Memories of rain, by Sunetra Gupta (1993) is a dark jewel of a book, a sombre and dense memorial stone made of darkness and yearning, frustration and anger. We are inside a sort of cenotaph: a young Bengali woman’s stream of consciousness and we never get a chance to hear anything else than her voice and the poetry which often resounds in the vault. It’s gloomy in a sense, but the prose is so dense and palpable that – as an unborn child waiting for birth - one is lulled and fed by its rhythm and texture. Sometimes you gasp for breath, but then, as opposed to the narrator, you can lay down the book and return to it later! I have to say that I have had trouble finishing the 200p novel: it isn’t long, but so little happens that one is at first unsettled and has to adapt. In fact everything has already happened, and what we read is the tremendous impact of what has happened.

She’s called Moni, and one day, during the Calcutta monsoon, Anthony, a drenched young Englishman, her brother’s friend, enters her house and life, and gets caught by her heavy aura of darkness. Like a satellite he is held prisoner by the gravitational pull of a dark star he hadn’t seen as he was cruising by. They marry, and she’s flown away to Bristol, England, where a short-lived period of agonized lust takes place, an Moni, keeping company to her dull mother-in-law, waits every day for Anthony to return from London. She bears a child, but soon their relationship deteriorates, and Anthony meets with Anna, a poet’s daughter and physically Moni’s contrary. The passion which starts between Anthony and Anna is the story’s main event. Moni now revolves around the two bright stars in a desperate orb of darkness and frustration. What she feels and thinks about while suffering because of them is the substance of the book.

Moni’s tragedy is that she’s a doomed woman, engulfed in a destiny of resignation and self-abasement; she cannot shout out, she cannot rebel and plead; she’s made to accept from the start, to resign herself to whatever happens to her, and we as readers watch as disconsolately what she is unable to change as much in front of her as within her, in the sediments of feminine behaviour that she’s made of. Here’s an extract from the book:

She will steal away like a sorry child, without dignity, she cannot confront him, the language of their love was silence, but now the space between them is dull with forgotten emotion, she cannot use silence to convey her pain, they stand upon Parliament Hill, the child unravelling her kite, Anna’s hair shimmering like a net upon the morning wind, the smoky profile of the city stretches out in the distance, she is still a stranger to this land, she watches the dark lust upon his eyes as they twist about in the sea of pale gold that blows upon his face, her hair, she reaches out for his trembling hand, he looks round in surprise, she has not reached for him in many years, she takes his quivering hand in hers, she will know the depth of his desire, she will feel the keenness of his lust, she will intercept the waves of passion that roll towards the emerald eyes, she must remember how much he once loved her to enjoy the prospect of leaving him, for she will not have the pleasure of his despair, she must steal away, when he would least suspect, in the few holy hours before a birthday party… (p.98-99)

This is in fact what Moni will do, this is the only action she will be capable of: slide back to her old place in her parents’ home, get back to her world, to her ring of safety and balance, where the forces that have played upon her and jolted her numb are no longer felt, where poetic oblivion can once again engulf her and soothe her like a child. Moni is as much a woman as a child; her femininity is omnipresent, her body and desires are heavy and rapturous, yet her will is childlike, strangely she can accomplish and impose nothing. In front of her husband’s desire, she submits; in front of his mistress, she submits, and all she needs is to remember, to live her feelings in the past and in song. If she had fought against her rival, God knows what would have happened. But all she can summon is that silent retreat away from him, because she knows he’s involved in an absolute of reality that she can’t even name for herself. He at least knows this absolute, even if she hates him for it. And yet, no, she doesn’t hate him. Not any more. What she feels is that numb distance, that frigid friendliness with darkness, whom she says has been her friend ever since she was little. We see her at times making strange love to this darkness, opening her body to it…

So the paradox and strange attraction at the centre of this story is  a mixture of powerlessness and intensity: she's transfixed, like the toad her brother wanted to anaesthetize and dissect, but on the other hand, it is Moni who creates, she’s the one who magnifies, who churns love into beauty, light into night, song into silence. What Anthony (and everybody else around her) has done is merely at the surface. She inhabits the immense caves of emptiness. The sombre, black-blue beauty we are washed into comes out of her only. It’s sometimes hard to see its colour, but when you do see it, Anna’s golden hair and green fairy eyes are just speckles of day which the huge Monsoon is about to swallow. Moni the dark witch, the drowned queen, the Mermaid of memory, has a power which can hurt no one, but which makes her utterly ill-adapted to the grassy playfulness of human frivolities. No wonder her prince left her to her depths. Having been caught by the spell of her moist black hair, he has quickly let go, and surfacing, has dabbled in the shiny beauty of Anna’s sunniness. She was his truth.

