Nirmal Trivedi

Author in town on book tour holds mirror to globalization

By Nirmal Trivedi

Kiran Desai’s new book grapples with the underbelly of globalization forces.

Brookline, MA — In Kiran Desai’s latest novel, “The Inheritance of Loss,” two untold South Asian histories emerge with startling and often terrifying clarity. One takes place in Kalimpong, in a colonial-era villa located in the border country between Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal where a nationalist movement to establish a land for Gurkhas makes its way into the lives of ordinary people. The other begins in New York City, but not among the city’s middle-class Indians whose immigrant stories have largely formed how the diaspora is seen. In Desai’s New York, a “shadow class” of Indian restaurant workers living without legal status find themselves discovering an America less like a land of plentitude than one of unrelenting exclusion.

So when Desai, the daughter of novelist Anita Desai, came to Brookline Booksmith for a reading on March 9, she began by highlighting the poverty that still exists in the world and particularly among South Asians. Despite the many stories of financial success, this “other side of the global economy,” as she put it, is the subject of “The Inheritance of Loss.”

In holding a mirror up to the contemporary scene of globalization and its discontents, she introduces us in her novel to the character Biju, the son of an Indian cook sent to the United States to make money for himself and his family. Angry at his father for this burden, Biju realizes his anger would have been doubled had his father not sent him away in the first place.

In capturing the conflicting feelings of the immigrant, Desai tells INDIA New England she relied heavily on her own experiences. “I’ve seen a lot of cruelties with immigrants to the States with families left completely behind. It’s sometimes this desire to just be American and forget.” Desai sees the cruelties as two-fold — they affect not only the immigrants, but also their entire families. For both those at home as well as those abroad, there is a persistent feeling of exile from what one holds most dear in the process of assimilation. Desai wonders whether this phenomenon is about “immigrant shame or rather the process of where one finds dignity in life.”

Desai

Despite the sobering dimensions of Biju’s story, Desai finds her characters survive in the world through a tragic-comic sensibility. Biju encounters a great richness of experience from other immigrants, particularly those who share his feelings of dislocation and nostalgia. Explaining why people often find her books funny, Desai suggests plainly, “there’s often refuge in humor.”

Maintaining her combination of optimism and politically-engaged critique, Desai recalls the scale at which changes in the immigrant experiences are occurring. “There’s an enormous number of immigrants [who] are going through this right now and for an entire generation of immigrants, their parents are growing old. These are basically broken families.” Split between New Delhi, New York, Kentucky and wherever else her tour takes her, Desai says, “Sometimes, I think I’m most at home in my e-mail address.”

As much as the immigrant experience of growing up without a clear sense of home is the subject of Desai’s writing, so is the history of colonialism. She sees herself as telling an old story of diaspora as encompassing generations without any real beginning.

She reflects on Punjabi Sikhs who in the 19th century weren’t allowed to bring their families to California because of strict immigration laws. “Whole families were split up. It’s common of a lot of us in the diaspora.”

Paralleling Biju’s story in New York, Desai takes us to Kalimpong to witness the life of an England-educated Indian judge who gets custody of his orphaned granddaughter but cannot reconcile his immigrant experience with his present life. Like Biju, the judge grows up imagining the West as superior before even having left India.

Desai recognizes that the story of immigration and self-imposed exile affects men somewhat differently than women. Speaking about the judge’s wife, Nimi, who becomes alienated from her husband after his experience in England, Desai says, “Biju or the judge couldn’t have been women. There are many stories of men traveling abroad and find that they are unable to relate to their wives. Tagore wrote about it endlessly.” What Desai ultimately highlights is not individual experiences, but rather the relations of recognition between immigrants, exiles and foreigners who all grapple with the weight of history. “Every class feels the weight of history,” she says. “And things sometimes change in times of desperation.”

Desai’s ultimate concern in writing her latest novel, she says, was much more about making even the ongoing conversation about globalization. With all the optimism, often merited, about the globalized economy, Desai finds its other, messier sides less discussed. “I really wrote this book,” she says, “keeping in mind the many young people who can work and get a job. But then they say that over 300 million people in India live on less that one dollar a day. You see one class talking in dollars and euros and another class still talking in one and two rupees. This is the heart of it.”