1Critics of Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), such as Pankaj Mishra, have pointed out that this novel deals with ‘just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence.’ While admiring ‘Desai’s artistic power,’ Mishra suggests that her novel, an ‘exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair,’ ‘[focusing] on the fate of a few powerless individuals,’ may ‘strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view.’ In Mishra’s reading, ‘Desai offers her characters no possibility of growth or redemption.’ Along similar lines, Geeta Sharma Jensen suggests that Desai’s novel is a ‘novel of class and economic disparity, a young girl’s fanciful love story, and a commentary on postcolonial India with its fading anglophiles, their crumbling edifices and their dwindling power in the face of a modernizing nation’s disaffected population’ (Jensen, qt. in ‘Kiran Desai at University of Iowa.’). As reported in The Guardian (Nov 2006), moreover, people in the lower Himalayan hill town of Kalimpong responded with anger at the depiction of their town and at what they saw as negative stereotypes of the Indian Nepalese.1

2My purpose in this paper is not to discuss or refute the validity of these views, but rather to look at Desai’s novel from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the chaos, despair, and imbalance referred to by the critics above, I would like to explore the intricate ways in which an immanent-transcendent narrative movement in The Inheritance of Loss balances gains and losses on minor and major levels, in petty and grandiose, natural and civilized, animal and human worlds, and how, through complex configurations, the centripetal attractions of home and the centrifugal flights of diaspora are placed in elaborate relief.

3At the end of The Inheritance of Loss, one of the main characters, importantly, has gained the insight that she can no longer ‘think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny little happiness and live safely within it’ (323). Taking its cue from this line and reading The Inheritance of Loss as not just one narrative but as a multidimensional hyperfabula or supernarrative that is local and universal as well as optimistic and pessimistic in equal measure, this paper will suggest that the worlds of Cho Oyo, Kalimpong, Kanchenjunga, and New York are surveyed from a narrative perspective that embraces the smallest creature as lovingly as the widest landscapes, while moving between present and primordial layers of time. While one critic has felt that this novel ‘focuses so heavily on description that the plot in some places feels as if it has been completely overlooked’ (Pryor 2006), this paper will propose that this very description of planetary life in its profuseness could be regarded as the main plot, in which a comprehensive narrative movement as a great equalizer, ultimately, evens out gains and losses, while pointing to the possibility of serenity and survival in the midst of inner and outer turbulence. In a reversal of predictable positions of immanence and transcendence on the level of characterization, the larger picture of the plot points to the immanence of the daily life of Desai’s characters while giving us a glimpse of the transcendent ultimate reality of life itself.

4I will suggest that Desai’s novel could be approached on three different levels. Firstly, there is an extraliterary level referring to real events in the life of the author herself2 and in the geographic region described in the novel, the northeastern Himalayas, ‘where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim’ (9). References to the extraliterary dimension, secondly, are counterbalanced against a literary level where plot, characterization, and imagery are uppermost, even though, as already indicated, there are critics who have found the plot lacking because of the over-abundance of descriptive imagery.

5Along with the literary and extraliterary levels, there is a third level pointing to an extra-dimensional reality. It is on this level, this paper will suggest, that the profuse imagery, linked to characters, landscapes, and events and thematically concerned with home and diaspora, with gains and losses, becomes the main ‘plot’ in not only describing but re-creating life in its largest sense as it includes and affects human beings, animals, insects, objects and nature. One critic, who comments on ‘the novel’s generosity,’ is on the right track when she suggests that ‘In the end, the landscape that has engendered great passion and destruction survives both. Characters, plot, theme—all are subsumed into it’ (Harleman 2009).

6In this regard, it might be helpful to look at Kiran Desai’s novel through the concepts of immanence and transcendence. Immanence is a concept usually associated with the body, with repetition and reproduction while transcendence is linked to the mind and to the transgression of boundaries, to creativity and cognition, culture and civilization. Home would be linked to immanence, while diaspora would be associated with transcendence. For feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, moreover, immanence is associated with women’s lives and work and transcendence with the lives and work of men, and men have, traditionally, according to her, been afraid of being mired in immanence.3

7In this paper, I posit immanence as linked to home, roots, and certainty, and transcendence as linked to diasporic travel, routes, and contingency. But just as diasporic space in reality involves a mingling and intersecting across identities and communities in ways that challenge notions of home and away, in Desai’s novel, I argue, there is a dissolution of the dividing lines between immanence and transcendence whereby immanence ultimately is transcendence and vice versa.