Not everybody will like Memories of rain. Critics say it is indebted to Virginia Woolf’s famous style of writing, but it also probably has the idiosyncrasies of the first novel that it is. Wading through it, I was wondering whether it could possibly become a movie, and I found myself answering yes, surprisingly enough, provided the director could transpose some of its thickness, some of its “glueyness”. I’m sure they are ways to recreate the feeling of hopeless imprisonment that pervades the story, along with its magnificent exploration of the realms of dark femininity. Moni could be interpreted by warm and stubborn Tabu, who has the sombre quality needed, as well as the voluptuousness; then Anthony might be any light-skinned actor, but who would have to have the intelligence and perceptiveness of a sophisticated Englishman!

Well! I’m pleased to announce that I too have escalated the Everest… Er, I mean I finally read Vikram Seth’s 1472 page novel “A suitable boy”, and that it has been a fascinating experience: thanks M. Seth! Such a length is said to be unparalleled in English literature, and indeed the length in itself is amazing. Fancy actually writing that incredibly long story, and controlling it from beginning to end. It took him seven years to complete, he said (and three to recover). Some people actually complained it strained their wrists, LOL. But there you are, if you are a lover of classic writing (some have said Austenian), if you love reading beautifully well developed prose, you’re the one for A suitable boy.

Now if you haven’t read the book and you are planning on reading it, come back when you’re through, because what I want to discuss needs looking at the plot and the narrative choices which Vikram Seth has made (so unavoidable spoilers!). But before I do that, I’ll quote what Steven Wu has written about the style, and which I find myself unable to express better:

A suitable boy is a superbly well-written book. Although I thought at first that Seth's tone was far too flippant, [our one disagreement here, I found no flippancy at all] I soon came to appreciate the simple, unpresuming, but eminently readable style that Seth adopts from the first page to the last. It's really remarkable that in over 1,300 pages of densely spaced text, Seth at no point wrote a single sentence that I found awkward, melodramatic, or out of place. Nor does Seth sacrifice content to maintain such a high quality of writing--the book includes everything from straight-up action to long brooding descriptions, from fast-paced dialogue to moody soliloquies, from lovely portrayals of India and its landmarks to involving emotional moments.

Do you know (I am now assuming my readers have now read the book. And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? What are you doing here? Aren’t you a lover of literature?) that some readers actually thought the novel was too long??? Yes, look at this:

“And it's so long. I love long books as I read fast - I generally finish a book in a few days or less, so having a substantial tome to work through is pleasant. But seriously, A suitable boy is just a beast, I have been slogging through for about 6 months now with no sign of the end.” I'm about halfway through at the moment, and am undecided whether to carry on. Who here has read it? Is it worth continuing? Does it progress beyond endlessly recounting of the minutia of the lives of its characters?” (link)

(Because on the contrary some people have “read the book for the fourth time early this year”!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Interestingly, I’m busy doing the same thing as this remarkable person: he’s also involved proving wrong another bored reader of the book! – the one with the weak wrists!)

SO: here’s the answer to the question “is the book too long for its own good?”

ANSWER: NO. The book is just amazingly readable, so it’s not too long, it’s too short, one is hankering for a sequel (1)! (This is exactly what Mystic wanderer says:

“However, patience is richly rewarded as the people and locales grow on you and upon completion, there is a longing to surmise what could possibly happen next. In other words, a wish (no, I’m not kidding) for it to be even longer.”

(OK the truth is that it is a little long. If the novel was a straightforward escapist succession of social and romantic events, yes, it would rather be filled with unnecessary material.)

But let me explain: the long bits were delicious moments of patient rapture as one the most elegant prose unfolds, and the bonus at the end of the effort (if one doesn’t skip these long passages) is that you discover they were in fact fascinating! For instance at one stage we follow Haresh the shoe-maker and the detailed procedure necessary to make a certain type of shoe: certain people might not like reading about that, but I think that this is what literature is all about: the reinvention of reality. A suitable boy is long because the reality which Vikram Seth is awake to is so full! (one might say: and India is after a [sub]continent) The book opens your eyes to the miracle of reality, which is in fact a creation. Reality is a creation, and the writer of such novels (Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy) sees that SO MUCH is happening before his very eyes. There is an incessant creation going on every second, and they have seen it. Others haven’t, they are blind to this continued creation happening before them. How, why, I don’t know, but these writers have the gift of open eyes, and they make us see it, hurray!

I think that this comes from the fact the Vikram Seth is a poet. People just don’t know what a poet is nowadays. Or let us say that so painfully few people do! Can you imagine that I’ve read people actually criticizing him for having rhymed his table of contents (Seth is also known for his rhymed novel, The Golden Gate)! Yes, that delightful bonus, that free gift to the reader, they just thought it was to show off! When I first saw this in the book, I was stunned, I was so grateful! I showed it to the people around me, and beamed at the gratuitous bonanza of bathing in that type of crazy luxury! And then you have the sheer constant virtuosity, all that poetry, eg the witty, ludicrous Kakoli couplets that some readers find so bad – ha, they’ve never tried to write poetry! Let them have a go, let them just write “silly” couplets. It takes a good poet to forge idiotic-sounding stanzas! Well, anyway, I just want to say that I was filled with the gratifying readability of the text. And it isn’t impersonal – you feel the presence of the author, in a very satisfying way, because he’s on your side, he tells you the things he knows and which characters do not know, he’s another, slightly better informed, you!
A poet Vikram Seth really is: the more I realize it, the more it explains things. It explains why so much happens in the book that doesn’t directly make the plot move forward, because he’s so preoccupied by the recreation (poihsis) of the world, in its delicate and fragrant nostalgia-feel, as well as in its fascinating technical minuteness. The inflamed speech of an angry politician, for example, offers the poet a terrain of unparalleled exploration of the language he loves, it turns him into a director of a symphonic orchestra! He can summon all the rhetoric, all the oratorical powers that exist, all the effects he likes, and recreate the rise and fall of empires through the unique power of the Word. Compared to that intoxicating experience, that of feeding the reader’s expectation with a few tidbits of romance is poor play.

