by Kiran Desai
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
‘Kiran Desai is a terrific writer. This book richly fulfils the promise of her first’ Salman Rushdie
‘A wonderful writer of comic set-pieces. A novel that manages to be both warm-hearted about human nature and clear-sighted about humanity’s flaws. Desai has a mature, compassionate voice’ Observer
‘Moving and bleakly comic… informed by wit’ Sunday Times
‘Desai brilliantly transports you to her novel’s setting, making the characters’ hopes and dreams feel as familiar as your own’ Glamour
‘Written with scintillating assurance and moral rigour’ Spectator
‘Desai weaves a rich tapestry of back stories and historical threads’ Metro
‘No subject is tired when tackled with the energy and intelligence of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Her Indian characters are exquisitely particular – funny but never quaint… Bittersweet, entertaining and just shy of tragic. Surprisingly wise’ Economist
‘Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence… lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender’ New York Times Book Review
‘Desai is wildly in love with the light and landscape and the characters who inhabit it. Summer comes alive with its sights and sounds and smells, and the rainy season seems to pour down with more force than in any other novel you’ve read… [She has] a love for language that few American writers her age seem able to rival. This story of exiles at home and abroad, of families broken and fixed, of love both bitter and bittersweet is one of the most impressive novels in English of the past year, and I predict you’ll read it… with your heart in your chest, inside the narrative, and the narrative inside you’ Chicago Tribune
‘A meditative look at the conflicting bonds of love and duty’ Vogue
‘Desai’s assurance and energy keep the plot on track and bring her ambitious tale to a fittingly strong conclusion’ People
‘Seldom has an author offered so fearless a glimpse into how ordinary lives are caught up in the collision of modernity and cultural tradition, and in the schisms and fanaticism that all too often ensue’ Elle
‘With its razor insights and emotional scope, The Inheritance of Loss amplifies a developing and formidable voice’ Los Angeles Times
‘Desai’s characters are so alive, the places so vivid, that we are always inside their lives. Her insights into human nature, rare for so young a writer, juggle timeless wisdom and twenty-first century self-doubt’ Boston Globe
‘Desai’s strength lies in her ability to capture, with humor and grace, the nuanced complexities of the characters and their times’ Denver Post
‘The novel is finely accomplished in the way it makes connections between private lives and public events’ Seattle Times
‘Sweet and savoury, sometimes wise and desperately forlorn, this is an engaging second novel from a brave new talent’ Globe & Mail
‘With her second novel, Kiran Desai has written a sprawling and delicate book, like an ancient landscape glittering in the rain… Desai has a touch for alternating humor and impending tragedy that one associates with the greatest writers, and her prose is uncannily beautiful, a perfect balance of lyricism and plain speech’ O: The Oprah Magazine
‘Glorious… luminous’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘Stunning… In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a “better life”’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard introduced an astute observer of human nature and a delectably sensuous satirist. In her second novel, Desai is even more perceptive and bewitching… Desai is superbly insightful in her rendering of compelling characters, and in her wisdom regarding the perverse dynamics of society. Desai incisively and imaginatively dramatizes the wonders and tragedies of Himalayan life and, by extension, the fragility of peace and elusiveness of justice, albeit with her own powerful blend of tenderness and wit’ Booklist
‘The book’s magic lies in [its] rich images’ Entertainment Weekly
‘A brilliant talent. Creating gorgeous pictures in the mind, Desai generously embellishes on colours, fragrances and evocative landscapes’ Asiana
‘Exquisite. Kiran Desai meets the complexity of our times with a language that is supple in its syntax and its rhythms. The story she tells is filled with patiently acquired insights about humanity, and every other page is a hymn to nature’s abundance’ Nadeem Aslam
‘A remarkable book, funny and insightful – a showcase for the amazing range and depth of Kiran Desai’s writing’ Manil Suri
‘The Inheritance of Loss, so moving, funny, unflinching, is the best novel I’ve yet read about the contemporary immigrant life and the on-going parallel world “left behind.” And the writing is extraordinary: astonishingly observant and inventive, joyously alive. Really, it’s just the best, sweetest, most delightful new novel I’ve read in ages!’ Francisco Goldman, author of The Divine Husband
