Chapter – I



Chapter – III

The Inheritance of Loss and the Loss of Female Voice

While Hullabaloo in The Guava Orchard is a brassy and somewhat whimsical novel, Kiran Desai’s next novel, The Inheritance of Loss, is a dark and ambitious glimpse at globalization and its discontents. It was published by Penguin India in early 2006 and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize 2006, for providing “a distinctive original voice and audacious imagination” (The Indian Express 12) to the world of modern literature. Kiran Desai created literary history by becoming the youngest ever woman to win the prestigious prize at the age of thirty-five, eclipsing the works of five other short-listed authors.

The Inheritance of Loss created a hullabaloo in the literary orchard and brought Kiran Desai much accolades and world-wide recognition. The fact that Kiran Desai could finally make it to the short-list of six from the long-list of 112 books was itself a wonder. The bookmakers had initially dismissed her as the 7/1 outsider. But the novel made a triumphant comeback as the judges’ panel that included poet and novelist Simon Armitage, novelist Candia Mc William, critic Anthony Quinn and actress Piono Shaw - held a different opinion. After a session that lasted about two hours, the panel unanimously chose Kiran Desai’s novel over five other short-listed books including the bookmakers’ favourite, Sarah Walter’s The Night Watch.

Prof. Hermione Lee, chairperson of the Judge and Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford, said about The Inheritance of Loss: “This is a magnificent novel of human breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and political astuteness.” (The Independent 14). Remembering Anita Desai, the noted Indian English novelist who is Kiran Desai’s mother, she enthused:

I think her mother would be proud. It is clear to those of us who have read Anita Desai that Kiran Desai has learned from her mother’s work. Both write not just about India but about Indian communities in the world. (The Independent 14).

Highlighting Kiran Desai’s originality and the strength of her novel, Prof. Lee added :

The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Indo-Anglian inheritance … but she does something pioneering. She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely her own. The book is movingly strong in its humanity, and I think that in the end is why it won. (The Independent 14)

Despite parental prediction, Kiran Desai was not prepared for the surprise. Accepting the award at a ceremony held at the Guild Hall, London, on 11th October, 2006, she said, “I didn’t expect to win. I don’t have a speech.” (India Today 12) After thanking her publisher, editor and agent, she added: “I’m Indian and so I’m going to thank my parents.” (India Today 12) Of her mother Anita Desai, to whom The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated, she said :

I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness in cold winters in her house … One minute is not enough to convey it. (India Today 12)

In The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai treats with tremendous insight, sensitivity, and often piercing irony, topical issues related to politics and terrorism as well as immigration, globalization, multiculturalism, colonial neurosis, identity-formation and subjectivity, and the nationalist, gender, cultural, ethnic and class differences that inform these processes. From a supremely funny and engaging novel in her joyous debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), Kiran Desai moved on to write The Inheritance of Loss where the prevailing mood is one of implacable bitterness and despair.

The Inheritance of Loss spans two continents and three generations. The story moves between New York and Kalimpong with scenes that contrast the life of illegal immigrants in New York and the growing unrest in Kalimpong. Full of pathos and tenderness, the novel presents its characters as ultimately frail human beings struggling in a search of love and happiness.

Kiran Desai, by setting her narrative in two parallel venues - New York of contemporary America and Kalimpong, a small Indian town at the foothills of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayan ranges - brings into relief the commonality of problems of the two hub of human insurgency, one tacit and the other vocal and strident. The aptness of the poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “Boast of Quietness” which Kiran Desai chooses as the epigraph to The Inheritance of Loss, adds immeasurably to the impact of the depiction of immigrants in the narrative. These immigrants have lost their homelands and have lost their identity and cannot hope ‘to arrive’ anywhere :

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 . . .

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)

Diaspora can be defined as a community of people who have settled outside their natal country but acknowledge their loyalties towards the ties with the country of their origin by voicing or implying a sense of co-ethnicity with the people of their country back home or as fellow members of their diaspora. Diaspora refers not only to geographical dispersal but also brings in the issues of identity, memory and home which such dispersal causes. There is no denying the fact that migration is a global phenomenon of the contemporary time. Crossing national boundaries has been a recurrent issue of the writers of postmodern literature. In his essay, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture”, Amitav Ghosh, the noted writer, rightly observes, “The modern Indian diaspora ... is not merely one of the most important demographic dislocations of modern times; it now represents important force in world-culture”. (Ghosh 243)

The Inheritance of Loss is set partly in India and partly in the U.S.A. Kiran Desai describes it as a book that “tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant. (India Today 14). The book also explores, at a deeper level, the consequences of the introduction of a western element into a non-western country. The novel also examines what happens when a person from a poor and undeveloped country migrates to a rich and developed one: “How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person’s thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time?” (India Today 14). These are, however, not new themes but old ones which continue to be relevant in today’s fast-changing globalized world where the past informs the present and the present unveils the past.

