Date:01/02/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/02/01/stories/2007020121840300.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Winning the Booker is a matter of chance, says Kiran Desai

Staff Report

Bangalore: "Winning the Booker is nothing more than winning a lottery — it is a matter of chance," said Kiran Desai, at a reading of her novel "The Inheritance of Loss" here on Wednesday.

When Ms. Desai began writing the "The Inheritance of Loss" eight years ago, she says she thought it would be "a much simpler narrative, set in New York." She found herself drawn, however, into revisiting the multiple experiences of immigration.

"There are women like me — working, successful global citizens — the `shiny class,' if you like. And then there is the `shadow class' also from the developing world, with no papers, having had to leave their families."

She was forced to ask, says Ms. Desai, if her own life might be made "on the backs" of those like Biju — one of the protagonists of her novel — a cleaner in the basement restaurants of New York. "And our lives always overlap, whether at visa offices or airports, where the experiences of arriving and leaving are shared."

Perhaps "The Loss of Inheritance" may have been better understood than "The Inheritance of Loss," said Ms. Desai in a lighter note, when asked about the title.

"A lot of the book is funny, and it deals with the richness of immigrant experiences — may be I have chosen to dwell more on the gloominess of it all. But the story of immigration is about loss too, about lost narratives — whether it was that of my grandfather who left his village in Gujarat to study in England, or whether it was my own journey."

Most of all, Ms. Desai says, her literary journey reflected "the inheritance of creativity" from her mother.

"It was so enormous an inheritance, that I can barely understand it myself. I grew up with her taste in writing, her sensibility. The rhythm in the house was the rhythm of a writer." It was when she realised how "frighteningly easy it was to go on writing, and exit the world" that she "decided it was time to put it all together".