The Inheritance of Loss

“A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred; between Nepal, England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling stolen from here, Kalimpong plucked from there—despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders.” 

Kalimpong, the novel’s primary setting, lies at the seat of great territorial strife in the Himalayan region. The countries listed have seized and ceded territory from each other for the purposes of trade, armed conflict, and imperial interests (particularly in the case of England, which ruled India until its independence in 1947). Migration and map-drawing are central themes throughout the novel.

“Jemu picked up the package, fled to the deck, and threw it overboard. Didn’t his mother think of the inappropriateness of her gesture? Undignified love, Indian love, stinking, unaesthetic love—the monsters of the ocean could have what she had so bravely packed getting up in that predawn mush. The smell of dying bananas retreated, oh, but now that just left the stink of fear and loneliness, perfectly exposed.” 

The judge sails for Cambridge with a banana his grieving mother packs in his bag; he is immediately ashamed that the fruit has rotted in the heat and disturbed his cabinmate with its smell. His shame in being Indian has already planted hooks in him, as this scene demonstrates, but it masks his fear of being alone and afraid.

“Despite his attempts to hide, he merely emphasized something that unsettled others. For entire days nobody spoke to him at all [...] and elderly ladies [...] moved over when he sat next to them in the bus, so he knew that whatever they had, they were secure in their conviction that it wasn’t even remotely as bad as what he had.” 

The judge’s shame in his ethnicity amplifies throughout his stay in England, so he tries to become as anonymous as possible. However, prejudice follows him wherever he goes, and not even the old ladies will show him kindness because of his skin color.

“‘I hope Biju makes a lot of money,’ reflected Sai, ‘they are the poorest family in the village. Their house is still made of mud with a thatch roof.’ Noni didn’t think this was suitable information for the cook to share. It was important to draw the lines properly between classes or it harmed everyone on both sides of the great divide.” 

The cook and Sai share a close relationship, but in Indian society they are not equals due to their disparities in language and class. Noni, an anglicized Indian much like Sai, wishes to uphold the social codes assigned to each class, presumably to maintain her high status.

“‘What is your status now, sir? I can’t help you unless I know your current status.’ They put down the phone hurriedly then, worried that immigration had a superduper zing bing beep pepping high-alert electronic supersonic space speed machine that could

transfer

connect

dial

read

trace the number through to their—

Illegality.” 

In the Queen of Tarts bakery, Biju’s coworkers frantically attempt to register for the green card lottery. Their paranoia about the interview process speaks to their anxiety about being undocumented workers. This passage also plays with the structure of the paragraph, isolating words to mimic the rhythm of the staff’s panicked thoughts.

“When he had visited his father in Kalimpong, they had sat outside in the evenings and his father had reminisced: ‘How peaceful our village is. How good the roti tastes there! It is because the atta is ground by hand, not by machine…and because it is made on a choolah, better than anything cooked on a gas or a kerosene stove…Fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk still warm from the buffalo…’ They had stayed up late. They hadn’t noticed Sai, then aged thirteen, staring from her bedroom window, jealous of the cook’s love for his son.” 

Biju’s homesickness draws his mind back to his hometown and a pleasant evening with his father. As they enjoy each other’s company, the cook relishes speaking about the traditional methods for making certain foods, while the orphaned Sai envies their parent-child relationship from the window.

“She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail. Phones emitted a death rattle, televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour. And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing, chilly and solitary—not anything you could grasp. The world vanished, the gate opened onto nothing—no Gyan around the bend of the mountain—and that terrible feeling of waiting released its stranglehold.” 

Rain punctuates several key scenes in the novel, setting a tone of both excess and confinement. As Sai considers life during monsoon season, she meditates on the difficulty of understanding life and the pain of waiting for love.

“The air grew colder and the evening progressed. Gyan, who had been gathered up accidentally in the procession, who had shouted half facetiously, half in earnest, who had half played, half lived a part, found the fervor had affected him. His sarcasm and his embarrassment were gone. Fired by alcohol, he finally submitted to the compelling pull of history and found his pulse leaping to something that felt entirely authentic.” 

Gyan at first views the GNLF demonstration with detached skepticism, but the crowd compels him to join in and channel his long-bottled anger by chanting, “Jai Gorkha!” He decides to join the movement in the heat of the moment, a choice he soon questions once he steps away from the fervor.

“By year’s end the dread they had for each other was so severe it was as if they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.” 

The judge and his wife Nimi do not love each other; rather, they resent each other. For years they live in constant conflict, the judge cruel and physically abusive, Nimi isolated and depressed. Here Desai also points to the novel’s theme of national conflict, which mirrors the antipathy between this married couple.

“Biggest pusher, first place; how self-contented and smiling he was; he dusted himself off, presenting himself with the exquisite manners of a cat. I’m civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I’m civilized, mam. Biju noticed that his eyes, so alive to the foreigners, looked back at his own countrymen and women, immediately glazed over, and went dead.” 

At the visa office, Biju decides to play calm, well-spoken, and confident throughout his interview to gain passage to the United States. However, the look in his eyes exposes how his devotion to Americans comes at the expense of devotion to fellow Indians.