The Inheritance of Loss is, to a large extent, a story of migration and lives being made over. In page after page, one finds the stories of Indian village life and of her people’s attempts to grapple with modernity side by side with the stories of illegal immigrants in a modern centre of globalized economy and politics like New York. The question of migration has always bothered Kiran Desai. She admits in an interview :

It is something that has been going on forever. I did not realize it at first. There are so many interlinked patterns that it becomes important to examine it. It is quite a pertinent issue. Politicians are still talking of taking non-westerners to western countries, people from poor countries to rich ones. It has a darker side. There is a reverse journey happening too, like in my grandfather’s time, when they went abroad to study and then returned. (India Today 14)

Both Kiran Desai and her mother write about the Indian experience of migration. There is a common thread because the mother and the daughter have gone through the same experience. As Kiran Desai says :

There is a parallel thread … My mother is half German and her father was from Bangladesh. I didn’t see the connection until much later, especially with her Fasting, Feasting. So, there are connections and parallels, the process of leaving India together. (India Today 14)

The novel, which took eight years to complete, draws on Kiran Desai’s own experience of leaving India. While talking of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss and her own life, she remarks :

The characters of my story are entirely fictional, but these journeys (of her grandparents) as well as my own provided insight into what it means to travel between East and West and this is what I wanted to capture. The fact that I live this particular life is no accident. It was my inheritance. (India Today 14)

Writers of the diaspora often rewrite history and frame new narratives of family, society and nation with a desire to revisit the past. It is here that memory and nostalgia play a very important role. The diasporic writer occupies a kind of space that is one of exile and cultural solitude. While immigrant and expatriate writings are more inclined towards the contemporary experience in the host society, diasporic works are more preocupied with the idea of the deserted or imagined homeland. Kiran Desai, in The Inheritance of Loss, has skillfully blended immigrant and diasporic sensibilities. Alienation and estrangement are inherent aspects of the migrant situation in which the individual’s identity is torn between the old and the new worlds of experience and “a major feature of post-colonial literature is the concern with placement and displacement” (Ashcroft 1989:8).

Set in 1980s of India, The Inheritance of Loss recounts an intensely absorbing story. At its centre is the family of a retired judge and widower, Jemubhai Patel. In Kalimpong, a hill-station in the Himalayan foothills, the retired judge, who was once a student at the Cambridge University, presently lives with his sixteen year old orphaned grand-daughter, Sai. In a painful incident Sai’s parents died in an accident in Moscow when she was only five.

Jemubhai lives in Cho Oyu, a large delapidated house built by a Scotsman but now owned by him. Jemubhai lives in this house with his chatty cook whose only son, Biju, works as an illegal immigrant in a restaurant in New York to fulfil a materialistic longing for prosperity. It is really interesting that while the cook always thinks proudly of his son doing job in New York, a metropolis in America, the son more often sadly remembers his father and childhood days in a village in India. As for Sai, she passionately falls in love with her mathematics tutor, Gyan, a Nepali Gorkha. But Gyan gets involved in the violent Nepali insurgency for the autonomy of Gorkhaland and is forced to back out from his commitment to love. After undergoing an agonising experience in New York restaurants as a drab immigrant and embittered with the American dream of success, Biju eventually decides to return to his father in India with the humble dream of buying a taxi and a home of his own.

Two generations ago the judge, Jemubhai Patel, had humble beginnings. He could arrange finances for his higher education in England by marrying a girl who could bring in a handsome dowry. The life of Jemubhai’s wife, Nimi, who is dead, is revealed to us vividly as Jemubhai relives his past through memory.

Originally, Jemubhai belonged to a small place called Piphit. His father was a poor man but had an ambition of sending his son to England for higher studies. Not having enough money to send Jemu to England, he went to several moneylenders but in vain. An idea came to his mind that money can be got if Jemu got married. The dowry will be used to send Jemu to England. He was so passionate to send his son to England that he was ready to compromise with any girl only if he got a huge amount of money :

Jemu would be the first boy of their community to go to an English university. The dowry bids poured in and his father began an exhilarated weighing and tallying: ugly face-a little more gold, a pale skin-a little less. A dark and ugly daughter of a rich man seemed their best bet. (89).

Jemu was lucky that the offer came from a rich merchant of Piphit. The merchant thought if Jemu succeeded, he would be the father-in-law of one of the most powerful men in India, perhaps a bargain to enhance his business. So the merchant, Boman Bhai Patel, went to Jemu’s house with the offer of his most beautiful daughter, Bela. Years later recalling Bela’s exceptional beauty, Jemubhai’s cook tells Sai :

You could tell from her features, which were delicate; her toes, nose, ears, and fingers were all very fine and small, and she was very fair-just like milk. Complexion-wise, they said, you could have mistaken her for a foreigner. Her family only married among fifteen families, but an exception was made for your grandfather because he was in the ICS.(88)

The offer was accepted and the bride brought a huge amount of dowry with her:

The dowry included cash, gold, emeralds from Venezuela, rubies from Burma, uncut kundan diamonds, a watch on watch chain, lengths of woolen cloth for her new husband to make into suits in which to travel to England, and in a crisp envelope, a ticket for passage on the SS Strathnavar from Bombay to Liverpool (91).

The bride Bela who was carefully ‘locked up behind the high walls of the haveli’ in her parental home was handed over like a commodity from her patriarchal father’s custody to that of Jemubhai’s. The consent or opinion of the bride or groom was not at all important. Her only ‘value’ lay in her dowry otherwise she was a ‘valueless’ person.

Vandana Pathak observes :

She had just left one suffocating, male dominated bastion to enter into another androcentric home for a loveless, unsuccessful marriage. Perhaps she was one of those girls in India who were taught since childhood (and some girls are being taught even now) not to question their father’s authority, and are told repeatedly that marriage, hearth, and motherhood are three key events, roles, and goals of their life. She was too young to comprehend the significance and intricacies of marriage. (Pathak 133)

When Bela married, “her name was changed into the one chosen by Jemubhai’s family, and in a few hours, Bela became Nimi Patel”. (91) As Jemubhai attempted to pull off his wife’s gold-embroidered Sari, he could feel “The fourteen-year-old crying in terror : “Save me”. (91)

Jemubhai’s family members, particularly his younger uncles, were very keen for the consummation of his marriage. They even advised him to use force and pin his wife down if she did not cooperate :

Next morning, the uncles laughed. “What happened? Nothing?” They gestured at the bed.