Okay, so now, the story…

But, I don’t know whether I should tell you the story. You’ll find it on Mystic wanderer’s page, for example. But in fact there isn’t ONE story in A suitable boy. I’d say there are at least four: Lata’s story, Maan’s story, Haresh’s story, and Mahesh Kapoor’s story. Naturally the four are interconnected, but they are also sufficiently independent to have an interest which is completely their own, and owes little to the other three. One might add also Dipankar’s story, and that of the Nawab sahib of Baithar. Then there are some sub-plots, of course related to each of the main strands. For example Pran’s section, revolving around Brahmpur University; the events here are connected to the Lata main strand through her sister, Savita, married to Pran (the book starts by their wedding and ends with Lata’s).

In Haresh’s story, there are many sub-stories, which we follow as he goes from job to job, revealing for us the surprising realities of shoe-making in India during the post-war period. Mahesh Kapoor’s plot revolves around politics, and thanks to that strand, we discover the life of ministers and their aides, the subtle intricacies of law-making, the strategies of elections, etc. A complete historical perspective is laid out before us, Northern India in 1952. Dipankar is our guide to the religious dimension which is explored in the book (the Kumbh Mela notably), and connected to him is the Chatterji family from Calcutta, an eccentric upper middle-class of flashy beauties and idle young males, completely opposite to Haresh’s practical and matter of fact world of entrepreneurship, for example, and of course an easy target to criticize anglo-Indianness.

Maan’s strand, together with Haresh’s, was perhaps the one I most appreciated: it tells the story of this rich politician’s son, made idle by Papa’s fortune and power, and it serves as an introduction to the world of tawaifs, those courtesan-singers we’ve already spoken about several times, as well as music and singing (ghazals), urdu poetry (Mast), urdu spelling (Saaeda Bai, his enchantress, makes him learn the language), myths and legends connected to the heroes mentioned in the songs, the rise and fall of singing masters and disciples… Maan also takes us in the country (he’s banned there by reasons too long to describe), where we get to know the village people, and this spoilt brat becomes a keen observer of the folk he thought he despised. All these passages are packed with insights on country customs and stories, crowded with unforgettable characters (amazing Moazzam, spellbinding Mr. Biscuit, for instance), and, among so many other impressions, the feel of the night breeze blowing freely as the voices and noises of the village are heard to rise and fall.

Lata’s strand is naturally presented as the core of the book, probably because of its title, but also because it connects most of the actors and events. But not all! (a few examples: Meenakshi’s infidelity, Maan’s love affair, Tapan’s schooling…) Nevertheless, she’s at the center, together with her inimitable mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, an extraordinary character that you and I will from now on remember all our lives. That’s really one of the book’s particular strengths, the vividness of the characterization. I just have to open the book any page, and see a name, and immediately a complete picture springs up, not only a physical portrait, but a social background, a story with its various causes and consequences… So in fact the book is less striking for its story than for its gallery of characters (and of course its remarkable style): of course we follow what happens to them, but that’s because they’re so close to us.

A suitable boy does not have a reformist ambition; it is a social book, but there are no revolutionary ideas, no ideological denunciation. It has ironical and satirical aspects, but its main intention is descriptive and evocative. So the issue that we have at hand, the question which makes the book flower and bear fruit, is a psychological one, which borders on the aesthetic: why does Lata choose Haresh? We have of course the book’s own answers: Kabir is too passionate, indeed she herself is too passionate, and she decides that she doesn’t want passion: she wants the other type of love, the “calmer, less frantic love, which helps to grow where you were already growing…” (p.1420 – end of section 18.21). That’s what she explains to Malati, her confidente and fellow-student. She doesn’t want a love that will lift her off her feet and dispossess her of herself. “Haresh’s feet touch the ground; and he has dust, and sweat and a shadow. The other two ethereal are a bit too God-like and to be any good for me”, she says.

