|
 
Kiran Desai
Writing, for me, means humility,” the Indian-born novelist Kiran
Desai told an interviewer for Rediff (January 30,2006,
on-line). “It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially
if you’re writing honestly.” Such doubt and humility not
with-standing, Desai—the daughter of the noted writer Anita
Desai—has won a great deal of praise for her two novels. The first,
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), drew comparisons to
the work of her fellow Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie, for the
richness of her writing, characters, and multiple plots, and she won
Britain’s Man Booker Prize for her 2006 novel, The Inheritance of
Loss, a multigenerational story set in India and New York. Those
accomplishments have apparently not altered her attitude about
writing fiction. “Each book is its own challenge,” she explained to
the Rediff interviewer, “and I find myself at exactly the
same level of trepidation and doubt as when I began the last time
around.”
Kiran Desai was born on September 3, 1971 in New Delhi, India, one
of the four children of Anita Desai, whose novels include Voices
in the City (1965), Clear Light of Day (1980), and
Baumgartner’s Bombay (2000), and Ashvin Desai, a businessman.
Anita Desai’s mother was German, her father a refugee from what
later became Bangladesh; Ashvin Desai’s parents were from the
western Indian region of Gujarat. Kiran Desai was raised in India,
sometimes living outside New Delhi and sometimes in Kalimpong, in
the Himalayas, where her family had a house “that was named Chomiomi
after a snow mountain in Tibet,” as Desai told the interviewer for
Rediff. She had a happy childhood.
Her earliest memories, she said to the Rediff interviewer,
are of “sitting under the table pulling the toes of all my older
siblings and parents in turn. Utter happiness. I remember my father
whistling in his bath,” and, she said, she recalls “sitting, a very
little girl, in my mother’s lap, layers of soft, old Bengali striped
sari, playing with the bangles she wore, one on each wrist, a book
in front, and her voice which is an utter-ly beautiful voice,
reading.” She added, “Human warmth is such an innate part of India,
and good humour.” At the same time, as Desai explained for Rediff,
“Kalimpong has a population of Tibetan refugees and a majority
population of Nepalis who were brought generations ago to work on
British tea plantations. It is a very beautiful place, but the
strains were obvious even when we were living there.” Long-festering
class tensions led to unrest in the area.
Desai received part of her education at St. Joseph’s Convent in
Kalimpong and then, when she was 15, moved to England to continue
her schooling. (Some sources say that she was 14 at the time; Desai
herself, in different interviews, has said both.) After a year in
England, Desai moved to the United States. She attended high school
in Massachusetts before enrolling at Bennington College, in
Bennington, Vermont. She studied for a time at the writing program
at Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia, and later went to
Columbia University, in New York City, where she obtained an M.F.A.
degree.
It was at Hollins that Desai began writing her first novel,
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, published in 1998. In an
interview for the Random House online publication Bold Type
(May 1999), Desai revealed that she had gotten the idea for the
novel after reading an account in an Indian newspaper of a hermit
who lived for many years, until his death, in a tree. “So I began to
wonder about what it was about someone like this who would do
something as extreme as to spend his life in a tree,” Desai said.
“So it started really with that character, and then the story built
up around it.” She began writing, she added, with “no idea what the
story would be” and “no idea of the plot. It sort of gathered
momentum and drew me along. It was an incredibly messy process.”
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard tells the story of Sampath, a
misfit young man in an Indian village whose life lacks direction
until he becomes a tree-dwelling guru, attracting followers from far
and near. Sampath’s traditionalist father, disconcerted at first by
his son’s actions, is ultimately not above making profits from the
sale and resale of objects of devotion that are to be placed at the
foot of the tree; the novel follows many others among Sampath’s
family members and fellow village dwellers, as well."
