The Paradox within Loss: Why everyone needs to read Kiran Desai's book

"Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?"

Before it won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, The Inheritance of Loss received a lot of flak from critics. Many termed it 'bleak' and 'inane', going on to explain that while the writing in itself was beautiful, the plot was disappointingly lose, and the book's ending rather anticlimactic. 

The novel hasn't received the public recognition it deserves, however, despite it being intensely, heartbreakingly human.

Kiran Desai's novel brings forth many themes, but the one that is central to the narrative is that of Loss, Fulfillment and, most of all, the yearning between the two. 

It takes more than a single reading to grasp the deeper meaning of the novel because there is no distinguishable plot. We are told about the lives of characters against the backdrop of political unrest in India, and the immigration craze in the U.S. Rather, the central theme of Loss in itself forms the plot; a running thread much like a large, shy whale diving into, and resurfacing from, the network of stories that make up the book. It was during my second reading that I began to uncover its trajectory. 

The novel revolves around a host of characters residing in the picturesque, quiet hilly region of Kalimpong, West Bengal. But this is India in the 1980s, and everything sleepy and ethereal about the place is about to change with the growing Gorkha uprising, as Sai soon finds out. 

Sai is a dreamy, blossoming young lady of 16 living with her emotionally caged grandfather and their servile cook in a house that is falling apart. In the neighbourhood, we come across the others: sisters Noni and Lola, Uncle Potty and Father Booty, the Afghan Princesses, Mrs. Sen- lives that are splashed across this novel in short streaks of anecdotes. The one hallmark present in them all is the experience of Loss. For Lola, it is her husband, Joydeep. For Noni, her career, and the possibility of a richer experience in spinsterhood. The Afghan Princesses, their kingdom, and Uncle Potty his sobriety. 

A locality of shared experiences that sounds a lot like M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, with a large amount of dark humour and breathtaking descriptions of the misty landscape. And not unlike The Village, the landscape against which the story is set, with all its natural beauty and seclusion only adds to the ache that the book brings to the reader.

But it doesn't stop there. Desai expands our focus to a national scale, where the country is experiencing its own complexity of change and yearning; India is gradually losing its utopian concent of unity, but regional cultures are finding a growing sense of Identity. 
She then zooms out further through Biju, the cook's son, to give us a world that is working its way around the larger problems of dealing with the ghosts of colonisation, migrant assimilation and globalisation poverty. 
Here is where Kiran Desai superimposes the macro and the micro- experiences of individuals become the issues of nations, global problems find utterance in local wisdom. The theme also spills over the plane of time. Biju loses his identity in an alien country only to find out that it isn't an isolated experience; Gyan's thinly veiled xenophobia isn't much different from the young judge's landlady. The passage of time becomes irrelevant as we realise that not very much has changed since the time of the judge's youth and that of Sai's with respect to the way Indians see themselves on a global scale of cultural status. 
Loss becomes the heart of the experience here, at all levels; the gradual 'Indianisation' of the U.S., the deep-seated separatist tensions in India, the cook's loss of personal dignity, Sai's loss of her parents, Father Booty's loss of his property. 

It isn't strange that Kiran Desai builds on the theme in this manner; after all, it is the one human experience that links us all as a species, and Desai uses this fact as a plot device: though the book is about divisions- cultural, societal, personal- this thread of Loss is the unifying factor in all cases- it dissipates the momentum of the separatists and breaks down the emotional barriers the judge, Sai's grandfather, has built all his life. 

But the question it raises, and tries to answer, is the one spelled out by Sai's thoughts at the beginning of the book: 

"Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself."

The entirety of Desai's novel rests on these lines, though love be supplemented with any emotion. Yearning, the book establishes, is the reality. The points between which yearning exists- Loss and Fulfillment, are mere transitions; Fulfillment being the Inheritance, or natural product of Loss. Life is largely spent between these two points, Desai points out; it never rests for long on each. Yearning or Longing is the quantum discontinuity between the two uncertain, volatile points in space-time of Loss and Fulfilment.

Biju, after all, yearns for a better life in America, lives there a while and longs for India again. It is not, as we see, the question of the two countries or the change in status that they represent that affects him, but this constant longing. Sai, similarly, only misses Gyan when they are not together; she only longs for family when she has a tiff with him. The cook's fatherly concern she finds sticky compared to the freedom young love has won her. 

It is Loss that makes us human and vulnerable, the judge realises. Mutt's absence is a catharsis not only for the judge's pent up emotions, but for Sai's and the Cook's as well, with all three of them calling out to the dog along the hillside, Sai venting her lovesick unhappiness, the Cook his anxiety over Biju. Loss becomes a synergy of shared emotion between human beings, a moment of recognition.