Now that’s an important question, believe it or not. Today passion, or romantic love, is almost always considered as a transforming force which contains its own justification. One rushes headlong into it, trusting it to contain its own value and meaning. One yearns for and relishes the head-over-heels feeling it brings. Its craziness is considered rational and its childishness a maturing process. Cool-headedness sounds strange when speaking about love. When you are “in” love, goes the popular notion, you cannot do wrong, because somehow love contains its own morality, it is oriented towards the good and it humanizes its beneficiaries. The common belief is that one becomes a better person when one loves or has loved. I realize that there is a distinction to be made between love and passion, and that only passion might be considered dangerous: but who can really distinguish love and passion? Isn’t true love a passion, a dispossession, a loss of the drop of water which is your identity into an ocean of bliss?

The 1400 pages of Vikram Seth’s book are telling us that this overriding experience at the core of human values, this love at all cost, this pot of gold, this life-fulfilling passion can and must be resisted. If the book has one message, that’s it. A writer of  Escapist literature (and the same works for a movie director) would have enabled, through some trick or other, the reunion of Kabir and Lata, which every reader needed so much to happen. But with A suitable boy we have a different outlook on passion and love. Look at this (link):   

“Upon reaching the last page, I tried carefully to analyse my own feelings, but my disappointment was inseparable from my admiration. On one hand, I detested the girl - I was seething with fury - because she had chosen a nice boy over a gorgeous boy. Why do writers do this to their characters (and to their readers, for that matter)? Why must literature echo the cold brutality of life? Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, in Pygmalion; Laurie and Jo, in Little Women; Edmund and Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo.

But here’s what this reader says next :

On the other hand, I admired Lata for being so well-grounded in reality. She was able to understand that her love for Khabir would not necessarily translate into a successful marriage, and she was also able to distinguish the man who could bring her happiness. In short, Lata chose to follow her head over her heart, and it was a decision that displayed maturity. Far too many novels romanticize reckless relationships without depicting the consequences (i.e. life after the happy - and, in many cases, abrupt - ending).

There, the lesson is learnt ! What is strange is that Vikram Seth himself says he is not completely ready to support Lata’s decision:

Miss Lata Mehra: Why did Lata marry Haresh and not Kabir... why why why...

Mr Vikram Seth: Now, now, you know better than to give the plot away for those who haven't read it yet. As for why, do you think I decided the matter? Lata decided for herself, and I'm not sure I approve of her decision. (Rediff On The NeT: Transcript of the Vikram Seth Chat)

Perhaps he didn’t want to elaborate, or appear, as a person, to be distinguished from the choices of himself as an author… But yes, so many Bollywood films (and other forms of art choosing to tell Love’s story) opt for the happy jump into the trap that nature has laid for us: charm and beauty, intoxication and wonder… But what about what comes after? Well, our civilization behaves as if it doesn’t really care, and it has equipped itself with the means to do just that, enable people to go from one love to another, and hope for the drug to work its magic each time. Lata’s frustrating choice flies in the face of romantic presuppositions, such as: “passion is the only thing worth living for”. And Vikram Seth achieves a far more original result with this choice than if he had somehow made the two predestined lovers help create the foundation for a better understanding of cross-cultural relationships. For his point about the choice of a reasonable love over a more dispossessing passion, but which is normally thought to be more fulfilling, goes aesthetically, psychologically, and anthropologically further. Even if this means upholding the traditional views of arranged marriages!

Because that is of course the risk he has run. Lata does what her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, wanted her to do, and has always thought best for her. It isn’t just a coincidence. Lata’s choice is a conscious decision that includes her mother, her family and the type of society which upholds that model. She doesn’t see herself in any future severed from her family, something the romantic orthodoxy would relish, the lovers shutting out the rest of the world, or at least finding it impossible to sacrifice their new worldview on the altar of family ties and any other interests. On the contrary, the common assumption is that traditional ties based on outdated ideas such as social and religious suitability need the groundswell renewal of experience and feelings which will bring it closer to the essence of life. And it’s up to the new generations to regenerate society in such a way. Such ideas can be read in the message of a number of Bollywood movies, which perhaps also use them to bolster their romantic choices. In short, in Desire lies Truth.

Well, Lata’s choice disproves this. Because she knows what it is to feel the burning of passion, to bask in its pleasure and its magic. She has felt the intoxication of dispossession. Lata knows how deeply this love fits who she is, what she likes, what she needs. Such a love is for her like blood in her veins. It fits her body and it fits her brain. As her friend Malati so forcefully says, Kabir and Lata are made for each other, like the two halves of the complete being they would be if she had chosen him. But she renounces him, and this really recalls the hero’s choice in Corneille’s plays. For Corneille, the hero is never more glorious than when he lifts love so high because he renounces it. But Lata (and Vikram Seth) have perhaps beaten Corneille: Lata actually chooses love, she doesn’t renounce it! She sacrifices love because it is too passionate, but embraces another more reasonable version: what a marvelous compromise to the old aesthetic dilemma! Romantic heroes in Corneille’s tragedies have to cut the strings of their heart because of their duty, and the beauty of their gesture is that they magnify tenfold the love which they renounce. Lata sacrifices Kabir and the corresponding fulfillment of her youth. But she bets on the fulfillment of her maturity, and the bonus is – who knows – that she might this way regain a love which she thought she had sacrificed. For such is love that it springs out of realities one had no idea contained it. So finally, this betting of hers (she isn’t happy with it, there is an element of uncertainty) makes her go beyond the tragedy of love seen as passion, into the reality and humanity of love understood as a gift. The love she chooses is indeed more given than received: there is more love, in a way, in her type of love.