8While for many Indians, images of life in the West have been infused with success and prosperity, Desai’s novel, so significantly titled The Inheritance of Loss, shows that contrary to colonial discourse, the journey to the West of Biju, the son of the cook, ends in total loss of all material gain. On one level it could be argued that Desai’s novel is about personal, cultural, and material losses linked to historical, colonial, and family inheritances. Diaspora is often associated to a loss of language, religion, and customs linked to one’s sense of home and origin. Coming home is no more secure. At the same time, in Desai’s novel, gains and losses, perpetually changing places in material and natural realms, mutually depend on and imply each other in ways that point to mutually dependent dimensions of immanence and transcendence.

9As we shall see, in The Inheritance of Loss, immanence and transcendence are only superficially opposite forces since they are blended and balanced, and sometimes reversed, in Desai’s delicate descriptive dance. Let us take a closer look, first at two of the main characters, the judge and the cook, and then at the landscape itself.

10As a highly educated man whose profession is justice, Sai’s grandfather, Jemubhai the judge, would seem to be the main character associated with transcendence. He identifies mostly with his father and disparages ‘the inappropriateness of the gesture’ of his mother in packing food for his trip to England as ‘Undignified love, Indian love, stinking, unaesthetic love’ (38). He leaves the confines of his family and village to travel to England and pursue a higher education at an institution eminently associated with transcendence, the University of Cambridge. He lives in and for the transcendent realm of the mind while denying and despising the immanence of the body, something that leads to great unhappiness in his life. Certainly, colonialism has a part in his painting himself into ‘an unwanted anachronism of postcolonial India’, as Mishra puts it in his review of Desai’s novel. In Cambridge, he freezes mentally in an internalized sense of inferiority. With a self-destructive aggression linked to his alienation from himself, Jemubhai denounces his own cultural roots and feels ashamed of himself, his own body, his smells, and his own origin. Returning to India he finds his family’s ways off-putting, and intercourse with his wife repugnant. Nature’s way of securing reproduction through the implantation of sexual desire in humans is seen by the judge as grotesque, and his own sexuality is conveyed through animal imagery as an utter loss of control, a ‘gutter act’ (170) that fills him with distaste. Instead of any experience of love and union he is as cut off from his wife as from his innermost self. In ironic reversal, however, the judge, whose utmost aim is to be civilized and thus human, becomes almost non-human, his gaze ‘the same blank look of a dog or monkey humping in the bazaar’ (170). His very brief loss of ‘human’ control during the act of sex is negated immediately afterwards through ‘ablutions’ and ‘a clinical measure of whiskey, as if consuming a disinfectant’ (170).

11Full of self-hatred, the judge is forever stuck in an attitude of complaint. The tea is not served in the right way and people do not behave in the correct way. Far from achieving the kind of transcendence that life in Europe and a higher education should bring, the judge, a conflicted mimic man, becomes immured in himself, internalizing all the notions of cultural inferiority that are imposed on him by British imperialist ideology. Walled-off, he sees nothing of England. In a mockery of his early aspirations to transcendence, on the level of the present in the narrative, we are told that the ‘certificate issued by Cambridge University […] has almost vanished into an overlay of brown stains blooming upon walls that had swelled with moisture and billowed forth like sails’ (7). The aqueous season is the one the judge hates; it makes him angry; he finds that ‘it made a mockery of him, his ideals. When he looked about he saw that he was not in charge: mold in his toothbrush, snakes slithering unafraid over the patio, furniture gaining weight, and Cho Oyo also soaking up water, crumbling like a mealy loaf’—‘doors he had kept firmly closed between one thought and the next, dissolving’ (110). The compartmentalization the judge has erected in the name of control and civilization crumbles.

12The judge turns out to be the most rigid, walled-off, incarcerated of all the characters, and in those respects he represents not transcendence but immanence in its most static and imprisoning form. But even this immanence is not fixed. As already indicated, the judge, ‘more lizard than human’, with ‘a hint of reptile in the slope of his face’; ‘[harks] back to the prehistoric,’ and ‘in attendance upon infinity, he [resembles] a creature of the Galapagos staring over the ocean’ (32-33).

13Creating a character whose immanence in a rigid, small, self-imprisoned world blends with the timelessness of the ‘prehistoric’, Desai points to the immanent transcendence of the ultimate reality.

14Seemingly house-bound and house-proud, the other main character in Desai’s novel, the cook, in his ‘feminine’ role of cooking, cleaning, and keeping house, would at first glance seem to be a character primarily associated with immanence. On one occasion he is even described as ‘round and womanish’ (143). His is a small realm, and small things are associated with him, such as the tiny knob of a watch or insects in the kitchen.

