Look first at two other novels that were in quiet contention for the Booker Prize this year. In Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, a young boy is rudely prepared for exile as the politics of 1979 Libya come streaming into his family home. In Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, a British convict makes a home in 19th-century Australia, anticipating the guilt of later centuries as he places his new life in the midst of aborigines.

If it is to be even presumed that the Booker Prize for Kiran Desai means anything more than acknowledgement for a humane story very well told, it is because it labels together the interconnected themes of the year — and who knows, even the Nobel prize for literature, in case Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk or Arab poet Adonis win today, as they are once again the favourites to do. “Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them,” she says in The Inheritance of Loss about her large and varied cast of characters.

Migrations and lives being made over are the staples of quality fiction. In Desai’s telling of the insurgency uprooting the settled — though only recently — rhythms of life on Kalimpong hillsides in the 1980s, however, a pessimism is palpable. By this account, there is no evading the wages of these movements, movements of one’s own choosing or on account of others’ compulsions. To belong or to unbelong is beyond our choosing. Displacement is the dominant paradigm.

Strangely, in this cheerfully — sometimes disconcertingly so — narrative, the writer who comes to mind is V.S. Naipaul, even more so because two characters given to lively analysing dwell on him. In Naipaul’s body of work, finding one’s centre is an exercise in peeling through past movements. Desai’s stories leave one with the conjecture that perhaps that exercise is less centripetal; the effect of finding one’s roots, or of having those in close proximity lay claim to theirs, is to be scattered. The only way to stop being fragmented is to paper the growing gaps with self-justification, ideology, rage, stories, dreams, theorising, delusion, plans, regrets.

... contd.