One last word concerning what V.S. suggests as the modus operandi of Lata’s choice: she starts to give in at the moment when her sister’s baby is born. This birth acts as a confirmation of marriages or settlements which have been agreed upon by the community one belongs to. The baby is the proof that life and joy are at the heart of traditional customs which are the foundations of a given community. This comes to weigh as much, if not more, in Lata’s mind, as her love of Kabir. Then there is also Haresh’s sacrifice. The suitable boy she chooses has, like her, been forced to sacrifice a love for a girl from another religion (Simran, a sikh). This theme is shown as bringing them closer together. And then finally there’s Lata’s rejection of dispossession, which on the surface only might appear selfish and worldly. Lata doesn’t own much, but she possesses a self which is the core of her strong-willed being. She would perhaps have accepted to lose part of it if Kabir’s gate had been open for her. But it is shut, shut by the widowed mother she loves and won’t disappoint. So she now knows she will be able to keep a self she feels eminently comfortable with. She’ll be Haresh’s equal, in a rather satisfyingly feminist way, whereas as Kabir’s lover and wife she would have had to settle down for a relationship with him as a Lata she couldn’t control completely. She would have owed him a part of herself which she can now decide either to give or to keep. As it is, her choice makes a natural leader, an independent decider of her fate, and this autonomy corresponds to her personality down deep.

The movie which could be made with A suitable boy would have to be split up between several episodes, so long and dense is the story. In fact the BBC had been thinking of such a serialization, but so far it hasn’t seen the light. It wouldn’t be very difficult to pick good actors for this or that character. So let’s have a bit of fun! Could Tabu be Lata? Preity Zinta (or Vidya Balan?) and Raima Sen could be Kakoli and Meenakshi; perhaps Mann could be played by Vivek Oberoi and Kabir by Atul Kulkarni? Mahesh Kapoor could, I’m sure, be Anil Kapoor. Perhaps Haresh could be taken by Shiney Ahuja?! I think Rani Mukherji would be a good Savita, and I still need a Mrs Rupa Mehra… Let’s think… well, after all, you tell me!

(1) Perhaps you knew - but the sequel ("A suitable girl") will come, eventually! Read here!

It took me a long time to finish The Inheritance of Loss. Not only because there has been so many things to do in the past months, but also because somehow the novel didn’t correspond to what I am at ease with, a real storyline evolving around recognisable characters, or perhaps actual characters making the story move, something like that (you can also have a look at this (negative) review). Instead, the story is brought forward through a series of touches, short chapters one after the other, none having more importance than the preceding, and the more important ones almost indistinguishable among the less important. The book starts with the “attack” of the house where all the action takes place (apart from the New York location), and you would expect this event to be given its fair dramatic importance: it is because of this attack that so many things are triggered in the story. But in fact, no. Kiran Desai just describes “the boys” who upset the inhabitants’ lives with this appellation: “the boys”. True, they’re only youths, a bunch of mere 20 year olds. But that’s not the point; what happens is told as if it had to happen, as if, dramatic or not, spectacular or not, it was preordained and nothing could change it. It is this indifference that bothered me and caused me to feel a little depressed while reading. The author doesn’t take sides: she just describes, and what happens, happens, without her judgement or opinion being called into play, seemingly.

Now I wonder whether the story itself isn’t a consequence of this attitude. Up to a certain extent, the characters are static, well, a sufficient number of them at least. What interests Desai is this stillness, this entomologists’ study of characters under her control. I’m not saying they’re not alive, mind. They are very well defined, very recognisable and realistically portrayed. It’s just that they are prisoners, they’re so powerless!  Indeed, “what binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation”, says Pankaj Mishra (The New York Times Book review), and ultimately I wonder whether they aren’t as much prisoners of the author’s own vision as of their own life situations. (We will see it’s more subtle than that!)

Here’s the story, as told excellently by Mary Whipple (DesiJournal.com):

Writing with wit and perception, Desai tells the story of Sai Mistry, a young girl whose education at a convent school in India comes to an end in the mid-1980s, when she is orphaned and sent to live with her crotchety grandfather, a judge who does not want her and who offers no solace. Living in a decaying house which he no longer repairs, the grandfather considers himself a member of the aristocratic hierarchy, more British than Indian, superior to hard-working but poverty-stricken people like his cook, Nandu, whose hopes for a better life for his son are the driving force in his life.

