What is The Inheritance of Loss about?

The Inheritance of Loss unfolds in two interweaving strands set in the late 1980s. In the Himalayan town of Kalimpong, a retired judge named Jemubhai Patel lives a rancorous retirement with his orphaned granddaughter Sai and their cook. Jemubhai was educated in England, and that education warped him — he returned to India with a deep contempt for the country he came from and a contempt for himself that followed from it. When the region becomes caught up in the Gorkhaland insurgency — a violent movement for ethnic Nepali self-determination — his comfortable disengagement becomes impossible. The second strand follows the cook's son, Biju, who is in New York without documentation, cycling through restaurant kitchens and rooming houses in a city that can barely see him.

The novel is about the inheritance of colonialism — the psychological damage done not only by direct oppression but by the aspiration to belong to the world of the oppressor. Jemubhai's self-hatred, his treatment of his wife, his studied Anglicization, are all understood as effects of this distortion. The cook's faith in education and migration as escape routes is shown as another version of the same fantasy: the belief that somewhere else, you will finally be seen and valued. Biju's New York is a city of immigration's underside, not its mythology.

Desai's prose is rich to the point of demanding attention — this is not a novel that reads easily. The Kalimpong passages have a fevered quality, the landscape almost alive with political tension. The New York sections are flatter and more documentary, which is itself a kind of argument: the immigrant's experience in a wealthy city is often one of radical invisibility. The novel's political anger is never quite controlled into thesis, which is a strength and occasionally a weakness.

Readers who find this book essential tend to be those with personal knowledge of postcolonial psychology — the novel diagnoses something real about the ways in which colonial education deforms its recipients. Readers who find it difficult often struggle with the density of the prose and the absence of a conventionally sympathetic center. The comparison is not to other postcolonial novels so much as to the tradition of consciousness-of-empire that includes Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Conrad's The Secret Agent.