15Associated with the minute and the microscopic, the cook is using and reusing ‘ancient bits of tinfoil’ that he is treating ‘as precious metal, washing, drying, using, and reusing them until they crumbled into tinselly scraps that he still couldn’t bear to throw away’ (32). In the wet season, he irons dry every page of the newspaper. In the upheaval of a police search he loses the silver knob of his broken watch. At the same time, the insignificance of the cook and his seemingly so limited existence is reversed in the exaggerating and enlarging stories he tells, as when he claims that even though he wasn’t bitten, the anger of the snakes in the garden when he defecated close to their territory made his body swell ‘up to ten times its size’ (13). Also, in his deep respect for nature, he regards with reverence the black cobras living in the garden, perceiving them as a respectable husband-and-wife team whose turf should not be trespassed upon by humans. Within the framework given, the cook, although he is ‘a smidgen in the scheme of things’ (55) turns out to be one of the most mobile characters and thus, in an unexpected reversal, would seem to be more linked to transcendence than the judge.

16Far from depicting an imbalance, The Inheritance of Loss points to a supreme and impartial balance. Humanity is better off, the suggestion seems to be, if we can hold on to a larger view of the ultimate reality of life. In this novel, it is the cook who, in his apparent immanence, is the character best able to do so.

17If we look at the landscape, we will see that right from the beginning of the novel, the depth and vastness of the natural world is evoked through references to distant mountain peaks that were once underwater, to the depths of the ocean, to the giant stature of trees, and to gigantic creatures living in the ocean.

18The transformative master metaphor par excellence in Desai’s novel is water in a myriad of manifestations. Water rinses everything away, such as the words written by humans (‘blue ink waves lapped the paper’ of Biju’s letter to the cook, 120). Water is also new life and new love. In the early stages of Sai’s romance with her tutor, water— dripping, flooding, and rushing—is a key element: ‘Sai thought of how she turned to water under Gyan’s hands, her skin catching the movement of his fingers up her and down, until finally she couldn’t tell the difference between her skin and his touch’ (129). There is an anthropomorphized mist that ‘[moves] like a water creature’ (1). Sai sees ‘the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders’ (9).

19During the three- to five-month long ‘aqueous season’, civilization almost dissolves (106). Modernity is almost extinguished, human inventions age and liquefy, and technology breaks down: ‘Phones emitted a death rattle, televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour. And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing, chilly and solitary—not anything you could grasp. The world vanished, the gate opened onto nothing’ (107-08). The power of humans is infinitesimal in comparison to the power of nature. Civilization is fragile; boundaries are eroded in the onslaught of nature. Desai’s description of the disintegration of books points to this larger level of life, where the fragmentation, dissolution and death of printed knowledge, the quintessence of culture and human sophistication, also involves a glimpse of how the huge is helped by the miniscule, how eternity is marshalled by termites:

The Gymhkana library was a dim morguelike room suffused with the must, almost too sweet and potent to bear, of aging books. The books had titles long faded into the buckled covers; some of them had not been touched in fifty years and they broke apart in one’s hands, shedding glue like chitinous bits of insect. Their pages were stencilled with the shapes of long disintegrated fern collections and bored by termites into what looked like maps of plumbing. The yellowed paper imparted a faint acidic tingle and fell easily into mosaic pieces, barely perceptible between fingers—moth wings at the brink of eternity and dust (198).

20The Inheritance of Loss teams with animals and insects as iconographic indicators of gains and losses, such as the butterfly effect leading to Father Booty’s being booted out of India (a story in which a butterfly plays a crucial part). The abundance of animal and insect imagery ties in with and reinforces a plot in which the microscopic points to the cosmic. Irrepressible armies of scorpions, giant squid, cats, dogs, cobras, insects, rodents, birds, wasps, butterflies, ‘boiling worms’ (141) march across the pages of Desai’s novel along with all the animals that the judge records as having shot (which he has not). Nothing stays the same. Human and non-human worlds are constantly transforming in Desai’s novel.

21In countless instances of an often original and striking imagery, human and non-human worlds merge, blend, or reverse roles, humans being animalized and animals being humanized; the judge is reptilian; an ‘aging uncle’ is likened to a ‘wizened bird man’ (169), and another character’s (Gyan) gaze is likened to a mouse (115). On one occasion, the judge’s penis, ‘[reaching] up in the dark and waving about,’ is likened to ‘a simple blind sea creature’ (38). Mutt, the dog, on the other hand, is ‘more human than dog’ (32). But Mutt is also primeval; during the rains, ‘Mutt turned into a primitive life form, an amoebic creature, slithering about on the floor’ (105).