The story of Sai, at her grandfather's house in Kalimpong, a small town in northeastern India bordering Nepal, alternates with that of Biju, the son of the cook, who is an illegal immigrant trying to find work and a better life in America. As Desai explores their aspirations, the hopes and expectations of their families, and their disconnections with their roots, she also creates vivid pictures of the friends and relatives who surround them, creating a vibrant picture of a broad cross-section of society. Uncle Potty, Sai's nearest neighbor; Father Booty, a foreigner who thinks of himself as Indian; Noni, a single woman who was once Sai's tutor, and her sister Lola, whose daughter works for the BBC; and Gyan, a young Nepalese who becomes Sai's tutor when she is in her mid-teens, are the main influences on Sai's life, providing her with her only real companionship. As the lives of all these characters also unfold in flashbacks, the reader learns of their personal struggles, their connections to a colonial past, the injustices they have suffered, and the injustices they have, in some cases, inflicted upon others. The social and political history of India is revealed subtly through the experiences of these characters.

Biju, working in a series of deadend jobs at small US restaurants, epitomizes the plight of the illegal immigrant who has no future in his own country and who must endure deplorable conditions and semi-servitude if he is to work illegally in the US. Always on the run from Immigration and often cheated by employers, Biju suffers additionally because his father, Nandu, proud that Biju is "working" in America, writes to him constantly asking him to help the children of his equally poor friends to find work in the US. Biju's friend Saeed Saeed, from Zanzibar, faces similar pressures from his family, though in his case these young men arrive at his place of work and apartment by the dozens demanding help and a place to live. His avoidance of these people provides scenes of dark humor and wit.

Sai's romance, at sixteen, with Gyan provides her with an emotional escape from Kalimpong, but it soon becomes complicated by Gyan's involvement with the Gorkha National Liberation Federation, a Nepalese independence movement which creates havoc in the community and turns neighbor against neighbor. Gyan's commitment to the insurgency offers an ironic contrast with the commitment of his family to the colonial British army in India, just as the judge's hatreds, learned in England, are ironically contrasted with his affectations of British behavior in later life.

She doesn’t tell the end of the novel, so you can still discover it for yourself: it’s a rather clever ending, in full coherence with everything else in it, and satisfies the reader well. But it’s interesting that Mary Whipple says the book is “the story of Sai Mistry”, because it isn’t. She’s only one of the characters, she’s only one of the group that interests Kiran Desai. Whole sections of the book revolve around another character, Biju, who has practically no connection with Sai at all. If the book were her story, these two would have to share a link. As readers, we have our expectations, and this is a typical expectation: we enjoy stories to be that of a central character, around which everything evolves. So much as to say, we love to identify ourselves, and we read novels with this projection of our selves in the story. I too was interested by young Sai, but sadly for me as well, she doesn’t get all the (authorial) attention one would like her to get, so to speak. For instance, we don’t know the end of her story with Gyan, who promises to get that dog for her. And anyway, as Desai writes (p.431): "Life isn't single in its purpose... or even in its direction... The simplicity of what she'd been taught wouldn't hold. Never again would she think there was but one narrative belonging only to herself, that she might create her mean little happiness and live safely within it."

The book isn’t any more the story of that old judge, nor of his cook, nor of Biju, the cook’s son, even though his story gets some sort of closure. So what is at the centre of the novel? Is it not the house? It would be a good candidate, because that’s where everything starts, where everything ends, around which everything revolves. It is the house that symbolises the colonial possessiveness which hampers progress towards an India that labours to be born. It is the house that represents the derelict state of India’s present, battling as it does between its glorious Independentist past and its future of dependence within a globalised market. “Cho Oyu”, as it is called, after the Himalayan peak (the 6^th in the world, and from the house Mount Everest’s 5 peaks can be seen – the house is the sixth, so to speak) is indeed at the centre. But the problem is that precisely it is a ruin, and if the book tells its story, and along with it, that of the people that come and go in it, then it must mean that the centre is hollow, like an old tree-trunk eaten by time and ready to crumble to dust.

The book’s title, The inheritance of loss contains a clue: normally when you lose something, you don’t inherit, precisely. Inheriting is a sign of gaining. Here and there in the novel, Kiran Desai speaks directly about loss. The first instance is right at the beginning. The young heroine has just been reading an article about squids in the National Geographic, and passes in front of herself reflected in the hall mirror where mist blurs her “smothered” picture, which she kisses as she passes:

“She 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 fulfilment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfilment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.” (p. 3)

I don’t know anything about Kiran Desai’s life, but somehow this fine description strikes me as being drawn from an experience of listless solitude and waiting for a love that doesn’t come, in spite of a hope as tall as the Himalaya. Could the book be the exploration of that solitude, that broken hope? Could writing it have helped its author to pass from that thwarted expectation to a more serene, a more encompassing welcome of what life means? Focussing on others, recreating the lives and hopes of others (Jemubhai, Biju, Gyan, Lola and Noni, even Mutt the dog!), wouldn’t that represent a soul’s efforts to people its solitude and give love anyway? From that perspective, true, Sai is at the centre of the book, and the author’s efforts to shift the centre away from her would only be another sign of that centrality… Sai the giant squid, eyes open in the dark of her life, waiting for another of her tribe, and catching her tutor in one of her tentacles… I must say I like that! Because when that other one does come, in the shape of Gyan, Desai is as quick to undo the relationship, and leave the hole bare, where love becomes what she says: a lack, a loss, “everything around it but the emotion itself”.