More laughter the next day.

The third day, worry.

“Force her,” the uncles urged him. “Insist. Don’t let her behave badly.”

“Other families would not be so patient”, they warned Nimi.

“Chase her and pin her down,” the uncles ordered Jemubhai . . .

“Spoiled,” they said to Nimi. “Putting on airs.”

How could she not be happy with their brainy Jemu, the first boy fron their community to go to England? (91-92)

One day as the family was out selling the jewels for extra money, Jemubhai offered his young bride a ride on his father’s Hercules cycle to which she agreed :

When he rode up, a child’s curiosity conquered her commitment to tears and she climbed on sideways. “Stick your legs out”, he instructed and worked away at the pedals. They went faster and faster, between the trees and cows, whizzing through the cow pats. Jemubhai turned, caught quick sight of her eyes-oh, no man had eyes like these or looked out on the world this way . . . He pedaled harder. The ground sloped, and as they flew down the incline, their hearts were left behind for an instant, levitating amid green leaves, blue sky. (92)

The family sold the jewels to get money to send Jemu to England. At the time of marriage, Jemu was twenty years old. When he returned after five years he was a totally changed person, thinking himself as a foreigner in his own home. While everyone was curious and excited at his return, he behaved in a strange manner shouting wildly and making fuss over his smallest possessions. The relatives, with whom he had a rapport, became strangers to him. He could not tolerate any one. His wife, who attracted him at the time of marriage, did not attract him any more. In fact, he forgot that he was a married man : “What would he do with her? He had forgotten he had a wife”. (166)

Nimi, on the other hand, during all these past five years remembered her bicycle ride with her husband as the happiest moment of her marital life :

All these past five years Nimi had remembered their bicycle ride and her levitating heart-how lovely she must have appeared to him. … He had found her desirable and she was willing to appreciate anyone who would think so. (166)

Nimi rummaged in the toilet case that Jemubhai had brought back from Cambridge, picked up his powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse and powdered her breasts : “She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed”. (166)

Jemubhai raised much hue and cry over his ‘stolen’ powder puff and then he realized where it was : “You filth!” he shouted and, from between her sad breasts, pulled forth, like a ridiculous flower, or else a bursting ruined heart - His dandy puff.” (168)

Hearing the scuffle inside the room, Jemubhai’s family members began to giggle and nod is satisfaction : “Break the bed” . . . “Now she will settle down,” said another medicine voiced hag. “That girl has too much spirit.” (168-169) Inside the room specially vacated for the purpose, Jemubhai finally pinned her down. This is how Jemubhai’s first sexual encounter with his wife, Nimi, is described :

Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury-penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of-he stuffed his way ungracefully into her. (169)

Nimi’s tale of humiliation, injustice, abuses, violence and battered life commenced within those four walls on that day itself.

Jemubhai Patel, no doubt, was an Indian and lived in India but his habits and his demeanour became more of a foreign nature because of his sojourn in the foreign land. He did not find any interest in his simple, docile Indian wife:

He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty, dismissed it. Once it had been a terrifying beckoning thing that had made his heart turn to water, but now it seemed beside the point. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one (168).

In public, he never “spoke to or looked in her direction”. (170). He took his wife to Bonda, the place of his first posting in India, but now she was only a means for the satisfaction of his sexual desires. In her husband’s eyes, Nimi was completely inadequate, fully inconsequential and totally incompetent. So he did not let her accompany him anywhere and she stayed alone. Nimi was a simple, illiterate girl born and brought up behind curtains. Jemubhai wanted his wife to be an English speaking well to do lady, so he arranged a tutor for her. Nimi was too simple to learn English and other worldly ways. She could not stand on equal terms with her husband. These things irritated Jemubhai Patel to such an extent that he behaved most brutally towards Nimi. The judge beat his wife and never allowed her go out of the house. Angered by Nimi’s inability to learn English, he resolved that she was unfit to be his wife :

Nimi learned no English, and it was out of stubbornness, the judge thought.

“What is this?” he questioned her angrily, holding aloft a pear . . .

“What is this?” he asked holding up the bread roll.

Silence.

“If you can’t say the word, you can’t eat it” . . .

He snatched the Ovaltine from her tentative sipping: “And if you don’t like it, don’t drink it.” (170-171).

He found faults with her dressing sense : “Take those absurd trinkets off,” he instructed her, riled by the tinkle-tonk of her bangles . . . Why do you have to dress in such a gaudy manner? Yellow and pink? Are you mad?” (172).

Nimi was left to sit alone in Bonda. Before marriage “she had spent nineteen years within the confines of her father’s compound” (171) and now she felt “uncared for, her freedom useless, her husband disregarded his duty” (171). Nimi had fallen out of life altogether leading a sequestered, lonely life full of silence and solitude :

Weeks went by and she spoke to nobody . . . when he found his wife rudely contradicting his ambition-his irritation was too much to bear. Even her expressions annoyed him . . . What would he do with her? She without enterprise, unable to entertain herself, made of nothing, yet with a disruptive presence . . . (172).