“Somebody in one of the kitchens of Biju’s past had said: ‘It could not be so hard or there would not be so many of you here.’ But it WAS so hard and YET there were so many here. It was terribly, terribly hard. Millions risked death, were humiliated, hated, lost their families—YET there were so many here.”

Biju’s journey shows the great difficulty of immigration to America. To the one who expresses skepticism about that difficulty, Biju protests, elucidating the great cost of leaving home, and marvels that so many endure that cost.

“‘Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European, have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian, and in all such cases, identify yourself with the race to which you belong.’—H. Hardless, The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette [...] she wanted to search out the descendants of H. Hardless and stab the life out of them.” 

Sai flips through an old book in the Gymkhana Club library that recommends westernized Indians should not fool themselves that they are European. Sai’s rage at this passage exposes her as one of the acculturated Indians Hardless references.

“He thought of how the English government and its civil servants had sailed away throwing their topis overboard, leaving behind only those ridiculous Indians who couldn’t rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn.”

The judge recalls when the British withdrew from India and discarded their traditional Indian hats as they sailed away. They left him a man without a country, an Indian who learned to mimic English culture at great personal cost, depositing him in a homeland he no longer knew.

“Suddenly, after this there was nothing more to say, for while the emotion was there, the conversation was not; one had bloomed, not the other, and they fell abruptly into emptiness. [...] ‘WHEN ARE YOU COMING?’ ‘I DON’T KNOW. I WILL TRY….’ Biju wanted to weep.” 

The emotional phone call between the cook and his son Biju occurs amid the GNLF takeover of Kalimpong, rendering the connection faulty. From the phone booth in New York City, Biju calls out to his father but cannot escape the time and distance that have separated them, leaving them both in painful silence.

“What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage [...].”

Lola considers the Gorkha cause and the instability it has caused, and in so doing gets to the heart of the novel. Relationships between countries and groups are not so different than those between romantic partners: passionate, divisive, and capable of ruin no matter how strong they appear.

“Parallel lives were being led by those—Budhoo, Kesang—for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green.” 

The novel is populated by characters who divide their allegiances between nations and cultures, and Noni acknowledges that she and her sister live modern existences in the ancient environment of the Himalayas. Her servant and watchman, both of lower classes, are afforded no such luxury; Noni wonders if they are more content.

“‘You told them about the guns, didn’t you?’ she was shouting all of a sudden. ‘You told them to come to Cho Oyu? You did, didn’t you, DIDN’T YOU?’ It all came bursting out although she hadn’t considered this possibility before. Suddenly her anger, Gyan’s absences, his ignoring her in Darjeeling—all came together.” 

In the heat of an argument, Sai realizes that Gyan betrayed her by telling the GNLF about the judge’s guns, which they stole in Chapter 1. Although Gyan denies this, Sai puts the pieces together and is convinced her theory is true.

“The cook could see the fires burning below him and the men scattering. As they crossed the heat vapor of the flames, they seemed to ripple and blow like mirages. Above was Kanchenjunga, solid, extraordinary, a sight that for centuries had delivered men their freedom and thinned clogged human hearts to joy. But of course the cook couldn’t feel this now and he didn’t know if the sight of the mountain could ever be the same to him.” 

The public burning of the Indo-Nepal Treaty devolves into violence and murder, a horrific incident the cook witnesses in the streets of his hometown. He surveys the once-familiar landscape as if it is ephemeral, smoke-like, whereas the great Kanchenjunga mountain remains as stable as ever on the horizon. However, the violence ruins the cook’s view of Kalimpong and the mountain.

“There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice—the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event.” 

Desai depicts the GNLF militants as opportunists, young men enraged by systemic oppression and inspired by action films rather than authentic political conviction. Yet no matter their reasons, the young men’s actions repeat eternal cycles of violence and justice, since their hatred phases through all generations and all nations.

“Sweet drabness of home—he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing—that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant.” 

Biju spent years in New York City, where he always felt like a stranger and was treated as such. As he steps foot in Calcutta, home at last, his sense of self realigns, and his self-pity evaporates.

“His hatred was its own creature; it rose and burned out, reappeared of its own accord, and in her he sought only its justification, its perfection. In its purest moments he could imagine himself killing her.” 

One of the novel’s final chapters exposes the depth of the judge’s misanthropy and the magnitude of his wrongdoing. The otherwise highly controlled man loses himself inside his rage. He beats his wife mercilessly, almost killing her, after seeing a mirror image of his shame in her face.

“Darkness fell and he sat right in the middle of the path—without his luggage, without his savings, worst of all, without his pride. Back from America with far less than he’d ever had. He put on the nightgown. It had large, faded pink flowers and yellow, puffy sleeves, ruffles at the neck and hem.”

Biju prepares for his trip back to India by buying a collection of American luxuries, but the GNLF steals them all, in addition to his clothing, luggage, savings, and wallet. Returning was the final act of empowerment he had left, but his homecoming swiftly becomes a further occasion for loss and humiliation, just like what he endured in America.

“Her crying, enough for all the sadness in the world, was only for herself. life wasn’t single in its purpose…or even in its direction.… The simplicity of what she’d been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it.” 

After witnessing the judge beat the cook, Sai mulls over her future in the yard of Cho Oyu. She realizes the self-centeredness of her perspective and that there are a multitude of other narratives occurring around her.