‘If God is in the details, Ms. Desai has written a holy book. Page after page, from Harlem to the Himalayas, she captures the terror and exhilaration of being alive in this world’ Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
‘The Inheritance of Loss is a revelation in the possibilities of the novel. It is vast in scope, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the immigrant quarters of New York; the gripping stories of people buffeted by the winds of history, personal
and political. Kiran Desai’s voice is fiercely funny – a humour born out of darkness, the laughter of the dispossessed. It is a remarkable novel because it is rich in that most elusive quality in fiction: wisdom’ Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai
PENGUIN BOOKS
To my mother with so much love
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Atlantic Monthly Press,
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 2006
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
8
Copyright © Kiran Desai, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
“The Boast of Quietness,” translated by Stephen Kessler, copyright © 1999 by
Maria Kodama: translation © 1999 by Stephen Kessler, from Selected Poems
by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. Used by permission of
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192573-8
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. 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.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. 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
The Inheritance of Loss
One
All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep.
Here, at the back, inside the cavernous kitchen, was the cook, trying to light the damp wood. He fingered the kindling gingerly for fear of the community of scorpions living, loving, reproducing in the pile. Once he’d found a mother, plump with poison, fourteen babies on her back.
Eventually, the fire caught and he placed his kettle on top, as battered, as encrusted as something dug up by an archeological team, and waited for it to boil. The walls were singed and sodden, garlic hung by muddy stems from the charred beams, thickets of soot clumped batlike upon the ceiling. The flame cast a mosaic of shiny orange across the cook’s face, and his top half grew hot, but a mean gust tortured his arthritic knees.
Up through the chimney and out, the smoke mingled with the mist that was gathering speed, sweeping in thicker and thicker, obscuring things in parts—half a hill, then the other half. The trees turned into silhouettes, loomed forth, were submerged again. Gradually the vapor replaced everything with itself, solid objects with shadow, and nothing remained that did not seem molded from or inspired by it. Sai’s breath flew from her nostrils in drifts, and the diagram of a giant squid constructed from scraps of information, scientists’ dreams, sank entirely into the murk.
She shut the magazine and walked out into the garden. The forest was old and thick at the edge of the lawn; the bamboo thickets rose thirty feet into the gloom; the trees were moss-slung giants, bunioned and misshapen, tentacled with the roots of orchids. The caress of the mist through her hair seemed human, and when she held her fingers out, the vapor took them gently into its mouth. She thought of Gyan, the mathematics tutor, who should have arrived an hour ago with his algebra book.
But it was 4:30 already and she excused him with the thickening mist.
When she looked back, the house was gone; when she climbed the steps back to the veranda, the garden vanished. The judge had fallen asleep and gravity acting upon the slack muscles, pulling on the line of his mouth, dragging on his cheeks, showed Sai exactly what he would look like if he were dead.
“Where is the tea?” he woke and demanded of her. “He’s late,” said the judge, meaning the cook with the tea, not Gyan.
“I’ll get it,” she offered.
The gray had permeated inside, as well, settling on the silverware, nosing the corners, turning the mirror in the passageway to cloud. Sai, walking to the kitchen, caught a glimpse of herself being smothered and reached forward to imprint her lips upon the surface, a perfectly formed film star kiss. “Hello,” she said, half to herself and half to someone else.
No human had ever seen an adult giant squid alive, and though they had eyes as big as apples to scope the dark of the ocean, theirs was a solitude so profound they might never encounter another of their tribe. The melancholy of this situation washed over Sai.
Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.
______
The water boiled and the cook lifted the kettle and emptied it into the teapot.