Jemubhai was obsessed with the English, their behaviour and their culture. Once, on finding his wife squatting on the toilet seat, he got so enraged that he gave her head a ducking in the toilet bowl itself. Nimi’s sensitive nature, loneliness and lack of love became the bane and burden of her lacerated psyche. Gradually, Nimi’s unending misery turned her invalid :

Nimi, made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. She peered out at the world but could not focus on it, never went to the mirror, because she couldn’t see herself in it, and anyway she couldn’t bear to spend a moment in dressing and combing, activities that were only for the happy and the loved. (173)

Matters reach a point of no return when Nimi accompanied a group of women who were going to welcome Pt. Nehru. In those colonial times this action of Nimi, though undertaken in ignorance, resulted in the refusal of promotion for Jemubhai. That day Jemubhai was at his worst in the treatment of his wife. He held a sort of court hurling several questions at Nimi :

He counted on the fingers of his free hand:

1. “Are you just a country bumpkin? “

Pause.

2. “Are you a liar?”

Pause.

3. “Are you playing foolish female games?”

Pause.

4. “Are you trying deliberately to make me angry?”

Long long pause.

Then, a venomous spat-out sentence:

5. “Or are you just incredibly stupid?”

When she said nothing, he waited.

“Which of the above? We are not ending this conversation until you reply.”

Longer wait.

“Which? Are you bloody stupid, I ask you?!”

Silence.

“Well, I will have to conclude that it is all of the above. Is it all of the above??” (304)

However, to his utter surprise and for the first time in his married life he got a defiant reply from his wife : “To his amazed ears and her own shocked ears, as if waking up to a moment of clarity before death, she said: “You are the one who is stupid.” (304)

For the first time the judge physically hit his wife though he had wanted to do so before too on several occasions but had checked himself :

He emptied his glass on her head, sent a jug of water swinging into the face he no longer found beautiful, filled her ears with leaping soda water. Then, when this wasn’t enough to assuage his rage, he hammered down with his fists, raising his arms to bring them down on her again and again, rhythmically, until his own hands were exhausted and his shoulders next day were strained sore as if from chopping wood. He even limped a bit, his leg hurting from kicking her. “Stupid bitch, dirty bitch!” The more he swore, the harder he found he could hit. (304-305)

Thereafter, this became a routine affair and Nimi succumbed pathetically before a violent husband. She was utterly helpless :

The anger, once released, like a genie from a bottle, could never again be curtailed. The quieter she was, the louder he shouted, and if she protested, it was worse. She soon realized that whatever she did or didn’t do, the outcome was much the same. 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. (305)

Thereafter, Jemubhai sent her away for good forgetting, among other things, that it was his marriage to Nimi and the money he got as dowry as a result of this marriage that he was able to make ends meet and sail away to England in order to fulfil his and his family’s dream of becoming an ICS officer :

He could bear her face no longer, bought her a ticket, and returned her to Gujarat.

“I can’t go,” Nimi said, waking from her stupor. She could take it for herself - in fact it would be like a balm, a dark place to hide herself - but for her family - well, the thought of their shame on her behalf was too much to bear.

“If I don’t send you back,” he had said to her at this point, in a tone almost kind, “I will kill you. And I don’t want to be blamed for such a crime, so you have to go.” (305).

Perhaps he did not know that Nimi was pregnant at that time. Deserted and disowned by her husband, Nimi’s condition was most pathetic. The doors of her parental house were closed for her. Following the death of her father, the house was owned by Nimi’s uncle :

The uncle turned his niece from the door. “You are your husband’s responsibility,” he said angrily. “Go back. Your father gave a dowry when you married-you got your share and it is not for daughters to come claiming anything thereafter. If you have made your husband angry, go ask for forgiveness.” (306)

Thereafter, Nimi lived the rest of her life with a sister and a brother-in-law who “resented every bite that entered Nimi’s mouth”. (306) Nimi later gave birth to a girl child. Jemubhai used his wife, abused her and finally discarded her. He had been rude and extremely cruel towards his meek, submissive and docile wife who suffered mutely and perished miserably in the end.

As regards the relationship between husband and wife which is considered to be a primary type of relationship that demands life long devotion of each partner towards the other, the judge fails completely. He ill treats his wife and ultimately disowns her completely. In Indian social set up, marriage is considered a sacred institution that “denotes those unequivocally sanctioned unions which persist beyond sexual satisfaction and thus come to understand family life” (Lowie 146). The judge, however, shows a complete disregard towards the sanctity of this institution. Nimi is neither educated nor economically independent. Her ‘self’ is submerged under the expectations of her husband who is her lord and master. One gets an occasional glimpse of it, only to see it thwarted, subjugated, totally crushed and made into a non-entity by Jemubhai, her husband. The way Jemubhai has sex with his wife can only be described as rape legitimized.

Nimi’s defiance of her husband by a single comment -“You are the one who is stupid” (304) - shows her ability to evaluate and assess things even in her muddled condition. It shows a spark of her persona, the embers of her personality which were unfortunately lost in the male dominated, phallocentric set up. The birth of her daughter, her status as a dependent, a parasite, and ‘her death by fire’ put her in the category of countless, nameless, and faceless, married Indian women victimized every year. Nimi led a humiliating life but did not request, beg, or grovel at her husband’s feet to accept her again. The life of ignominy was better than ‘death in life’ every moment with him. Towards the end of the novel, Jemubhai wondered “if he had killed his wife for the sake of false ideals. Stolen her dignity, shamed his family, shamed hers, turned her into the embodiment of their humiliation”. (308)

The three stages of the progress of woman’s ‘subculture’, according to Elaine Showalter, the well known feminist critic, are ‘feminine’, ‘feminist’ and ‘female’. These can be understood as ‘imitative, ‘reactive’ and ‘self-fulfilled’ respectively. She also talks of these three stages as ‘muted’, ‘eloquent’ and ‘articulate’. If classified along these lines, Nimi would fall in the first category i.e., the muted.

