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"There is a parallel to immigrant stories everywhere"

Mukund Padmanabhan

Kiran Desaion what the Booker Prize has meant, her literary inheritance, and the controversy over her novel.

— Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.

Kiran Desai: "I have to sit on my desk and the process reveals the book. I never know in advance."

There's hardly been a quiet moment for Kiran Desai since she won the Man Booker Prize last year for The Inheritance of Loss. She's recently been at literary festivals in Jaipur and Galle [Sri Lanka], is scheduled to visit two others in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and is in the midst of a book-reading tour of Indian cities to promote her novel. She caught up with The Hindu in Chennai.

How has the Booker changed your life?

There has been a total transformation. I kept my mouth shut for seven years [during which she wrote The Inheritance of Loss]. Now all I do is talk. (laughs)

And travel.

Yes, talk and travel. And I don't see it stopping for a long while actually. I think it is going to continue for many months, if not for the rest of the year. So yes, in a way the Booker has made it much harder to write.

The last time we spoke — which was a few days before you won the Prize — you had said that you planned on working on another novel by the end of the year. But a recent reported datelined Galle, suggested you were worried that there may not be another novel in you.

I did not say anything close to that. What I said is that I don't know what I am going to do next. It's always true for me ... the process of writing reveals the book to me. I have to sit on my desk and the process reveals the book. I never know in advance. And this is always a risk. You don't know what is going to come out. It may not work. So I probably said something to that effect.

I didn't know whether this book [The Inheritance of Loss] would work ... whether there would be enough material to put it all together. And surely any writer worries what is going to come next.

Is there a germ of an idea already?

Not really. But a shadow of something that is perhaps pretty much unconscious. But I do want to sit at my desk again.

After you won the Prize, your mother [novelist Anita Desai] told this newspaper in an interview that she was "sad" that the publishers had reduced the length of the novel by 300 pages. Did you feel that way too?

You know, in one way I am a bit sad because I cut for reasons of momentum and structure. In terms of material, there certainly were things that I wish I had kept because the arguments could have been extended further into the past and it could have been brought up to the present. But I held it to that time period ... the 1980s. I wish I could have come up closer to the present. So much has happened in the past 20 years in terms of immigration and movement; it would have been fun to extend it.

Of course, there were also so many characters that went and whole angles to the immigrant story which I cut out.

So it wasn't just a condensation. The chopping actually reduced the very scope of the novel.

Yes, I changed it. It was too difficult to hold together with that structure. There were some people who would take a messier, more flawed book and still think it more worthwhile. My mother is more tolerant of a more messy book, and so am I as a reader. It doesn't bother me so much. But publishers, no. In fact, I was told to cut it even more! But I held on to a lot of scenes that would have gone.

You keep talking about the "profound debt" you owe to your mother. Is this debt related to practical things such as the fact that parts of the novel were written in "cold winters in her house?" Or is there also a literary debt? Did she influence the novel in a tangible way?

When I look back, books like Fire in the Mountain, Baumgartner's Bombay and even the sadness in Clear Light of Day must have had an influence on me. But it always is hard to tell exactly what is a literary influence, what is a personal influence, and what comes from talking with her. It is probably a combination of all these things.

Did she actually go through it and make suggestions?

Yup. She was the first person to read it. I had already cut it quite a lot. But she read it in quite a messy stage, at a time when a publisher would not have been able to make sense of it. Only someone who understood the subject matter very deeply who would be able to say, `Yes, it might work.'

Were you rattled by the reaction in some quarters in Nepal and in and around Kalimpong? There were accusations that your portrayal of Nepali-speaking people and the movement for Gorkhaland were prejudiced.

I was very surprised. I didn't see it coming. I sometimes think I should re-read the book and try and discover what it was. As I have said earlier, I have sympathy for the cause. I was also trying to say that it is true that it did turn violent and that it was very frightening for everyone on the hillside — Nepali or non-Nepali. The hillside did shut down, there was curfew, there was nothing to eat, there was violence on both sides. The police do not come off very well at all and I make it clear it was stamped out very brutally by the police. I read many books on the [Gorkhaland] movement as well. I realised there is a parallel to immigrant stories everywhere. Immigrant communities several generations on are still struggling to find space in their own countries.

What about the portrayal of Nepali characters?

The cook and the son are not Nepalis at all [as some of Desai's critics assumed]. The only major Nepali character is Gyan and he is sympathetically portrayed as far as I am concerned. I have tried to understand what someone growing up in the hillside must have gone through during that time. He is portrayed in a human way, he is neither violent nor stupid.

But the reaction has prevented you from going back to Kalimpong?

Yes, it was a nice plan. We were all planning to go — all the Penguin people — for a book reading in Kalimpong. But it might have turned into a book-burning. (Laughs) I was advised it wouldn't be smart to go. My aunt [her mother's sister who lives in Kalimpong] has been under a lot of pressure. She's a doctor, has a clinic, and is much loved on the hillside. But people's anger against me seems to be directed against her. It's been very difficult to her.

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"There is a parallel to immigrant stories everywhere"

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