Books & Poetry

In a once grand house in the northern Himalayas live a retired judge and his granddaughter, Sai. Looking after them is an ageing cook. Sai languishes in this reliquary of a house surrounded by piles of mouldering copies of
National Geographic.

Two cultured Indian sisters also belong to this colony of Anglophiles. Listening to the BBC news on a crackly radio, they eat tinned biscuits and worry about the unrest brewing in this district of Darjeeling. It is 1986 and the Nepali citizens of West Bengal resent being the underprivileged majority; they want a separate Gorkha state.

A world away, the cook’s son, Biju, works in the sweatshop restaurant kitchens of Manhattan, where swell French and Italian eateries are ‘perfectly first-world on top, perfectly third-world below’. In the States illegally, Biju keenly feels his status as an unwanted immigrant. He longs to shake the ‘enormous anxiety of being a foreigner’ but this will only happen if he gives up the dream and goes home.

At Cambridge in the 1930s, the judge faced the same choice. Returning home to work in the Indian Civil Service, he becomes one of those ‘ridiculous Indians’ who acquire European habits yet remain separate. The judge realizes that Sai is very much like him. With a convent education and English manners, she is an ‘estranged Indian living in India’.

Desai fashions a single portrait from this mosaic. Each character arrives at a realisation of the truth about colonialism as unavoidable and implacable as the peaks of Mount Kangchenjunga.