However, all the major female characters in The Inheritance of Loss can, by and large, be classified under the third category i.e., articulate. In many a case, the marginalized woman’s struggle cannot be dubbed as full blown feminism but can surely be conceived as feminist consciousness. The patriarchal establishment has long assumed that a woman is just a physical entity deprived of ‘thought’ which is considered to be the prerogative of the male. A number of female characters in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, however, not only think for themselves but also lead the kind of life they want to. They make an effort at different stages of their lives to define themselves.

Sai, Jemubhai’s granddaughter, is a teenager when the action of the novel takes place. Due to the sudden demise of her parents in an accident in Moscow, Sai, who had been studying in a convent school is removed from there and is given shelter by her maternal grandfather, Jemubhai, a retired judge who is leading the life of a recluse in Kalimpong. Noni, whom Sai’s grandfather engages as her tutor, finds Sai “far older in some ways” (66) and “far younger in some” (66). She explains this contradiction in Sai in the following words :

Younger, no doubt, because she’d lived such a sheltered life and older, no doubt, because she spent all her time with retired people. She might always look like this, girlish even when she was old, old even when she was young. (66)

In the company and influence of Noni and Lola, Sai grows into an emancipated young woman. Books too are an early influence on her. She reads enthusiastically and this stimulates her thinking and her imagination. Her teacher, Noni, is another formative influence on her. Noni tells Sai how, when young, she used to dream of becoming an archaeologist but as her parents were old-fashioned, they did not understand her desire :

“Listen to me, “Noni told Sai, “if you get a chance in life, take it. Look at me, I should have thought about the future when I was young. Instead, only when it was too late did I realize what I should have done long ago. I used to dream about becoming an archaeologist. I’d go to the British Council and look at the books on King Tutankhamen … But my parents were not the kind to understand, you know, my father was the old-fashioned type, a man brought up and educated only to give orders … You must do it on your own, Sai.” (69)

Sai gets proper guidance from Noni to move ahead in life disregarding the strenuous circumstances. Sai would have to break the shackles of adult restrictions and go ahead with her dreams and aspirations to materialize them and make her life successful by creating a remarkable niche for herself in society :

She remembered her parents, her father’s hope of space travel. She studied the photographs taken via satellite of a storm blowing a red cloud off the sun’s surface, felt a terrible desire for the father she did not know, and imagined that she, too, must surely have within her the same urge for something beyond the ordinary. (69)

Absence of love, affection and craving for attachment take her closer to Gyan, her mathematics tutor, and make her cling on to him for support. Gyan entered into Sai’s life when the latter was sixteen and Noni suddenly discovered that she was unable to teach Sai physics and mathematics. Gyan was then appointed as Sai’s mathematics and physics teacher. Ever since Sai had come to Kalimpong, elderly crowd consisting of Lola, Noni, Uncle Potty and Father Booty, the judge and the cook had surrounded her. Gyan, being of the same age group as Sai, was a pleasant change for her. His pleasant demeanor made Sai believe that there was brighter side to life and other things worthy to live for :

“Him?” asked Sai. How had she looked? she was thinking. How had she appeared to the tutor? The tutor himself had the aspect, she thought, of intense intelligence. His eyes were serious, his voice deep, but then his lips were too plump to have such a serious expression, and his hair was curly and stood up in a way that made him look comic. This seriousness combined with the comic she found compelling. (73)

After Gyan’s arrival in her life, Sai has new feelings about herself for the first time. All the emotions, feelings and imaginations of adolescent life suddenly overpower her. Suddenly she “had felt so acutely aware of herself.” (74). That night Sai surveyed herself in the minor and became conscious of her appearance with a vague yearning to attract Gyan towards her :

She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility. She stuck her tongue out at herself and rolled her eyes, then smiled beguilingly. She transformed her expression from demon to queen. When she brushed her teeth, she noticed her breasts jiggle like two jellies being rushed to the table. She lowered her mouth to taste the flesh and found it both firm and yielding. This plumpness jiggliness firmness softness, all coupled together in an unlikely manner, must surely give her a certain amount of bartering power? (74)

Till then Sai had been living in the company of two bandy-legged men and felt if she continued living so her “beauty, so brief she could barely hold it steady, would fade and expire, unsung, unrescued, and unrescuable”. (74). She now felt determined “to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed.” (74). Sai suddenly found herself obsessed with her own face :

But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer. (74)

Sai suddenly begins to understand love and is curious to know about the love affairs of others. She inquires the cook about the judge and his wife. She presents herself in all her glory before Gyan. Gyan, a young man of twenty, is also attracted towards her :

Her eyes, he noted, were extraordinarily glamorous: huge, wet, full of theater, capturing all the light in the room . . .

With the palm of his hand, he cupped her head….

“Is it flat or is it curved?”