Later in the book, while Sai is moping over her half-broken relationship, and she goes to see Uncle Potty, the drunkard neighbour who has perhaps a soft spot concerning her. This is what Desai writes when he sees that Sai is in love:

“He had anticipated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art, the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than a simple bovine happiness.” (p.334)

I suppose that for Desai, this expression “tapestry and art” means that the loss of love must be part of the greater picture of love, that love encompasses more than “the emotion itself”… But that’s a strange thought, isn’t it? For lovers, the emotion bowls over everything else, there is nothing outside it, love is the tapestry itself. But for somebody needing a love that hasn’t come, waiting for a fulfilment which grows with absence, we can understand that what is around, or behind, i.e. the tapestry, the weaving of meaning and stories, is perhaps more important than living the real thing. Art vs. life…

Let’s have a look now at this other narrative, the one dealing with Biju, the exiled cook’s son. Does it shed some light at what Kiran Desai is doing in this novel? Why is there such a separation between what happens to Sai and what happens to Biju? The fact that Desai has herself lived abroad (she’s anglo-Indian, I understand) could explain her interest for the expat’s ordeals, but to make a whole theme out of it: there’s something else. We said before that Desai’s characters are more or less all prisoners. Up to a certain extent, Biju’s one too, even if he manages to escape India and its colonialist frame of mind (but he insists that his father sent him, he doesn’t present it as what his freedom has achieved, unlike Saeed). In fact, they all try to escape, they’ve all had this dream to leave this trouble-laden India:

“When you go to America, take me along also”, said Tashi after he had sold the tourist trip to Sikkim.

“Yes, yes, I will take us all. Why not? That country has lots of room. It’s this country that is so crowded”.

“Do not worry, I am saving my money to buy a ticket, and how are you, how is your health?”Biju had written. One day his son would accomplish all that Sai’s parents had failed to do, all that the judge had failed to do.” (p. 114)

Biju goes to America to flee India - they all flee it somehow - and when they come back, India’s problems are still there, worse perhaps for them having not stayed. So they cling to memories of grandeur (the Raj), of freedom (America), of luxury (Europe), etc. and the tasks to undertake are burdened by these memories. The tasks to undertake are undertaken by the young and violent “boys” whom they do not understand. Something new and original is perhaps erupting there, but they do not see it. Kiran Desai has the rare gift of penetrating the complex of emotionality, identity, moral and historical reasoning that lies at the heart of this phenomenon of departure and return. This is how she expresses it:

"Immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey."(p.400)

What does Biju find in New York? Another prison, another foiled dream. And what does he bring back when he returns? Less than what he had taken away with him! Loss, here again. He’s left with what loss gives, that tapestry, a certain sense of beauty, perhaps. Well, it’s a beauty that we choose to see more than he does, presumably. But the allusion to Kanchenjunga, Mount Everest, now and then in the novel, and most prominently at the end, is revealing of this elevation towards beauty:

“The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you needed to do was to reach out and pluck it.” (p. 433)

So much for the reader: go back and read! And take your time, Kiran Desai seems to say. Even if it seems close, the mountaineer knows that what looks close might take time, a lot of time. Mount Everest was not conquered in one day.

Would The inheritance of Loss be a good choice for a movie? Sure. Even if the director would probably be tempted to romanticise it. I would love to see Konkona Sen Sharma as Sai, and perhaps Shreyas Talpade for Biju (or Rahul Bose?). I don't know if Anupam Kher would accept to play the cantankerous Jemubhai, but I'd like him to. And Gyan? Well he could be Ankur Khanna, who was not bad at all with KSS in Amu. What do you say?

PS: there's an interesting interview with Kitran Desai here on Jabberwock's site.

Mulk Raj Anand’s small fiction volume « Untouchable », which dates back to 1935, evokes the life of a young sweeper called Bakha, through the description of a day’s happenings, from the morning when, only half awake, and after a cold night (due to his love of British clothes, he despises ordinary sleeping rags), he has to rush to clean the latrines before anybody can use them, down to the evening throng that he joins in the nearby city, where a rally in support of Gandhi has been organised. In between, we follow him and his thoughts, and we are made to understand the joys and frustrations of his dalit condition. Joys, because he is a young and strong lad, whose lively and gentle nature has predisposed to the pleasures of contemplation, dreaminess, and wholesome physical exertion. But also frustration and violence, because as an untouchable, this generous human being is denied a normal social condition.

The book is not without its defects. For example it starts dealing with characters that we don’t meet later, and seem forgotten; it contains narrative styles which don’t really coalesce; and what happens to the hero is perhaps not as dramatic, given the intensity of the subject, its political and anthropological importance. But one feels interested in him; one imagines his life very easily. Bakha has a clear, individualised identity, a voice too, a soul: good characterisation. His peaceful nature is charmingly present, his angers and sorrows are painfully graphic, and Anand’s voluble and graceful style grabs you from the opening, all the way to the last section, the Gandhi rally, where somehow he loses you because of his desire to make us hear ideologists debating Indian democracy. Still, the bulk of the story centres around Bakha, and that is what I’ve been interested in. 

