Author Kiran Desai

I’m Indian, but not really. My parents immigrated to Canada before I was born. I was raised mostly in Calgary and spoke mostly English at home.

When I go back to India, where I still have quite a bit of family, I am a conspicuous tourist. My Indian clothes are out of style. The spices upset my stomach. I am overwhelmed by the dirt, the masses of people, the anarchic traffic and the irregularity of the water and electricity. Culturally, I’m grey. I identify as Canadian, but there’s a part that’s Indian, though I know next to nothing about Indian history, folklore or even Hinduism.

It’s a typical situation for children of immigrant families in Calgary and across the western world, and part of the much broader topic of immigration that has spawned great literature, specifically in the Indian community with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry.

An author who has recently joined these ranks is Kiran Desai (daughter of Anita Desai), who was in town a couple of weeks ago for WordFest. Her novel, The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, one of the literary world’s most prestigious prizes. It spans several generations, continents and disparate characters in its exploration of immigration and post-colonial life in India.

The story follows Sai, a 16-year-old orphan living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the hill-station village of Kalimpong. Sai begins a romance with Gyan, her math tutor, but he soon becomes resentful of her life of privilege and joins a group of Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel storyline, Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, immigrates to New York, where he works at a series of ill-paid, under-the-table jobs, living a lonely existence in slum-like conditions while desperately seeking a U.S. green card.

“They’re all imaginary characters,” says Desai, “but they all have something to do with my life and family history. This book is quite close to me in many ways. For example, my grandfather was a judge, and he did make this journey all the way from a village in Gujarat to England and on to India.”

Many authors focus on the positive aspects of this type of journey and what Salman Rushdie calls “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs."

Desai’s characters, however, struggle with the lives they have inherited. “Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them,” she writes. Change is attempted with little success.

It’s not the most hopeful view of immigrant life. There’s this illusion, she says, “that (the United States) is a country full of immigrants and it’s a heroic endeavour to immigrate, as though you make a journey from an un-free and cowardly world to a brave and free world, and you are giving up something worse for something better.

“You’re supposed to belong more and more and more, but it’s not (like that),” she adds. “You keep reinventing yourself and every time you do it, you don’t trust it, because you know how easily it can be changed.”

Immigration is a difficult topic, and in the past few years there has been some controversy in the way Indian writers, as well as other ethnic writers, portray the issues. One way is with magic realism, a fusion between physical and psychological reality that incorporates aspects of folklore, fairy tale, dream, magic and religion. The argument, says Desai, is that “there’s a demand for an exotic version of the East and we’re providing it, producing a fake version of our country that is ultimately childish and not really of this world, and as a result we’re not taken seriously. The anger about using magic realism is that you are portraying your country in a certain naive, unreal, exotic way and selling it to the West.

“As a political argument I can agree, but as a literary argument I can’t because then you’re going to have to throw out any writer who uses folk tale or elements of fairy tale,” she adds. “But these are our legends, and we do have monkeys, mangoes, guavas and magical events, so in terms of politics I think it makes sense, but as a literary argument you’re writing off authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many others.”

Desai says it comes down to a colonial legacy of how Indians want to be perceived by the West. “The heart of it really is, how are we being looked at from the outside? If it was just for us, nobody would even think about all of this. Mangoes are not exotic to us. (They’re) exotic to whom? Exotic in America, maybe, but not exotic in India.”

These are part of bigger issues that she has been debating and discussing for the two years she’s been on tour. “We’re talking about political matters, immigration, English as a language, and an anger against even using English. There are levels and levels of fighting.”

In a country with more than a billion people with somewhere around 20 Indian writers well known in the English-speaking world, Indian authors become ambassadors, she says, which isn’t always fair. Still, it’s not a bad place to be. Immigrant and Indian writing are growing areas of literature and Desai has carved out a prominent spot in that world.

The writer’s life is part of Desai’s own inheritance. “My mother’s life is reading and writing, all day long,” she says, and as such, the rhythm of it comes naturally to her. “I find it comes quite easily. I find it very hard to live differently. I also feel like I write constantly in my head. It’s not necessarily healthy, but I’m happy.”