With an unsteady finger, he embarked on the arch of an eyebrow. …

“Oooph,” she said. She couldn’t stand a moment longer, that peppery feeling of being traced by another’s finger and all that green romance burgeoning forth. Wiping her face bluntly with her hands, she shook out her kimono, as if to rid the evening of this trembling delicacy. (115-116)

Gradually, Sai-Gyan relationship blooms in an uninhibited manner :

Gyan and Sai. At subsequent pauses in the rain they measured ears, shoulders, and the span of their rib cages.

Collar bones, eyelashes, and chins.

Knees, heels, arch of the feet.

Flexibility of fingers and toes.

Cheekbones, necks, muscles of the upper arm, the small complexities of the hinge bones.

The green and purple of their veins. (124)

Their romance flourishes even when trouble has started in Kalimpong :

Up the bones of the spine. .

Stomach and belly button—

“Kiss me! “he pleaded.

“No,” she said, delighted and terrified . . .

Moments clocked by precisely, and finally she couldn’t bear it—she closed her eyes and felt the terrified measure of his lips on hers, trying to match one shape with the other. (125)

They crave for each other’s company and their relationship attains new levels of intimacy :

Just a week or two later, they were shameless as beggars, pleading for more.

“Nose?” He kissed it.

“Eyes?” Eyes.

“Ears?” Ears.

“Cheek?” Cheek.

Fingers.” One, two, three, four, five.

“The other hand, please.” Ten kisses.

“Toes?”

They linked word, object, and affection in a recovery of childhood, a confirmation of wholeness, as at the beginning-

Arms legs heart-

All their parts, they reassured each other, were where they should be. (125-126).

Sai and Gyan become completely engrossed in love :

When they would finally attempt to rise from those indolent afternoons they spent together, Gyan and Sai would have melted into each other like pats of butter-how difficult it was to cool and compose themselves back into their individual beings. (129)

They use nicknames for each other with Gyan calling Sai his “momo” (140) and “Kishmish” (140) and Sai addressing Gyan as her “Kaju” (140) :

Ah, dumpling stage of love-it had set them off on a tumble of endearments and nicknames. They thought of them in quiet moments and placed them before each other like gifts. The momo, mutton in dough, one thing plump and cozy within the other-it connoted protection, affection. (140)

Sai goes on excursions with Gyan and visits almost each and every place of Darjeeling and other picnic spots. However, Sai-Gyan relationship is complicated due to the Gorkha unrest. Somehow, the upsurge in Kalimpong takes Gyan in its grip. Gyan sees a procession in the market demanding Gorkhaland. He sees his friends as a part of this procession. Out of curiosity, he also joins the procession. The procession ends with the speech of a leader. The speech of the leader affects him so much that he becomes aware of the deficiencies in his life and begins to compare his poverty with the luxuries that Sai enjoys :

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk -

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement take the harshest route possible. (161)

Thus, when Neps revolt against the growing impact of the outsiders, the Bongs, with clear animosity, Gyan shifts his loyalties from Sai to the revolution. Neps considered themselves strangers in their own homeland and for this they held Bongs responsible who took away the key posts from them and subsequently they were forced to lead the lives of underdogs. The sudden change in Gyan from a docile boy into a raging young man ready to hurt Sai to soothe his seething heart hurts Sai to a great extent for she had gradually developed a genuine liking and love for Gyan : “She remembered her face in his neck, arms and legs over and under, bellies, fingers, here then there, so much so that at times she kissed him and found instead that she’d kissed herself.” (194)

When Gyan visits Sai at Cho Oyu for the last time, Sai notices that he sits at the table as if in chains :

A few months ago the ardent pursuit and now he behaved as if she had chased and trapped him, tail between his legs, into a cage!

What kind of man was this? She thought. She could not believe she had loved something so despicable. Her kiss had not turned him into a prince; he had morphed into a bloody frog. (249)

Sai feels utterly annoyed at this behaviour of Gyan and boldly confronts him :

“What kind of man are you?” she asked. “Is this any way to behave?”

“I’m confused,” he said finally, reluctantly. “I’m only human and sometimes I’m weak. Sorry. That “Sorry” unleashed a demoness of rage: “At whose expense are you weak and human! You’ll never get anywhere in life, my friend,” shouted Sai, “if this is what you think makes an excuse. A murderer could say the same and you think he would be let off the hook to hop in the spring?” (249-250).

During curfew in Kalimpong, Sai feels a great yearning for Gyan who has now deserted her. Feeling restless she keeps on waiting for Gyan with a faint hope of his return still hidden somewhere in the deep recesses of her heart:

Marooned during curfew, sick about Gyan, and sick with the desire to be desired, she still hoped for his return. She was bereft of her former skill at solitude.

She waited, read Wuthering Heights twice over, each time the potency of the writing imparting a wild animal feeling to her gut-and twice she read the last pages-still Gyan didn’t come. (250)

Sai introspects and desperately seeks to understand her own feelings :

Was her affection for Gyan just a habit? How on earth could she think of someone so much?

The more she did, the more she did, the more she did.

Summoning her strength, she spoke directly to her heart. “Oh why must you behave so badly?”

But it wouldn’t soften its stance.

There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to-everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life. (252).