Although the publishers of Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard
have been comparing the book to Arundhati Roy’s award-winning novel
God of Small Things, 27-year-old Kiran Desai turns out to
have less in common with Ms. Roy or Salman Rushdie than with an
older generation of Indian writers, including her mother, Anita
Desai, and R. K. Narayan,” Michiko Kakutani wrote for the New York
Times (June 12, 1998).“There are no grand, mythic visions at work in
Hullabaloo, no ambitious displays of magical realism. Rather,
the novel stands as a meticulously crafted piece of gently comic
satire—a small, finely tuned fable that attests to the author’s
pitch-perfect ear for character and mood, and her natural
storytelling gifts.” Reviewing the novel for Newsday (June 1,
1998), Lise Funderburg wrote that Desai “has attacked classic
themes: women’s roles, worship of false idols, intolerance,
generation gaps. Couched in the broad comedy that relies on the
familiarity of each subplot, these issues ambush the reader. What
seems merely to be the lead-in to a good laugh and nothing more
actually lingers, leaving questions that are, for all their
familiarity, no less profound.” For Hullaballo in the Guava
Orchard, Desai was presented with the Betty Trask Award, given
by the Society of Authors, a British organization.
Asked why eight years had passed between the publication dates of
her first and second novels, Desai said to an interviewer for
Jabberwock (January 20, 2006, online), “I suppose I was
working and reworking the second book a lot.” Most critics seemed to
feel that her second book was worth the wait. “If Hullabaloo in
the Guava Orchard established Desai as an expert storyteller,
The Inheritance of Loss,” Desai’s 2006 novel, “distinguishes her
as a writer of note,” Jennifer Berman commented in the Los
Angeles Times Book Review (January 22, 2006). Set mainly in
Kalimpong, where Desai spent much of her childhood, The
Inheritance of Loss follows the lives of a retired,
English-educated judge, whose time abroad has caused him to feel
permanently out of place in his homeland; the judge’s granddaughter,
Sai, an orphaned teenager who lives with him; the judge’s cook, who
dotes on Sai; the cook’s son, Biju, who earns subsistence wages as a
waiter in New York; and Sai’s tutor and romantic interest, Gyan, an
ethnic Nepalese who become involved with a rebel group and
thereafter rejects what he sees as Sai’s bourgeois lifestyle. “
Although it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals,
Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with
intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international
issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality,
fundamentalism and terrorist violence,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in an
assessment of The Inheritance of Loss for the New York
Times Book Review (February 12,2006). “Despite being set in the
mid-1980’s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.” The book,
according to Marjorie Kehe’s review for the Christian Science
Monitor (January 24, 2006), “is populated by characters who are
mostly either exiles, eccentrics, or both. It is a work full of
color and comedy, even as it challenges all to face the same
heart-wrenching questions that haunt the immigrant: Who am I? Where
do I belong? . . . Nothing sours the warm heart at the center of
this novel. Desai is sometimes compared to Salman Rushdie, and the
energy and fecundity of imagination in her works do make them
somewhat akin to his. But the tenderness in her novels is all her
own.” In 2006 Desai won the Man Booker Prize, awarded to writers who
are British or Commonwealth citizens, for The Inheritance of
Loss, becoming the youngest woman ever to receive the prize. (As
quoted by Dwight Garner in the December 3, 2006 edition of New
York Times, Desai said that “in an odd way” she owes her award
to U.S. president George W. Bush, as it was his 2004 reelection that
led her to put off becoming a U.S. citizen.)
Desai said during her interview for Bold Type, “There are all
kinds of theories that you get told in writing workshops—‘Write what
you know,’ and that sort of thing, which I don’t believe at all. I
think one of the great joys of writing is to try and explore what
you don’t know, that’s exciting to me. There are all kinds of little
[rules]—show, don’t tell—I just wouldn’t pay attention to any of
that really.” Asked by the Bold Type interviewer about her
mother’s influence on her own writing, Desai said, “I’m sure she did
have a big influence, because all my life I’ve grown up hearing her
talk about writing and literature and books. It was wonderful to
have her around when I was writing [Hullabaloo in the Guava
Orchard]. . . . She was very good through that whole time, not
providing critical support as much as emotional sup-port. A very
motherly role, really.”
Kiran Desai lives in Brooklyn, New York. Each year she visits India,
where much of her immediate family live. Her connection with India,
she commented to the Rediff interviewer, “was never broken.”
—S.Y.
 |
