About "Inheritance of Loss"

To interrupt the story again...

I just read Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-winning "The Inheritance of Loss." I first saw the title a few months ago on a list of "South Asian Must Reads" right under "The Namesake."

"Inheritance" takes place in Kalimpong, a village in the misty reaches of the Himalayas, a place where canned ham is still an hors d'ouevre of choice at stylish dinners.

The main storyline involves missing guns, perverted justice, angry young men and cross-border violence with Nepal. But forget all that. I kept returning to the novel's descriptions of the main character's pre-Indian-independence stint as a student in England.

This man, known as "the judge", is a premier member of the Indian Civil Service, the near-mythic body of officers who once governed India on behalf of the British Raj. But before the judge can become "the judge", he spends several years at Cambridge University at a time when being a South Asian in England carries a particularly uncomfortable political heft.

The judge's shame at his own Indianness and his subsequent fanaticism for all things British suggest, at best, a troubled personality (a few years in England are not enough to turn a sane man into a frothing, wife-beating lunatic, no matter how much self-loating is heaped upon him. And yet this is what happens to the judge). The isolation the judge inflicts upon himself signals a unique area of failure: that of those who attempt to cross worlds. Native Britishers are boisterous and happy, native Indians are loud and cheery. It is only the judge who is constantly apologizing sotto voce, although never for the right things or to the right people.

I am reminded of the recent fracas in France over Muslim headscarves. The judge lived in England nearly a century ago, but his sense of "otherness" might seem very familiar to young European women who choose to cover their heads today. Immigration is not a smooth process.

Both "Inheritance" and the headscarf debate suggest the question: why bother to immigrate in the first place? Immigration is very different from travel, even extended travel. Immigration is not some glamorous exercise, it's a process of adjustment made more difficult by the fact that you can't change how other people view you, even if you can change how you view them.

I've barely been in India for four months, and I don't intend to live my whole life here, which means I hardly qualify as an immigrant. But I have gotten a glimpse into some of the frustrations unique to this boat. Immigrants are like travelers, except they can't go back. This really makes all the difference.

I'm back in India thirty years after my parents left. I wonder what our family gained as a result of our intercontinental exercise? I'm not trying to be provocative or mean. I am very happy and fortunate to be where I am, and I don't forget this. But if my parents had never left India in the first place, their lives would not necessarily have been any worse today. And to be very honest, I'm not sure mine would be either. (I realize this might be unique to the United States-India country set. People who came to the US from other nations might not feel the same way.) And just because I have left the United States for a "glamorous stint" in India doesn't mean that I'm automatically better off.

So I guess my question is actually more nuanced than that. The standard belief is that people immigrate in search of a better quality of life. Back in my parents' day, this was certainly the motivation. But when dealing with nations where an equal quality of life is available (and I realize I am talking about a particular slice of Indian society, here, not everyone enjoys a high quality of life in either India or, for that matter, the US) why choose to immigrate? What is there to gain? Do people still immigrate under those circumstances, or do they just travel?

And what does it say about either me or these authors (Lahiri, Desai) that their books leave me depressed about the immigrant exercise? (The author description at the back of "Inheritance" reads "Educated in India, England and the United States, Desai continues...to divide her time between places, with mixed results." This sentence fascinates me. What does "mixed results" mean?) The tiny humiliations and momentary pangs of immigration are so minutely and painfully described, which for some readers might be a necessary enlightenment. But I'd like to see a book about a first- or second-generation immigrant who isn't dogged by the politics of racial identity or haunted by a sense of cosmic displacement. A book that more accurately reflects my own life, which (if I'm being honest) hasn't been a worse one just because my parents didn't step off the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock. (But maybe I'm being unfair. My parents probably identify with the Lahiri-Desai narrative. For all that I blather on, I didn't immigrate to the US. I was born there. So what do I know? These books aren't, in fact, about me.)