One day in mid-September, Kiran Desai went looking for herself. The Man Booker Prize shortlist had just been announced, and her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, was among the final six, along with works by Kate Grenville, MJ Hyland, Hisham Matar, Edward St Aubyn, and Sarah Waters — none of which she had read. Desai left her apartment in Brooklyn and headed to the largest bookshop she knew. “To the big Barnes and Noble. And none of the books were there,” she says with a prickle of surprise. “Including my own.”
It was only last week that Desai finally met her fellow nominees, at the prize-giving evening. And when her name was announced as the winner, she was doubly shocked. “I was very surprised. I was very surprised.” She says it twice, as if to cement the thought in her head.
There is an added charm to Desai’s win, as her mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the Booker three times. “I hope she has heard,” says Desai. “But she’s living in a house without a phone.”
Desai’s hunt for herself on the shelves of a New York bookstore, and the circuitous route to claim her prize, are curiously apt. The Inheritance of Loss is a sprawling novel that runs from the Himalayas to New York city — taking in Marks & Spencer knickers, Grand Marnier and Nepalese insurgents along the way — and offers an insightful and often humorous commentary on multiÂÂculturalism and post-colonial society.
One wonders, therefore, whether she felt altogether comfortable accepting the Man Booker prize, considering the inherently colonial nature of the award. “Mmmm, I know,” she nods. “Someone said to me, ‘Will you turn down the Booker prize because it is a Commonwealth prize?’ And I said ‘I’m not crazy!’ It’s also a hedge fund, so you have big-business qualms about that. There’s all kinds of reasons to turn it down.”
Did she seriously contemplate doing so? “Nooo! NO! Because you can drag that ethical dilemma into every single aspect of your life — and that is very much what my book is about. Would I buy this sweater? Where is it made? It’s by someone poor in China and someone horrible is making money out of it.”
Desai (35) lived in India until she was 14, when she and her mother left first for the United Kingdom and then for the United States, where she has lived ever since.
However, she still holds on to her Indian passport. “Now I could become an American citizen, but then George W Bush won and I’ve just been unable to bring myself to do so,” she explains.
Increasingly, too, she is unsure that she would really want to surrender her Indian citizenship. “I feel less like doing it every year because I realise that I see everything through the lens of being Indian. It’s not something that has gone away — it’s something that has become stronger. As I’ve got older, I have realised that I can’t really write without that perspective.”
It was only when she began writing about the immigrant experience in New York that she realised she would have to return to India. “And then, of course, I find myself at a disadvantage because India has changed, moved on. I go every year, yet it belongs to Indian authors living in India. The subject belongs to them. So the only way I could put this book together was to go back to the India of the 1980s, when I left.”
It is this feeling of being caught between two continents that infuses The Inheritance of Loss. At times, it appears to rejoice in the intermingling of cultures; at others it seems to inspire a wistful melancholy. Does Desai feel liberated or limbo-ed by her odd dual citizenship? “Both.” She laughs. “In many ways it’s incredibly lucky, enriching, to see both sides. On the other hand I do worry. You think, what’s next? This book is made up of many little bits and pieces, of half- stories, and immigrants in a basement you just see briefly as you pass by. So I do think, will I ever have an entire story to tell?” The advantage is that she feels she could settle almost anywhere.
Just as she has faltered in accepting US citizenship, she has been unwilling to embrace the US style of writing. Having attended a creative writing course at Columbia University, of which she says her first novel Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard was a product, she decided to start afresh. “It was very hard for me to write like that,” she explains.
‘They demand you write a certain way because you have to present your work in half-hour instalments. You are having to polish only a little bit of it. It suits the short story more than the novel.
“You certainly can’t sit there with the big, huge monster [novel] and function in any kind of way as an American writer, because you are constantly having to make grant applications, and you either have to exit that world or your work must change.”
Desai chose to exit. “I didn’t apply for grants or writers’ centres, I didn’t join writers’ groups. I just couldn’t do it. It didn’t seem an honest way to write to me. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.”
Instead she lived on her advance, stretching it further by moving to Mexico for a while occupying small rooms in overcrowded houses in New York. She did not expect, however, that she would have to live like this for eight years until the book was finished. The end came, she admits, partly out of financial necessity.
I wonder where in her heart she would like to be celebrating right now. She does not hesitate: “I would like to be in India.” She smiles broadly.
“Because they care for the Booker so much. Sometimes it means something in America and sometimes it doesn’t. It would have been a lot of fun to be in Delhi, with lots of family and all the generations.” — Â