As curfew is lifted in Kalimpong, Sai, in order to salvage her dignity, “started out on the undignified mission of searching for Gyan” (252). Sai confronts Gyan in his own neighbourhood and tells him boldly : “You hate me . . . for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me. You aren’t being fair.” (260). Without mincing words she tells him what she really thinks of him :

“And how grown-up are you? Too scared even to come for tuition because you know you’ve behaved nastily and you’re too much of a coward to admit it! You’re probably just sitting waiting for your mummy to arrange your marriage. Low-class family, uncultured, arranged-marriage types …. they’ll find you a silly fool to marry and you’ll be delighted all your life to have a dummy. Why not admit it, Gyan?” (261)

Feeling betrayed in love Sai screams at Gyan’s sister :

Go and tell your parents what your brother has been up to, telling me he loves me, making all kinds of promises and then sending robbers to our house. I’ll go to the police and then let’s see what happens to your family. Gyan will get his eyes pulled out, his head cut off, and then let’s see when you all come crying to beg.... Hah!” (262).

Gyan realizes that Sai “was an uninspiring person, a reflection of all the contradictions around her, a mirror that showed him himself far too clearly for comfort.” (262). Sai pursues Gyan’s brother and sister in a state of anger mixed with despair but is suddenly overcome with a feeling of shame :

Shame caught up with her. What had she done? It would be her they would laugh at, a desperate girl who had walked all this way for unrequited love. Gyan would be slapped on the back and cheered for his conquest. She would be humiliated. He had hit on the age-old trick that remade him into a hero, “the desired male”.... The more he insulted her behind her back-”Oh, that crazy girl is following me...”—the more the men would cheer, the more his status would grow at Thapa’s Canteen, the more Sai would be remade behind her back into a lunatic female, the more Gyan would fatten with pride.... She felt her own dignity departing. (262)

With shame and despair following dejection in love, comes a feeling of self-pity. As Sai walks back home she realizes that “even peasants could have love and happiness, but not her, not her . . .” (263). Alone in her room, Sai flung herself at her reflection in the mirror and wondered at her future :

What will happen to me?!

Gyan would find adulthood and purity in a quest for a homeland and she would be left forever adolescent, trapped in shameful dramatics. This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot . . . (265)

Orphaned and lonely, Sai’s situation is not an easy one, yet she faces it with dignity and poise. Caught right in the middle of an Indo-Nepali insurgency, Kalimpong descends into chaos. This experience, along with her failed romance with Gyan, helps Sai grow and understand life better. She becomes conscious of the existence of more than one point of view. Sai also realizes that it is neither possible nor desirable to be so self-centered that one fails to understand and accommodate others :

“Shame on myself . . .” she said . . . Who was she . . . she with her self-importance, her demand for happiness, yelling it at fate, at the deaf heavens, screaming for her joy to be brought forth . . . ? . . . 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. (322-323)

Sai’s last thoughts are centered on her father and his space programme and on the journeys of those around her – the judge, her grandfather, the cook and his son Biju. She drives strength from all these and comes to a better understanding of herself and her place in the world. She no longer feels embittered even towards Gyan :

She thought of her father and the space program. She thought of all the National Geographics and books she had read. Of the judge’s journey, of the cook’s journey, of Biju’s. Of the globe twirling on its axis.

And she felt a glimmer of strength. Of resolve. She must leave.

Gyan? She thought with a burst of hope. A message: I will love you after all. (323-324)

Vandana Pathak observes :

Now she had the courage to be on her own. This transformation in Sai has been depicted well in terms of space. It commenced from claustrophobic space, to bigger space, to the globe on its axis and to the horizon. This spirit, when set in contrast with her previous life (in the convent and Kalimpong), places her in the category of the millennium woman who is ready to accept challenges boldly and strives to change gender definitions, roles, and practices. Till this moment of realization, she was a puppet in the hands of destiny. Now she would be the master of her own destiny and shape it, perhaps, by treading in her father’s wake. Her self affirmation was a decision taken apropos to her will. Her odyssey, like her father, grandfather, and Biju was about to begin. (Pathak 140-141).

Lola and Noni are modem women with independent outlook. Atrocities committed by the judge to his wife, Nimi, find a contrast in the loving life of Joydeep and his wife, Lola. Joydeep had a romantic notion of living in countryside, so he sold his property in Calcutta to settle in Kalimpong where he lead a happy life in the company of his wife, Lola. However, death deprives Lola of this happiness. After the death of Joydeep, Lola lives with her sister, Noni. Both sisters live together on his pension but the insufficiency has to be met out someway for which Noni takes up the tutor’s job offered by the judge. They live by themselves in a house called Mon Ami. Both like reading and are fond of discussing the kind of subjects that the educated usually ponder over. Though both Lola and Noni are quite broad-minded, of the two, it is Noni who is more balanced and accommodating while Lola is more outspoken.

Noni lived with her sister Lola in a rose-coloured cottage named Mon Ami. Lola was a widow. Her husband Joydeep had died of a heart attack and she lived on his pension. Her sister Noni was a spinster. She moved in to be with her widowed sister and to contribute her share in finances, she agreed to tutor Sai. They felt very sorry for Sai and really loved and cared for her. They considered Sai as the “orphan child of India’s failing romance with the Soviets”. (p.42) They were quite shaken by the news of a theft at the judge’s home and considered their home vulnerable. Their watchman, Budhoo, was too old and a Nepalese and so he could not be trusted. Like the judge’s Mutt, they had a pet cat called Mustafa. Both the sisters were Anglophiles. They listened to BBC News and on their black and white TV watched To the Manor Born or Yes, Minister. They cultivated broccoli on Mon Ami with seeds procured in England. Their orchard provided them with pears for stewed pears and for making wine. Their washing line boasted of Marks and Spencer lingerie.On the door was hung a thangkha of demon. There were “Tibetan choksee tables painted in jade and flame colours piled with books.” (p.44) There was a volume of paintings by Nicholas Roerich, Salim Ali’s guide to birds and entire work of Jane Austen. The dining room cabinet was of Wedgwood and a jam bottle was kept on the side board. The sisters were living symbols of acculturation.

