The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss, a 2006 book by Kiran Desai, explores immigration, identity, and relationships on both the interpersonal and international scale. Spanning India, England, and the United States, the novel details the conflict between traditional Indian ways of life and the shiny opulence of Western nations. The book won several awards, including the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007. Desai wrote the book in the seven years following her 1998 debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Plot Summary

The Inheritance of Loss follows four characters from a household in Northern India. The house is Cho Oyu—a stately manor in the village of Kalimpong—which is home to the judge, his granddaughter Sai, and the cook. The cook’s son Biju, meanwhile, lives in New York City. Each chapter focuses on a primary point-of-view character to anchor this wide-reaching narrative that spans decades and nations.

The novel begins at Cho Oyu in 1986. A group of Nepali-Indian insurgents robs the judge’s guns from the house, humiliating the proud old man. Many of the judge’s chapters track his rise from peasant to judge for the Indian Civil Service. The judge faces constant discrimination throughout his schooling in Cambridge and adapts himself to English speech and custom as a result. He returns to India contemptuous of his native land and the wife he left behind, whom he abuses as he begins his career. In retirement, the judge is an isolated, imposing figure who takes in his granddaughter Sai.

Sai has a surrogate father in the cook, but she longs for her late parents. Throughout her childhood she is tutored by her neighbor Noni. For her physics tutoring at age 16, the judge hires a young Nepali man named Gyan, with whom Sai becomes romantically involved.

The Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), a group of Nepali people demanding statehood in India, wages violence throughout the area. Gyan’s participation in the GNLF harms his relationship with Sai, whom he comes to resent for her Westernized customs. Gyan also tells the GNLF about the judge’s guns, inspiring the robbery that begins the novel. After the public burning of the Indo-Nepal Treaty, which the cook witnesses, a violent outbreak ravages the community.

Meanwhile, Biju hops from one New York restaurant to the next, their kitchens filled with undocumented workers like him. Biju longs for home, ever anxious about his immigration status. After serving steaks to Indian businessmen, Biju decides to work at a Hindu-owned restaurant. The owner, Harish-Harry, overworks and underpays his staff, who live in the restaurant’s basement. Nursing a work-related injury and missing his father, Biju decides to return to India.

Sai and Gyan fight bitterly as the violence escalates, critiquing the other’s cultural practice, but Gyan soon abandons the GNLF and regrets betraying her. The police force arrests several innocent people for the gun robbery, and one of those men’s relatives steals the judge’s beloved dog Mutt from Cho Oyu. The judge berates and beats the cook for his inability to find Mutt, and the downtrodden cook begs the judge to kill him. Sai spots Biju in the distance, wearing a woman’s nightgown since the GNLF robbed him of clothes and money. The novel ends with the cook and Biju reuniting at last.