“Terrible,” he said. “My bones ache so badly, my joints hurt—I may as well be dead. If not for Biju….’ Biju was his son in America. He worked at Don Polio—or was it The Hot Tomato? Or Ali Baba’s Fried Chicken? His father could not remember or understand or pronounce the names, and Biju changed jobs so often, like a fugitive on the run—no papers.
“Yes, it’s so foggy,” Sai said. “I don’t think the tutor will come.” She jigsawed the cups, saucers, teapot, milk, sugar, strainer, Marie and Delite biscuits all to fit upon the tray.
“I’ll take it,” she offered.
“Careful, careful,” he said scoldingly, following with an enamel basin of milk for Mutt. Seeing Sai swim forth, spoons making a jittery music upon the warped sheet of tin, Mutt raised her head. “Teatime?” said her eyes as her tail came alive.
“Why is there nothing to eat?” the judge asked, irritated, lifting his nose from a muddle of pawns in the center of the chessboard.
He looked, then, at the sugar in the pot: dirty, micalike glinting granules. The biscuits looked like cardboard and there were dark finger marks on the white of the saucers. Never ever was the tea served the way it should be, but he demanded at least a cake or scones, macaroons or cheese straws. Something sweet and something salty. This was a travesty and it undid the very concept of teatime.
“Only biscuits,” said Sai to his expression. “The baker left for his daughter’s wedding.”
“I don’t want biscuits.”
Sai sighed.
“How dare he go for a wedding? Is that the way to run a business? The fool. Why can’t the cook make something?”
“There’s no more gas, no kerosene.”
“Why the hell can’t he make it over wood? All these old cooks can make cakes perfectly fine by building coals around a tin box. You think they used to have gas stoves, kerosene stoves, before? Just too lazy now.”
The cook came hurrying out with the leftover chocolate pudding warmed on the fire in a frying pan, and the judge ate the lovely brown puddle and gradually his face took on an expression of grudging pudding contentment.
They sipped and ate, all of existence passed over by nonexistence, the gate leading nowhere, and they watched the tea spill copious ribbony curls of vapor, watched their breath join the mist slowly twisting and turning, twisting and turning.
______
Nobody noticed the boys creeping across
the grass, not even Mutt, until they were practically up the steps. Not that it mattered, for there were no latches to keep them out and nobody within calling distance except Uncle Potty on the other side of the jhora ravine, who would be drunk on the floor by this hour, lying still but feeling himself pitch about—”Don’t mind me, love,” he always told Sai after a drinking bout, opening one eye like an owl, “I’ll just lie down right here and take a little rest—”
They had come through the forest on foot, in leather jackets from the Kathmandu black market, khaki pants, bandanas—universal guerilla fashion. One of the boys carried a gun.
Later reports accused China, Pakistan, and Nepal, but in this part of the world, as in any other, there were enough weapons floating around for an impoverished movement with a ragtag army. They were looking for anything they could find—kukri sickles, axes, kitchen knives, spades, any kind of firearm.
They had come for the judge’s hunting rifles.
Despite their mission and their clothes, they were unconvincing. The oldest of them looked under twenty, and at one yelp from Mutt, they screamed like a bunch of schoolgirls, retreated down the steps to cower behind the bushes blurred by mist. “Does she bite, Uncle? My God!”— shivering there in their camouflage.
Mutt began to do what she always did when she met strangers: she turned a furiously wagging bottom to the intruders and looked around from behind, smiling, conveying both shyness and hope.
Hating to see her degrade herself thus, the judge reached for her, whereupon she buried her nose in his arms.
The boys came back up the steps, embarrassed, and the judge became conscious of the fact that this embarrassment was dangerous for had the boys projected unwavering confidence, they might have been less inclined to flex their muscles.
The one with the rifle said something the judge could not understand.
“No Nepali?” he spat, his lips sneering to show what he thought of that, but he continued in Hindi. “Guns?”
