TIOL and other miseries...

The Inheritance of Loss was a book that left me feeling a faint unease and left me wanting to read more… to arrive at a conclusion.

The prose itself was fluid… lyrical even, in some parts. The narrative was unsettling in parts. The uneasiness I referred to earlier was perhaps a manifestation of this character of the writing.

The “main” plot itself seems practically non-existent, where sub-plots abound. The cameos of Biju as an illegal immigrant, or Panna Lal as the thieving, scrivening cook who thinks nothing of cheating his old benefactor are poignant reminders of our legacy of colonialism. Gyan and Sai’s romance, Lola and Noni’s incessant old woman chatter, Mrs., Sen’s garrulousness—all these strike the right chord. The bitter old judge, caught up in his own miserable world—unable to embrace life, except in his devotion to Mutt, as it were—captures our attention. We laugh at their follies and smirk as they totter in their grotesqueness. This book is like a patchwork quilt—but the fabric of the quilt itself is missing. What perhaps is missing is the “fabric” of one storyline that holds all of these together.

There seems to be a self critical vein running through the entire narrative as it were, causing the post colonial Indian reader to pause and grimace as each well described barb hits home. Every nuance rings true and leaves a gash of a wound that feels too hard to fill. This seems to be the only common thread—a bitter, potent, and sometimes furious self recrimination that feeds on itself through the book.

The characters themselves inherit this limitedness from the plot. They come centre-stage and capture our attention and stop suddenly, stunted by the limitations of the story. There seems a sort of hopelessness and humiliation that are inherent in the narrative which the characters acquire and embrace.

The writing is fluid, beautiful… It flows to embrace each little crevice of emotion it portrays. It seems contemporary almost in the issues that it seeks to expose. It encapsulates and presents the dilemmas of modern day living in a painfully real way.