Karen Desai: The Inheritance of Loss.

The Inheritance of Loss explores issues of cultural displacement in a Darjeeling community suddenly overrun with Nepalese revolutionaries. In it, Desai toys with her readers’ sympathies. This is a plus for me. I enjoy books without clear villains because this seems more like how real life is—issues are complex, and even people who seem to be on the wrong side of the debate usually don’t mean to be hurtful. So perhaps the greatest triumph of The Inheritance of Loss is the fact that the reader is made to feel conflicted about the revolutionaries in a way that helps us identify with our young protagonist, Sai, and her bumpy romance Ghorkaland fighter Gyan.

        To be clear, there is a distinctive antagonistic force in the book. As Edward Said states in Culture and Imperialism, “…imperialism lingers, as we shall see, where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in a specific political ideological, economic, and social practices” (9). The remnants of British Imperialism seem to lurk like ghosts around every corner of the book’s setting. This haunting presence is perhaps never better illustrated than when Sai absentmindedly picks up The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette, a book so unapologetically bigoted that she is overcome with a desire to find the author’s decedents and “stab the life out of them” (218).  This is a significant moment because it also illustrates Sai grappling with the questions of privilege and innocence that have already come to so entangle the reader by this point in the book. Children shouldn’t pay for their parents’ crimes, Sai reminds herself, “But should the child, therefore, also enjoy the father’s illicit gain?”

There is a sense of right and wrong in the book, but it is depicted in terms of a generations-long battle that is greater than any single individual. Although it is not quite, as the judge’s father thinks, that “by the time a case of a stolen cow arrived at court, centuries of arguments had occurred between warring families, so many convolutions…that there was no right or wrong anymore” (65), Desai does concede the daunting enormity of straightening things out. For example, as readers, we sympathize with Lola and Noni when the rebels invade their home, and Desai affirms this sympathy, but also indicates that the characters are caught up in something so much larger. “…Lola and Noni were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others, over many generations” (266).