Lola’s only daughter Pixie (Piyali Banerjee) was a BBC reporter and lived in England. Lola was very proud of her daughter and always thought of England. Noni was a stranger to love. She was able to identify with young Sai and so liked her. She was sent to a mean spirited school where she remained invisible or went underground. She recovered her confidence late. By then, life had passed by being fast paced. Her father too was a patriarch. He was an old fashioned man who was brought up and educated to issue orders. Her parents could not understand her.

Due to the insurgency movement, life had become difficult for the sisters. To solve the land grab problem, Lola used feminine wiles and helplessness of a female all alone in a malicious world. In spite of her age and widowed status, she was sexually abused. The phallocentric Pradhan humiliated her as a ‘commodity’ so much that she was mortified and scandalized.

Another woman, Mrs. Sen, who is looked down upon by these two sisters because she is not as well educated as they are, often voices her opinions on topics that are being discussed by Lola and Noni. Though her opinions are quite crude, yet she is a woman who, in spite of her drawbacks, manages to have her own voice. Mrs. Sen’s daughter, Mun Mun, of whom she is very proud, manages to get a job with the CNN and lives in America.

The judge’s daughter and Sai’s mother is another important character of the novel. She had spent her life in a hostel. The judge paid for her upkeep but never visited her. As a college student in Delhi, she had fallen in love with Mr. Mistry. Before one year was over, Mr. Mistry proposed marriage and she accepted it because, “this romance had allowed her to escape the sadness of her past and the tediousness of current girlish life. There was a time when everyone wishes to be an adult, and she said yes.” (26) On her elopement, the family in Gujarat felt disgraced and disowned her. She had to accompany her husband to Moscow and so kept her daughter, Sai, in the same hostel where she had grown up. Her contact with her daughter was restricted to letters and providing bank drafts for her education. Unfortunately at Moscow, both the husband and the wife were crushed to death under the wheels of a local bus, severing their contact with the daughter and the world. Her father had found her useless and absurd. Kiran Desai sheds valuable light on the father-daughter relationship and an insight into the father’s psyche :

He had condemned the girl to convent boarding schools, relieved when she reached a new height of uselessness and absurdity by eloping with a man who had grown up in an orphanage. Not even the relatives expected him to pay any attention to her again. (308).

Mrs. Mistry, Sai’s mother, is a woman who emerges as a person capable of making independent decisions. Jemubhai had greatly neglected his daughter and sent her away to boarding convent school. She meets, elopes with and marries a successful young Zoroastrian brought up in an orphanage. Though she is a Hindu, she has no qualms marrying a Zoroastrian. This can be interpreted as a secular and emancipated outlook.

The mother of the judge was a typical housewife. She was quite distraught at the time of bidding farewell to her son “because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of goodbye and the briefness of the last moment.” (36) She was upset that her frail son would never get her special choorva in England and was afraid of his catching a cold. She had knit a sweater for him “in a pattern fanciful enough to express the extravagance of her affection”. (36). She had given him a decorated coconut as an offering to be tossed into the waves. Being a typical mother and due to lack of experience, she had given him “lump of pickle wrapped in a bundle of puris; onions, green chilies and salt in a twist of newspaper” (37) and a banana. She knew her son’s shy, inhibitive nature well but “in her attempt to cancel one humiliation she had only succeeded in adding another.” (38) Neither was she consulted in the choice of a suitable bride for her son nor was she taken to Mumbai to see him off. These facts throw light on her status in the family.

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a gynocentirc text. The gynocentric identifies an essential struggle towards ‘self realization’ or ‘selfhood’ both of the author and the character she creates embedded within the text. Mary Eagleton elucidating the concept of “gynocriticism” comments :

There is an objective reality which the author apprehends and describes truthfully in the text; the reader appreciates the validity of the text and relates it to her own life. In this paradigm, author, character, and reader can unite in an exploration of what it means to be female-they can even assert a collective identity as “we women” and the reader is gratified by having her anger, experience of hopes confirmed by the author and narrative. (Eagleton 9).

Kiran Desai, in The Inheritance of Loss, has depicted many female characters. These women characters have been relegated to the same stock stereotypical positions women have always played from an essentialist male point of view. These female characters are products of culture and belong to all strata of the society such as rich, poor, and elitist housewives, widows, spinsters or virgins. Kiran Desai, like her mother, reveals the inner landscape of her characters, and she acquaints the readers with their desires, love, fate, and longings. She infuses in her readers’ mind sympathy for each of the characters by imparting to them a distinct individuality. In the novel, there are representative female characters that have settled in India and abroad. All of them together depict a picture of heterogeneous feminine identity in the text.

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is about globalization, economic inequality, fundamentalism, insurgency, and terrorist violence, immigrant life, postcolonial Indian life, changing seasons of nature, and human mind, etc. Yet it deals with basic human emotions like love and hate, jealousy, conflict and struggle, marriage, adjustments, sex, and physical abuse.

The female characterization, in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, throws light upon the hierarchical structure of power levels in an androcentric society. The multiple female characters analyze the tenor of human relationships on the basis of caste, class, gender, race, and other social institutions. Female characters in The Inheritance of Loss are unable to cope up with life and its eventualities, and seem a little shaken. In the novel, masculine virtues are valorized yet the relationships are maintained and nurtured by females.

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