66 pages • 2 hours read
Kiran DesaiThe Inheritance of Loss
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Sai Mistry, a 17-year-old girl in 1986 India, sits on the steps of her home reading about the giant squid in National Geographic. Her grandfather, the judge, plays chess inside the drafty, dilapidated house of Cho Oyu, while the cook makes dinner in the kitchen and Mutt the dog lies sleeping. Sai is waiting for Gyan, her math tutor and beau, who is presumably waylaid by the fog.
Sai walks inside to find the judge sleeping. He wakes, demanding tea from the cook. The cook makes tea and complains of pain, saying he would be dead but for the help of his son Biju, who works in America. Sai delivers tea and unappetizing biscuits to the disgruntled judge. The cook scuttles over to serve the judge chocolate pudding.
Three boys, Nepali insurgents, approach the house in want of the judge’s hunting rifles. Mutt barks at them, and the boys step back in fear. Mutt wags her tail, and the boys approach again demanding guns. The judge denies he has them, and the boys threaten to kill the family one by one, with Sai last. Sai retrieves the guns, all rusted, and the boys demand to stay for tea.
They find the cook under the dining table, and he begs for his life. They tell him to make food, and the cook finds himself in the kitchen with Sai and the judge. The cook fries pakoras for the boys as the judge sets the table and Sai makes tea as the English do. Meanwhile, the boys tour the stately but deteriorated home.
They eat and drink, then raid the house’s supplies of food, soap, cold cream, and alcohol. They pack their loot inside two of the family’s trunks. Angry at the dearth of cigarettes, the boys defecate in the toilets without flushing. Before leaving, they force the judge to say “Jai Gorkha” and “I am a fool” (8).
The cook wails while the judge sits, maintaining his composure despite shaking with shame. The cook draws the curtains on the fog.
The newspapers of the time report on an upcoming rock concert at a Bombay hotel, a technology fair in Delhi, and Indian-Nepali insurgents angry at their minority status in the local Himalayan region.
Chapter 2 Summary
The judge sends the cook to report the gun thieves to the police. He goes, despite his resistance to stirring up trouble. The police question him and arrive at Cho Oyu to investigate. They interview the judge, and the police laugh that the intruders demanded tea. They dust for fingerprints and confiscate evidence but also snoop about the house, finding faulty plumbing and an attic filled with spiders.
The police, suspicious of the cook, search his mud hut on the property. They find a clean place behind the house’s water tank where the cook angered two “husband and wife” cobras once (14).
The police tear apart the cook’s home in search of evidence. Sai watches and feels sad that they are disrespecting the man’s few belongings. She studies the two precious photographs on his wall: one of the cook and his late wife “standing X-ray stiff” at their wedding (15), the other of their son Biju. Biju’s mother died after a fall from a tree 17 years ago. The police find Biju’s letters from America and read one aloud.
Chapter 3 Summary
Nineteen-year-old Biju works behind the counter at Gray’s Papaya, a hot dog shop in New York City. A “sweet-faced girl” (17) orders a hot dog as the men behind the counter make suggestive comments to her. A visitor from Bangladesh complements the staff on the food but remarks on the business’s strange name.
Biju, naive around his coworkers, refuses to see women in Washington Heights with the other staff. The manager warns of mandatory green card checks and recommends that Biju and the other undocumented staff “disappear quietly” (18).
Chapter 4 Summary
The police read all of Biju’s letters to his father. The cook, imagining his son’s success in the American restaurant business, pictures a luxurious retirement with Biju’s family. When writing back to his son, the cook advises him to save money, be wary of strangers, and maintain his health.
Sai remembers an inflatable National Geographic globe she once ordered by mail. She uses it to show the cook where New York is and to explain why India and New York experience day and night at opposite times.
The police leave the cook’s home in shambles and take his nice (albeit broken) watch. The cook grants that they were entitled to their suspicions, as servants usually steal. Sai is ashamed to see the cook’s home like this, since it emphasizes how their differing statuses and the superficiality of their affectionate relationship.
Sai remembers arriving at Cho Oyu for the first time and standing alone at the end of the driveway until the cook arrived to retrieve her. She had observed him as “a poverty-stricken man growing into an ancient at fast-forward” (21). In the present, Sai remarks at the injustice of the police raid, but the cook defends the police’s thoroughness.
Chapter 5 Summary
Biju works at a series of New York restaurants. The kitchens of French, colonial, and American restaurants are filled with staff from South America, Central America, Africa, and Asia. Various coworkers from around the world tell Biju that Indians can be found everywhere from Guam to Guyana.
At one job, Biju encounters a Pakistani coworker and hates him instantly. Biju tells his father, and the cook warns him, “Beware. Keep away. Distrust“ (25). The enmity between Biju and the Pakistani man festers into a yelling match during which they throw cabbages at each other. The owner fires them both because the upscale clientele in the dining room above heard them fighting in the “third-world twenty-two steps below” (25). The owner dismisses Biju with a final insult about his body odor.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Desai begins The Inheritance of Loss in medias res at the pivotal gun robbery, later described as “the start of everything going wrong” (245). The incident highlights the signature traits of each member of the Cho Oyu household: the judge’s pride, the cook’s fear, and Sai’s naivete. The incident also frames Cho Oyu as one of the novel’s primary settings and a symbol of the judge’s withering pride. As the Nepali insurgents search the home, “[t]heir noses wrinkled from the gamy mouse stench of a small place, although the ceiling had the reach of a public monument and the rooms were spacious in the manner of old wealth” (7). This description outlines the deep class divides in India, as do the cook’s reactions to the police searching his home. The judge and Sai might be living in a dilapidated manor, but the cook enjoys no such modern comfort.
Desai also makes the global scope of her novel clear in these introductory chapters. The action switches between India and New York, and she makes repeated reference to the migration of people from one country to another. The hometown of every main character in the novel is Kalimpong, India, located at the fulcrum of conflicted territories like India, China, England, Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan. The boys who come to Cho Oyu are Nepali militants intent on establishing their own territory within India. Indeed, the boys’ violation of the Cho Oyu property speaks to the ever-changing borders with which the novel is concerned, the “messy map” always in dispute (10).
Similarly, the kitchens of New York City abound with people who, like Biju, come from faraway places. Coworkers educate him on the worldwide impact of Indian people, and he is surprised there are millions of immigrants just like him.