22In this way, Kiran Desai’s novel alternates between human and animal worlds, home and diaspora, India and America, and between lifestyles that could be seen as opposites. But the divisions between the local and the global crumble when we learn how you can be as exposed to dangers and humiliations at home, as is the case when Biju returns from America. Some of the characters, such as the judge and the cook could be seen as opposites. Total opposites on a surface level, they are, however, just as the cobras in the garden, a kind of ‘husband-and-wife’ team. As such, each of them represents one pole on the axis of immanence and transcendence, an opposition that is reversed or undermined in ways that point to the underlying and indivisible unity of an all-encompassing, ultimate reality. In this regard, it is significant that both the first and last sentences in The Inheritance of Loss begin with the word ‘All’ (‘All day’…; ‘All that is needed’….). ‘All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the winds at its summit’ (1). Both at the beginning of the novel and at the end there are references to Kanchenjunga, and it is no accident that the painter Nicholas Roerich is mentioned (44), whose paintings of Himalayan landscapes evoke an extra-dimensional, spiritual dimension, especially, perhaps, in his painting KANCHENJUNGA (1936).

23One might draw the conclusion that Desai is depicting a dark and difficult universe that swallows and eliminates everything indiscriminately, a universe where nothing really matters. But things matter deeply to Desai’s protagonists (the cook’s love for his son being a salient example), who are described in such a way as to make them matter to the reader as well. Indeed, the narrative voice conveys a deep concern for the social and political reality of the inhabitants of this world. There is a strong sense of moral awareness and compassion.

24The point of this paper instead concerns what I see as a third level in Desai’s narrative, a level on which Desai goes beyond not only the pettiness of stereotype but beyond the divisions and limitations of human life itself in order to point to an ultimate, immanent-transcendent reality. Such a cosmic stance is no escape from social and political realities. Instead, it is a reminder of the liberating clarity of a detached and transcendental point of view. If the local insurgents, the GNLF boys who behave like hooligans, had developed such an attitude, their grievances could have been articulated and acted upon more intelligently and compassionately, and therefore more effectively for the benefit of all. There is no suggestion that a Western, humanist higher education necessarily leads to such an attitude (as the example of the judge shows us).

25While diasporic transcendence—leaving the immanence of home and roots and venturing out beyond known boundaries—would seem to be associated with (the hopes of) gain in terms of success, safety, and economic survival, immanence would primarily be linked to the stagnation of staying at home. In the final analysis, Kiran Desai’s novel erases all such boundary lines. The terms immanence and transcendence have been linked to notions of inferiority and superiority, as when Simone de Beauvoir points to the immanence of the housebound domestic work of women and the boundary-crossing work of men. In Desai’s novel, such understandings are inverted and dissolved as the judge’s transcendence in terms of career and status is shown to be hollow while the cook’s kitchen-bound immanence is associated with pride and joy. The destitute servant is lighter and richer than his burdened, embittered, and deprived master.

26On the larger scale of all-encompassing planetary life transcendence and immanence are no longer opposites. Instead, they are as indissolubly implicated in each other as the myriad life forms described in Desai’s novel ranging from interdependent armies of insects and animals to the gendered or non-gendered ‘husband-and-wife-teams’. Superficially opposites, transcendence and immanence could be seen as a kind of cosmic ‘husband-and-wife-team.’ ‘Transcendence and immanence are not opposites’ but ‘intimately imply each other,’ as Lata Mani has commented (in a different context). ‘For how else could God be omnipresent? It is only by embracing immanence that one is opened to the mystery of transcendence’ (2002).

27It is the ‘embracing immanence’ of The Inheritance of Loss that opens the door to the ‘mystery of transcendence.’ ‘[L]it by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender’, as Mishra puts it so well in his review, Desai’s novel shows, with compassionate detachment, the futility of thinking that we as human beings can grasp existence in controlling fists of atomized individuality. We are reminded that it is a mistake to ‘think there [is] but one narrative and that this narrative [belongs] only to [ourselves]’ (Desai 2006: 323). Whether we are aware of it or not, we are part of and mutually constituted by and within an infinite and intricate web that we seldom pay attention to in our daily lives, one that includes human and non-human, visible and invisible, worlds. Translated into spiritual terms, the ultimate reality, or divinity, if you will, is not transcendent in the sense of being separate from life as we know it, but is immanently infusing all reality. It is to Kiran Desai’s credit as a writer to have given us a pointer to the immensity, intricacy, and incomprehensibility of the universe we inhabit and to the depths of ‘a more elusive dimension’ (29). Desai’s descriptive imagery forms countless drops flowing into an equalizing narrative ocean that resembles and reflects this greater, ultimate reality.