It also facilitates growth. Desai shows this several times over the novel. Jemubhai Patel- the young judge- doesn't experience any emotional development because he has barred himself to the experience of losing any aspect of his life. He fears Loss, fears change. Sai's acceptance of how much time she has wasted- on Gyan and on Cho Oyu- compels her to take the decision of leaving. Biju's return brings home the realisation to both father and son that homecoming and togetherness trumps any materialistic ambitions, but only for a while, for Fulfillment will soon grow into a different, new yearning.

Loss, then, becomes the driving force of our lives, pushing us forward to other experiences; towards a richer existence. It reminds us of the unrelenting passage of time, of our mortality and our common brotherhood in this life. It makes our existence meaningful, our successes sweeter and our shortcomings worthy of greatness.

That is the Inheritance it offers.

(Miss)construing: When Feminism turns Trivial

Oh, Rebecca Solnit, what have you done?

A few days  ago, I'd been eavesdropping on a conversation in a cafe. Not a wholesome habit, I know, but the profound dialogue in question was taking place at the table behind me and didn't appear to be held in a tone that suggested the speaker intended any kind of discretion.

This animated discussion was taking place between two very metropolitan-looking, smartly dressed girls in their late teens or early adulthood, and while I didn't notice this last aspect until I got up to pay my bill, I knew the voices were female as I picked up my ears when I first heard the snippets of conversation emanating from behind me. 

"I don't know why he does it", one was saying, "I told him that I thought the film was brilliant, and he brought it down so badly. It's such a fun movie."

"I know, right?!" Her friend responded, automatically. 

"We fought about it. We're always fighting these days. I told him to stop mansplaining to me about my tastes."

One table forward, I cringed when I heard it. 

And suddenly, it seems to be everywhere. On social media, in literature, on websites and on my Facebook feed, complete with the annoying hashtag. 

#mansplaining.

Most modern-day feminists are proud of this, of course. I'm not quite sure how proud author Rebecca Solnit is any longer, since she first coined the term in 2014, in her recent (and latest) book Men Explain Things to Me. 

While I haven't read the book, and therefore cannot comment on how relevant and logical the origin of this phenomenon is, I can say for sure that the movement it created turned into a sickening social malady on par with stage five cancer. 

What is Mansplaining? some would ask. A good place to begin. Google, the quickest of tools for obtaining information, defines mansplaining as (of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.

At the 2017 Jaipur Literary festival, writer and journalist Bee Rowlatt described the experience of being mansplained to as being "talked over and crushed in conversation". 

I would simply prefer to define the term as 'a terrible way to disregard an opinion, shut down rational debate and term a male acquaintance as a bigot even though he may not actually be one.'

Because that's what this term 'mansplaining' actually is. It is a term that can be thrown without justification at any man, in the midst of civil debate, just to render anything he said prior to its usage null and void. The problem with this term is that it curtails free speech, and any kind of equality in civil debate. And mind you, this is what early feminists fought fervently for- freedom of expression and equality. Today's feminism- fourth wave feminism- turns free speech on its head, lashing out against all men, and even their own sex (basically anyone who has a different opinion), terming them misogynist and anti-feminist. They disregard their views entirely and pigeonhole them as 'bigoted'.

Feminists today consider it inappropriate for a man to express his opinion on a topic they claim 'to obviously know more about'. This would include women's issues and virtually everything else under the sun. A man is dead meat dare he venture to suggest to a woman anything about her diet, job, hobbies, or even just recent developements in scientific research. They cut up his opinion, chew on it and divine some sexist flavour at its heart. Then they call it mansplaining and terminate what would be a fair, if not interesting, exchange of information. They don't seem to understand that even if they are dealing with a bigot, shutting him up won't change the way he thinks. 

But I'm rambling, and we're forgetting the main chink in this term's armour. Mansplaining isn't a gender specific term, for the most part. 

Think about it for a minute.

There have been times I've had a female teacher override me within a conversation. Being a self-confessed nerd, I've 'mansplained' to my friends quite often, and still feel rotten about it. The auntie next door dresses me down about my neglect of Hindi and fluency in the English language (a valid point, but she doesn't let me get a word in on how it happened), and I've been 'mansplained' over and over again by feminist friends, and waited patiently until I could get a word in and tell them that I knew what they were talking about, but could we please look at it this way...

