The Inheritance of Loss

In a decaying house called Cho Oyu below Kanchenjunga, a retired judge lives with his cook, his dog Mutt, and, newly arrived, his orphaned granddaughter Sai. The judge was educated in Cambridge, where he learned to despise everything he came from, and returned to take it out on his wife. Sai falls in love with her mathematics tutor Gyan, a Nepali Indian whose prospects are nothing like hers, and who drifts into the Gorkhaland agitation that is gathering through the hills in 1986, with boys taking guns off verandas and roadblocks going up. Meanwhile, in New York, the cook's son Biju moves from one basement kitchen to another on expired papers, sleeping among rats, being told by every employer that he should be grateful. Desai sets the two illusions against one another: the family that believes England made them, and the father who believes America will make his son. The prose is dense with the particulars of damp, mildew, curries and cold, and the novel's judgement is even-handed and unsparing, finding in colonialism a durable machinery for teaching people to be ashamed of their own.