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.