Sure, there are men who mansplain, and I've come across them, too. But I haven't noticed any differences in the way that they go about it when compared to the women who do it. At the end of the day, I'd just chalk it up to a large ego- a very human trait. 

It is silly, to be honest, to target solely this term, when it is an entire movement that's souring and beginning to collapse under its own weight. Feminism has made some stupid decisions of late, and had some insane ideas- but hell, mansplaining has been about the worst. Not to mention the trivialisation of rape, with many women claiming to feel 'raped' when a man looks at her funny or even farts too loud (not kidding about this one, google it). 

As a woman who is tired with the victim complex flaunted by feminists today, I wish we would infuse the movement with a little more sense. We aren't fragile, sensitive snowflakes, and shouldn't aspire- or encourage other women and girls- to be. There are more pressing issues regarding women to be dealt with, such as rape and reproductive rights. There are countries and regions where our sisters haven't felt the tread of feminism at all. We should be focused on larger concerns. 

As for mansplaining, we need to remember that nobody is going to hand us our rights in conversation, or anywhere else in life. If you feel 'talked over and crushed', tell the person, goddammit. Open that pretty mouth of yours and tell them, 'I'm sorry, but you haven't been listening to my opinion'. Walk away if they don't let you talk, because that isn't a conversation, that's a monologue and you don't need to be an audience. 

It's time we we honour fair debate and a sensible exchange of perspectives. Reinvent feminism for equality, not whiny superiority. Get rid of #mansplaining unless you want to #missconstrue everything.

In Praise of Coffee Tables: An Introduction

The birth of the English essay, they say, occurred rather inconspicuously in the coffee houses of eighteenth-century London. Frequented by a large number of writers, doctors, politicians and merchants, issues of the day and novel ideas were discussed, creating a cauldron for intellectual debate.

Fast forward two centuries, and we have T.S. Eliot publishing his essay On Tradition and Individual Talent in 1921 which caused a stir with its call for literary depersonalisation, essentially resulting in the symbolic Death of the Author.

In these times, we have witnessed the Death of the Fact, and there hadn't been any Eliot to introduce the concept to us; it was simply shoved down our throats by our constantly evolving species and patient but overbearing Grandmother Time.We're still reeling from this realisation- that hitherto 'infallible' digital media has developed a certain kind of dubiety; that our news may not really be factual; we aren't sure if our policy decisions are just based on appeals to emotion, or concrete data and fact-based logic.Our history textbooks are suddenly sketchy, the image of the party that we support just turned strangely ambiguous.

But I digress. The burning issue at hand is not the debate over whether or not we live in a post-truth world; whether we gradually trickled into this predicament or plunged headfirst into it, or which political wing is right. 

The question we should be asking is: Where do we go from here? We've always had our doomsayers and fatalists with their refrain of catastrophe and we've always had our hotheaded brave-hearts unthinkingly hailing movements, but we also have the ones who stay rational and detached and explore these changes to see where they may lead. One cannot halt the march of history, after all.  

On a personal note, I see one hell of an opportunity in this dissonance that we're going through. 

But first, why did I mention the Coffee Houses? 

Because those coffee houses serve as a concept for our age. As open spaces for debate, expression and an exchange of ideas- as well as an incubation chamber for new ones- they pushed into society new ways of thinking, a civil, respectful approach toward debate and probable disagreement, a healthy attitude to change and an openness to consider a different perspective.

This is crucial for us now more than ever. And this post-fact environment, I believe, will provide the right momentum for all of it. 

Firstly, since we are exposed to a host of opinions, it would push one to reconsider long-held, sacrosanct personal ideals and adopt a new, different perspective. The demolishing, or challenging, of a paradigm is the first step to learning, or cementing, an opinion respectively. 

Secondly, on an important philosophical front, the zeitgeist will push us to delve into what exactly the concept of a 'fact' really is, and whether such a concept truly exists. Is truth objective in every context? Can there really exist- with all human infallibility- a sole, accurate account of an incident or event in the past? Can fact exist without emotional appeal? We would have to consider all these dilemmas before we can realign ourselves with our current existence. 

A third aspect- and the one that seems most pressing- is the awareness of the ambiguity of historical fact. Historiography, the study of the history of History itself- of how events were recorded and by whom- will need to be emphasised upon just to reveal to everyone how the historical fact died a natural death centuries ago: history was always written by the victor and exaggerated or euphemised where found convenient. Our post-fact world didn't have much of a 'fact' to it in the fist place. 

An acceptance and a willingness to work toward the best possible future is the way we should be headed.

It also doesn't hurt to have a coffee every now and again along the way, either, while brewing ideas.