Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006)

Author and Production History

• Kiran Desai

Publishing History

• First published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton in 2006

Plot Summary

• One: February 1986. Kalimpong, northeastern Himalayas. The judge plays chess, watches his female dog called Mutt and waits for his tea, while the cook tries to find something to serve it with, and the seventeen-year-old Sai awaits a mathematics tutor called Gyan with whom she has had one-year-long love affair. They are robbed and humiliated by a juvenile Nepalese guerrilla gang.
• Two: Unwilling, the cook has reported the robbery in the judge’s name. The police arrive and investigate unenthusiastically, noticing the downfall of the judge’s once wealthy home and his servant’s poverty. The cook’s wife died seventeen years ago, his only son, Biju, works as a waiter in the US. The cook tells his dramatic story of the snake incident.
• Three: Biju’s experiences at a fast food restaurant in the US, selling hot dogs with a fellow server, Romy. Being nineteen and feeling too young and disgusted by the sheer thought about the Dominican prostitutes, he is the only worker who does not attend a nearby brothel. The manager’s name is Frank – ironic for someone selling frankfurters.
• Four: The cook is humiliated by the police for his poverty and low social standing. Sai feels embarrassed and tries to make her friend feel better but only succeeds in making the situation even more uncomfortable, the gap between even more visible. The cook has great expectation as to his son’s, and thus his own, future.
• Five: Biju changes jobs often and has difficulties assimilating the multicultural world in New York, which is divided into a first-class and a second-class clientele. When he meets a Pakistani co-worker, he is almost glad. At least he knows what to expect from him: well-known reciprocated hostility.
• Six: The cook closes the gates, fearing the local thief, Gobbo, and talks to Sai about her background. Sai’s parents married against their families’ will and emigrated from India to Russia, where Mr. Mistry was promised to become a space pilot, leaving their six-year-old daughter at St. Augustine’s nuns’ convent. The Mistrys are run over by a bus and leave their orphan child in the care of the nuns and now her grandfather, Justice Jemubhai Patel, who had moved into Cho Oyu, a house built by a Scotsman. Sai had a hard time at the convent where she befriended Arlene Macedo and learned to distinguish between Englishness and Indian culture, as well as a certain fascination with sin.
• Seven: Sai arrives at her grandfather’s house at the age of nine. She finds her only relative assimilating a lizard and his dog Mutton a film star. The judge is bossy towards the cook and not thrilled by the presence of his granddaughter. As he cannot afford a convent school education and does not want to send her to a government school, the judge hires a tutor for Sai.
• Eight: The judge is disturbed by Sai’s arrival and cannot sleep. He remembers his first journey to England, the ashamed parting from his parents, the stay at Mr and Mrs Price’s and his loneliness in Cambridge. In the morning, he tells Sai of her tutor: Noni (Nonita), an elder spinster who lives with her widowed sister Lola (Lolita). The cook shows Sai around in the neighbourhood: Uncle Potty, their nearest neighbour, a farmer and a drunk; Father Booty; two Afghan princesses living with Nehu; Mrs. Sen, whose daughter Mun Mun left for America and the two sisters, who feel contempt towards the Russian-Indian relations but nevertheless develop sympathy for Sai.
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Language and Style

• Indian idioms:
• Onomatopoeia:

Topics

• religion, faith, superstition:

Intertext

• Katherine Mansfield, The Voyage (1922) : a young orphan girl travels to live with her grandfather, not knowing what expects her, others commanding her fate (39-42)