Anand was obviously confronted to the difficulty of a task that had not been tried a lot before him. How can one make people understand that an untouchable in Indian society is not only a human being like all others, but that the whole structure of Indian society, and the whole notion of segregating human beings, is standing on end? Such a small book (156 pages) indicates that either the challenge was too great for Anand, or that he hasn’t comprehended the full possibility of the literary task. So, as one starts reading the thin volume, one expects an explosion of denunciation and exposure that simply isn’t there. For all its good intentions, Untouchable is in fact a stepping-stone for greater works that will need it to jump deeper into the issue. Perhaps it wasn’t possible to go much further in 1935.

What I particularly appreciated is the description of the colonial situation in which we are plunged: Bakha is ironically trying to escape the alienation of his Indian condition through mimicry of the British model. He yearns after the British soldiers’ clothes, one of their hats, their style, their language which he wants so much to learn, that hockey stick which an “amazingly kind gentreman” has presented to him… In fact, Britishness is for him the way out of untouchability: not quite Gandhi’s message. That colonialism is thus (half) vindicated through a denunciation of untouchability is one of the novel’s peculiar (but no doubt historically sound) paradoxes. Perhaps for Anand, who lived in England for a long part of his life, the English version of civilisation was preferable to the Indian caste system?

Nevertheless, the story’s main interest remains the insider’s sympathy for Bakha. It isn’t enough to say that through him, the author has evoked humanity, beauty, and grace. He does that, because his young hero is so delicately portrayed, and the funny or touching anecdotes which fill his day are so humoristically connected with the more dramatic episodes. There is a very successful emotional combination of frightening and pleasing events. But through Bakha, we also see India, its splendour, its evocative mystery, and, I am tempted to say, its femininity. The rolling landscapes, the soft evening breezes, the childhood memories, even the people, in spite of their prejudices, are forgivable because they are poor and uneducated.  All this simplicity, even if it can hurt, because it is unrefined, strikes as far less scathing than other portrayals, in later, more mature books. 

One is sometimes reminded of Shylock, in Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice. Like him, Bakha is wounded in his flesh by a pollution that he cannot accept, and that he painfully has to learn to live with. Like Shylock, he could say: “Am I not human?” to all those who shout at him and treat him worse than a dog. There is a very moving scene, when Bakha brings a child to her mother, a child that has been wounded in the head by a stick during a hockey game. Before the game, he had in fact noticed that the little one wanted to join in, but the other players wouldn’t let him. And so after the (rather serious) incident, when Bakha alone takes him to his mother, fearing for him, and worried about the others’ carelessness and insensitivity, the mother grabs the child from him, and she abuses him for having “touched” it, and probably she thinks, hurt him. His love of defenceless innocence becomes a cause for shame and insult.

Anand’s call for a society where castes would no longer inflict pain on one another gains strength when we realize that Bakha’s ideas are brainstormed into submitting and justifying his own lowliness. It will not be more toilet flushes in India which will solve the problem, as E.M. Forster seems to believe, in his Introduction to the novel. Even Gandhi has been powerless to eradicate the problem. The scourge goes much deeper, to levels of animality which reside within humanity, and which some men can unfortunately convince other men to accept as their primary nature. Man is both angel and beast, and some beastly men, who need slaves to exert their greed and thirst for cruelty, and who can’t bring other beasts to cringe before them, use the angels. That is the drama of untouchability. The grace of the human body, the wonder of God’s creative powers is transformed into a poisonous spell or leprosy that disfigures it. Untouchability might seem animal-like in its deformation of human dignity, but it is fact very human. It is the animal or beastly side of humanity that expresses itself there. Anand evokes this drama, this plague of our condition, but it will take many more powerful writers, thinkers and politicians to fully denounce its essential scandal. It will take many more civilisations to change not beast into angel, but man into man. 

PS: an interesting take on the book, and a description of today's dalit situation here (thanks Banno). Here's an extract:

The book was written in 1935, but is life for the untouchables any different now? It’s obvious not, check out for yourself here.

Yes, a lot of the Dalit women can fill water from a tap now, and don’t have to wait around a well, hoping for a sympathetic upper caste person to turn up to fill their pots, like Bakha’s sister had to. But like Bakha’s sister Sohini who is mauled by the priest, the Dalit girls today too regularly have to face the threat of rape if they show the smallest signs of raising their heads.

A lot of people can get an education, unlike Bakha who even though he is willing to pay one anna per lesson to the little upper caste boy who plays hockey with them, has to beg to be taught with humility. A lot of people can get other jobs, and don’t have to continue sweeping and scavenging like Bakha, whose life revolves around the latrines. So, yes, perhaps things have changed a little. But how much?