A mundane tragedy

In her first book Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Anchor, 1999), Kiran Desai wrote a comic fable of a man who escapes the world by climbing a tree.In The Inheritance of Loss (Grove Press, 2005), she chronicled the violent political convulsions that toss individuals about like so much flotsam. Here, the escape is inward and the convulsions are psychological. The grand historical forces are still present—globalisation, migration, the legacies of colonialism—but they are refracted through the prism of individual consciousness, surfacing as depression, artistic megalomania, and a pervasive, free-floating anxiety.

Desai constructs her narrative on a vast canvas, weaving together a multitude of storylines that span continents and generations. The novel is polyphonic, shifting its perspective from Sonia Shah, a solitary literature student whose profound loneliness at a Vermont college makes her vulnerable to a toxic and predatory affair with a much older artist, Ilan de Toorjen Foss, to Sunny Bhatia, a young journalist in New York feeling like an "impostor, a spy, a liar, and a ghost" while navigating a fraught relationship with his American girlfriend, Ulla.

He seeks community but finds only a collection of solitary individuals performing the same lonely pantomime of escape. His mother, Babita, executes a grander version of this flight, purchasing the historic Casa das Conchas in Goa to escape the "hell on earth" of her Delhi family feud. Yet, this idyllic mansion becomes a new prison of fear and isolation, besieged by property disputes, threatening phone calls, and the ghosts of the past.

While their lives run on parallel tracks, their families' richly detailed worlds in Allahabad and Delhi are ironically linked by a failed marriage proposal orchestrated by their grandparents. A large cast of finely-drawn secondary characters drives the plot: Sonia's unlucky, unmarried aunt Mina Foi serves as a haunting portrait of a life unlived, while Sunny's sharp-tongued, widowed mother, Babita, schemes against her corrupt brothers-in-law, a family feud that culminates in their brutal murders and the disappearance of two young servant girls. Desai masterfully braids these disparate threads: Sonia's psychological torment and escape from abuse, and Sunny's confrontation with his family's murky legacy, showing how the echoes of personal history and the pressures of the present conspire to bring two profoundly lonely souls onto an eventual, fateful collision course.

The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is, in fact, the loneliness of almost everyone in Desai's richly populated world. Sunny's mother, Babita, is a prime example. For all her sharp wit, she is marooned by widowhood, a feeling she captures perfectly: "How desolate it was to have to hoard one's thoughts and jokes for future company, how tedious to translate them into a letter. How sweet it was when one could undo the lethargy of time by chatting with someone about the little things…"

Sonia's aunt Mina Foi is similarly haunted by a life of quiet desperation and missed opportunities. From the lonely grandeur of an artist's ego to the silent suffering of a dutiful daughter, Desai makes it clear that her protagonists are not unique, but merely the focal point of a universally felt affliction: the one culture that is truly global, a lingua franca of despair spoken with equal fluency in Allahabad, New York, Delhi, and Vermont. It is a novel that asks what happens when the children of midnight's children find themselves utterly, terribly, magnificently alone at noon.

Throughout the novel, characters embark on desperate quests for a place of belonging, yet their actions merely deepen their alienation. This is a world where the concept of home is a mirage. Sunny, seeking an authentic connection, moves to the immigrant enclave of Jackson Heights, only to observe his fellow Indians consciously ignoring one another, "as if it was better to be one Indian than two Indians." He seeks community but finds only a collection of solitary individuals performing the same lonely pantomime of escape. His mother, Babita, executes a grander version of this flight, purchasing the historic Casa das Conchas in Goa to escape the "hell on earth" of her Delhi family feud. Yet, this idyllic mansion becomes a new prison of fear and isolation, besieged by property disputes, threatening phone calls, and the ghosts of the past, proving that a change of scenery is no cure for a haunted soul. Desai masterfully shows that in our globalised world, home is not a place one can return to or purchase, but a state of being that remains maddeningly out of reach.

This is an excerpt. Read the full review on The Daily Star and Star Books and Literature's websites.

Najmus Sakib studies Linguistics at the University of Dhaka. Reach him at [email protected].