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 36-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 36 Summary
Biju learns from newsagent Mr. Iype about the unrest in Kalimpong. Biju, worried about his father, obtains a stolen phone number from a street hustler and calls the MetalBox guesthouse in Kalimpong. The watchman runs for the cook, who abandons his dinner preparations for the phone.
The MetalBox watchman’s family listens in as the cook shouts to Biju over the guesthouse phone. They can barely hear each other but manage to convey that each is safe and well. The watchman’s wife sees telephone lines swaying outside, and children climb a tree to stabilize the line. The cook lies that there is “NO TROUBLE NOW” (253) in Kalimpong. The cook asks when Biju will come home next, and Biju, heartbroken, realizes Harish-Harry won’t give him leave from Gandhi Cafe. The phone line goes dead. The watchman says Biju will call back, but he does not.
Biju stands on the street in New York, sad that he and his father had so little of substance to say to each other. He fears never seeing his father again. The cook considers someone’s stray comment that Biju will return to India fat. Biju, however, has grown so thin that he wears child-sized clothes from the 99 cent store. At the Gandhi Cafe, Harish-Harry shows the staff photographs of his new condo in New Jersey. His last worry is his daughter, who is rebellious and single.
Chapter 37 Summary
Local strikes, growing longer in duration, affect Kalimpong businesses so much that they won’t open. GNLF guards grow bolder at roadblocks, turning vehicles away from town, and raise the volume on their statehood demands.
Mrs. Sen knits at Mon Ami and says, “No peace for the wicked” (259), but Lola says there is no peace for the innocent. The GNLF has overtaken the Gymkhana Club, and the area’s typical crowd of tourists and boarding school students has vacated. There is no running water, kerosene, gasoline, or electricity in town.
A group of GNLF boys intrudes on Mon Ami and spies Noni and Lola’s food on the counter. They tell the women to buy calendars and cassettes from them, and the women do. Noni grants their request to sleep there that evening. The sisters lie awake all night and expect Budhoo the watchman to come, but he never does. Lola suspects he is in league with the GNLF, whereas Noni doubts this. Lola mocks Noni’s conciliatory attitude about the GNLF cause.
The next morning, the boys threaten Noni and Lola if they report them to the police. On the way out, the boys note the large size of the Mon Ami property and build a hut there a few weeks later.
Chapter 38 Summary
Lola and Noni realize that their wealth has left them vulnerable to the envy and retaliation of the marginalized Nepali. Lola complains of the huts to Pradhan, the leader of the local GNLF. He tells her his men are on government land, not her property. He taunts her, offering to marry her as his fifth wife. The surrounding soldiers and Pradhan’s wives laugh, and Lola departs.
At Mon Ami, Lola won’t answer Noni’s questions. She sits on the toilet and rails at her departed husband Joydeep for abandoning her. She remembers Joydeep’s affinity for Western culture and literature, and how he would quote Robert Frost to placate her. Noni asks her to open the door, and Lola refuses. She antagonizes her sister, telling her to join the GNLF and go to hell. Noni sits on the sofa and reflects on the folly of her ignorance and their attempt to maintain modernized lives among people too poor to call the region “exotic.”
Chapter 39 Summary
Gyan visits Sai at Cho Oyu. She asks what kind of man he is, and Gyan claims he is weak and confused. Sai erupts, shouting that this is a poor excuse. Angry, Gyan responds with the GNLF rallying cry and leaves abruptly. Sai is heartbroken and waits for Gyan to come back, but he does not.
Sai visits Uncle Potty, who notices her depressed state and attempts to cheer her up with a song. Uncle Potty remembers his extensive studies of love in Oxford libraries and his dalliances with men during various research trips. Sai visits Lola and Noni, who tease her about her relationship. Sai catches a cold and uses the illness to disguise her grief. She decides to use the abolished curfew to her advantage and track Gyan down herself.
Chapter 40 Summary
Sai inquires in town for Gyan but does not find him. She searches the Kalimpong college, also empty, and walks two hours to the poor area of town. She finds his home, “a small, slime-slicked cube” (279), and realizes why Gyan was ashamed to bring her here. Gyan’s little sister emerges, and Sai asks for Gyan, who walks out a moment later.
There is instant tension between Sai and Gyan. He asks what she wants, and she blames the GNLF for Father Booty’s exile. They argue, and Sai smarts when Gyan calls her a fool. She tells him he’s a hypocrite for eating imported food at Cho Oyu and objecting to it now during the Gorkha uprising. Gyan starts to laugh at their absurd argument over a Swiss man, chocolate, and cheese, and as Sai joins him she calls him momo.
Gyan becomes angry and wants to stand his ground, although he has grown afraid of GNLF extremism. Sai sees that he hates her, and he calls her ignorant. She goes on to call him ungrateful, “typical of you people” (286). He calls her a fool again, and she attacks him with her nails. She accuses Gyan of telling the Nepali boys about the judge’s guns. She jumps toward him again, and he pushes her. Gyan’s sister sees the ordeal, and he retreats into his home as Sai threatens to report him to the police.
At Cho Oyu Sai sees a man and woman pleading with the judge on the veranda. It is the wife and father of the innocent man whom the police arrested for the gun robbery. The judge says he can do nothing for them. The cook shoos the man and woman away, and they stare at Mutt as the judge walks her. Sai collapses on her bed, fearing the future and crying for Gyan.
Chapters 36-40 Analysis
During the emotional phone call between Biju and the cook, their difficulty hearing each other over malfunctioning phone lines mirrors how far apart they have grown. Biju’s homesickness deepens as he listens over the phone:
“The atmosphere of Kalimpong reached Biju all the way in New York; it swelled densely on the line and he could feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gestures of the ferns” (252).
When the line goes dead, the cook is surrounded by his friend’s family for comfort, but Biju has no one. He lives in an indifferent city and works in an indifferent environment “where they had not noticed his absence” (256). He must decide if his life in America is worth the risk of becoming “no longer relevant” to his father (255).
Meanwhile, the GNLF intrude on Noni and Lola’s “picturesque cottage” at Mon Ami. Lola, ordinarily so harsh on the Nepali cause, must admit that her and her sister’s wealth make them targets for the insurgents. Further, she realizes they never cared about their poor neighbors. Only now does the truth come to bear as the marginalized retaliate, “and it turned out that they, they, Lola and Noni, were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations” (266). Like the judge, proud Lola has been brought low, particularly when meeting with the GNLF leader, which stokes her anger at Joydeep and her sister. Noni, although more sympathetic to the Gorkha cause, also acknowledges her naivete and “cowardice” in establishing a home full of modern conveniences in a place like Kalimpong.
Similarly, Sai wakes to the reality of Gyan’s home “slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal—modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next” (280). She pities Gyan’s living situation and how he is his family’s “best bet in the big world” (280) with his intelligence and education. Gyan, however, rejects Sai’s pity as further proof of her elitism. His thoughts turn to current affairs in the GNLF, and the reader sees the thinness of his political conviction. His rage is much narrower: “He hated his tragic father, his mother who looked to him for direction [...] simply for being male” (285). Sai responds with generalizations about the Nepali, echoing language she has heard from Lola, and the truth that Gyan hates her “for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me” (285). Indeed Gyan considers her “a reflection of all the contradictions around her, a mirror that showed him himself far too clearly for comfort” (287).
