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The Inheritance of
Loss
On the one hand are Sai’s grandfather, Jemubhai, a retired Anglophile tetchy judge, puffed up with his sense of English pride, who can scarcely tolerate Indians, and his cook, Nandu, proud of the fact that his son works in the US. On the other are Gyan, the mathematics tutor who gives up his romance with Sai to join the GNLF insurgency, and Biju, the cook’s son who, contrary to his father’s belief, lives the life of an illegal alien moving from one restaurant job to another in New York. Between the two is Sai herself, destined to live with her unwanting grandfather in his decrepit house after the death of her parents. In the first part, the novel delights in polyphonic multicultural diversity of its many subjects. Gradually, we realise the restlessness of the characters, their insularity from the world and their forms of self-absorption. Desai’s novel is poised ably on the contradictory terrains of East and West, poverty and wealth, the migrant and the resident. We find her people struggling to find a foothold in a spirit of schizoid detachment from the world, but unable to do so in either of the two worlds they inhabit. Sai’s life is represented as a foil or parallel to Biju’s. Both want to connect in some way with the worlds they inhabit, but remain unsuccessful. Sai falls in love with Gyan, whereas, Biju hopes to establish a network of communications with restaurant owners and guests, but is beguiled each time. Both are, in essence, immigrants wanting desperately to "belong", who realise that life seldom promises fulfilment. As the epigraph from Borges says: "My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. Apart from these central characters, we get vignettes from the ordinary, but eccentric lives of Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Noni and her sister, Lola, who read Jane Austen, and Saeed Saeed, all of whom are the means of projecting the colonial narrative of history as well as depicting the subsequent alienation from society and the acute loneliness and bitterness with their surroundings. Unfortunately, none has been painted fully in rounded tones and they fragment as soon as the reader establishes some kind of affinity with them. Desai’s narrative particularises the notions of class, race and geographical locale without forgetting to contextualise these issues within the unavoidable areas of global history. A far more ambitious product than her debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, the novel is nonetheless personal and intimate. Although very different in conception, Inheritance`85 evokes the same stark terror whose immediate source is obviously a frightening loneliness, anger and protest. Poised between nostalgia for the past and a foreboding of an apocalyptic future, Biju, otherwise a comic figure, goes in search of some kind of redemption from an existence torn between continuity and rupture. The intensity of his experience, as depicted in the book, is a result of his status as a migrant who struggles to bring out a self-portrait as a way of recognising his identity. As Brodsky would assert: "Uncertainty is the mother of beauty." Desai’s language has much to recommend the novel. If there were a vocabulary that precisely captures the sensory impact of language, it is to be found here: "All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths." In spite of its seemingly limited concerns, The Inheritance of Loss has big issues to deal with: the glaring class inequalities of Indian society, the impact of the "imperialist" project of the United States, exile, colonialism, the spectre of terrorism (to which we are introduced right at the outset) or the processes of globalisation that transcend civil strife. |
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