An Inheritance of Small Things

When i put down Kiran Desai's Booker prize winning 'The Inheritance of Loss' (last years booker winner) a strange sense of deja vu hit me. My mind went back to the last booker prize winning Indian author whose book i had read, namely, the God of Small Things (which won the booker in 1997). I wonder what it is about Indian booker winners and amazingly sad narratives. While the God of Small Things was set in a picteresque Kerala backdrop and an orthodox Christian family, Inheritance is set in Eastern India in a small village called Kalimpong. The main characters here are an old, embittered judge, who just seems to want to hide away from the world at his home at the bottom of the hill. The judge is revisited frequently by visions of his past, as a student in England, where, as a result of his low self esteem, he withdraws deeper and deeper into a shell, and virtually turns into a monster on return to India and his young wife. At his doorstep one day, arrives his grand daughter, Sai. Fate thrust her into his home, when her parents die in Russia, and she has to leave the boarding school she was staying at. Also in the narrative is the cook who has been with the judge for a long while. The narrative keeps switching between Kalimpong and the USA, where Biju, the cooks son, is struggling as an illegal immigrant to finally get himself a green card.

As i mentioned before, the book reminded me in certain ways of Arundhati Roy's modern classic. The unbearably sad family living out their almost invisible existence with little to look forward to. Inheritance also provides a backdrop to show a Gorkha uprising in the hills, which lead to a lot of bloodshed and violence. And Sai is personally and deeply affected by this. The man she had come to love, Gyan, her tutor, ends up joining the uprising and forsakes her. The climax may seem a bit abrupt for some, but for me, complemented the unbearable sadness pervading the whole book and its tone.

Not one of my favorites, but definitely worth a read...