, the constipated and rotten banana smelling pre-judge runs to the bathroom. He ends up having to stick "a finger up the hole" and excavate within to release "a backed up load of of scropulated goat pellets...trying to catch them before they bulleted into the water." (Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, pg. 121)
This act of scouring his own anus to release the constipation is so degrading, so demoralizing and so simple that the reader has no option but to pity the man who is so uncomfortable in his own skin. He has thus boarded embarrassed by his own family, shatters a cultural ritual by not waving at his boasting father, yet he worries most about whether the men outside the bathroom have heard him crap in the toilet. What is his obsession with caring about what the men think? They're westerner's and he is not.
Warning: Story killer. Read at your own risk.
Another example of this ripping a person's pride to sheds is when Biju, the son of Jemubhai's cook, returns to India. Biju has very little money that he managed to save up. Yet the promise of America was a lie in his case and his yearning for his father was much stronger. Because of the insurgency in Kalimpong, Biju has no choice but to ride with a group of rebels back to his town. The rebels kick him off the vehicle, take his money which is hidden in his shoes, and take his clothes. On top of that, the only clothing he can find is a pink muumuu hanging from a clothing line.
The ailing Biju then runs to his father's residence, demented from physical pain and mental agony...in a pink muumuu. He has not only been demoralized and dehumanized in two countries, he is emasculated in his own town. He has thus inherited all of the loss he can handle. However, Biju and his father are the only two in the book who never inherit loneliness.
If there is moral in this story it is that love is the only thing that a person cannot lose. But not just the love between two random people, like Sai and Gyan's, or the love between father or grandfather and daughter. Here it is the love between a single father and his son.
Book Information:
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Grove Press, NY 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4281-8 ISBN-10:0-8021-4281-8
Carmen Sofia Grant - Carmen is a social media marketer, freelance writer, and blogger. Her favorite blogs are MomCrunch and Social Media Examiner.com
