John Freeman

Kiran Desai made her debut in 1999 with "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," the tale of a shiftless son of middle-class Indian parents who climbs a tree and begins to be treated as a guru. The young man's father begins scheming about ways to charge pilgrims for the chance to pose a question to him.

Eight long years later it is a much different world, and Desai has returned with a much different story, "The Inheritance of Loss." Whereas "Hullabaloo" was a cheeky, whimsical novel, Desai's latest is a dark and ambitious glimpse at globalization and its discontents. Set in New York and Nepal, it conjures a population all too used to saying goodbye and starting over. We spoke with Desai not long before she won the 2006 Man/Booker Prize.

I found the passages of "Inheritance of Loss" which are set in New York incredibly powerful, and full of some really sad details. For instance, there is the character from Zanzibar who begins ducking phone calls from people from his home village because he cannot provide the food and shelter his parents bragged he could. Clearly, your passage to America wasn't quite this drastic. Where did you come up with some of this material?

I actually lived with a man from Zanzibar for a year--a lot of [that part of the book] is taken from knowing him. It's true; that's how it works. Relatives arriving, but enough having them around, and then the terrible cruelty of the process of immigration. It seems to be about throwing people overboard and breaking your connection with people who are hoping you will help them eventually.

What was coming to America like for you?

I had a lot of optimism the first five years I was living in this country. I thought it was quite easy to be an immigrant living here, but as the years go on, the center doesn't hold, it becomes worse and worse and worse as you are supposed to be more sure of your place in the world. With what's happening right now--I realized the center doesn't exist--it keeps getting replanted and replaced maybe not in a country, but certainly in a culture I left a long, long time ago.

Where did you live in India as a child?

Mostly in Delhi; Bombay a bit. It was a very quiet, early-to-bed city. It has changed drastically. Even though it was the capital, there was the feeling that it was very much remote. There was the feeling that books were the only thing that led you to the world. You reread really hard--that was the only thing you could do. That was life completely when I was growing up: reading.

Were most of the authors Indian? Or were they English?

A lot of English authors--by the time I was growing up, in the early eighties, the publishing world in India was really small. There were not the number of writers there are now. There was really, really almost nothing. When a book came out by an Indian author, everyone went and got it because there were so few. It's sort of funny, because it meant that some obscure book could become the pillar of your thought process, and you come back to the world and you realize not everyone has read some bizarre social study, but for you it could be a major thing.

You wrote this book on the run almost, living in Latin America, the US, India, over almost ten years. Did you have to teach yourself solitude or does it come natural to you?

It becomes a habit, which in the end just becomes everything. I know I didn't have this habit. I wrote my first book without this habit. By the time the second book came around and I finally finished, it was so deeply part of myself. There was no divorcing myself from it--it was very much a part of my personality then. Now I am back in New York, and not writing, it's interesting to see the writing life here--which is not one of solitude.

Where do you feel like home is now?

Right now, I don't know what or where and even at the end of this book, I don't know what it is exactly, if it's just what is happening in the world right now but I find myself in a much worse mental state, which is maybe what is true of the characters. The U.S. has given me every thing that I need for writing, but in a sense of a home? I have been New York the longest. It's very easy to arrive here, but it is very easy to leave, too. To depart from: the door is always open to many different places.

(2006-10-17)

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