"The Inheritance of Loss": A moving tale of honesty and horror

"The Inheritance of Loss"
by Kiran Desai
Atlantic Monthly Press,
324 pp., $24

Kiran Desai's hilarious and light-hearted debut novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," concerned an aimless young man in a small village in India, who retreated into a tree to live a contemplative life.

In "The Inheritance of Loss," Desai again sets her story in village India, leavening it with an equal measure of humor. But this second novel is broader in scope, peopled with a more diverse set of characters and shimmering with honesty and humanity.

Jemubhai Patel, a retired English-educated judge, lives with his orphaned granddaughter Sai and a cook in Kalimpong, a beautiful mountain town located in the foothills of the Himalayas near Nepal. "All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths."

The Patel family and their Anglophile friends barely notice that insurgents from Nepal have lately been claiming Kalimpong and its environs as their territory. Sixteen-year-old Sai has a tutor, Gyan, a 20-year-old man of letters who happens to be Nepali. Unbeknownst to all, they have fallen in love. "So they played the game of courtship, reaching, retreating, teasing, fleeing — how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours."

The family's idyllic life is shattered when Nepalese insurgents break into the house one night, seeking Jemubhai's hunting rifles and traumatizing everyone in the process. It is doubtful that the family will ever be able to return to its comfortable ways.

If Sai has kept a secret from everyone, so has the judge. Having abandoned his wife and daughter years ago for reasons known only to him, he must now come to terms with his past.

Gyan's love for Sai is put to the test as a surge of patriotic fervor draws him into the insurgency. Meanwhile the cook's son, Biju, has landed in New York with false papers. There he tries to carve a new existence, meeting mostly with disappointments.

His dream unfulfilled, his identity in question, he decides to return to India to visit his father. When he reaches the outskirts of Kalimpong, he is captured by the insurgents. Somehow he must manage to escape.

Sai musters the courage to venture out and look for Gyan, while the other characters try to cope with their own losses, whether acquired or inherited.

Perhaps because the book is so ambitious, it is not surprising to encounter a few flaws. The motive behind Gyan's sudden political conversion is somewhat obscure. The writing style has a detached quality, leaving the reader feeling less than fully engaged with the characters. And the chapters are broken into short episodes, interrupting the flow of the story.

Despite these flaws, this novel is finely accomplished in the way it makes connections between private lives and public events.

Bharti Kirchner's latest novel is "Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries."