Midway through Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Inheritance of Loss, a young Gurkha man in the process of being won over to the GNLF insurgency of the 1980s recalls meeting an old uncle. The uncle, fallen off the map for so long in the service of the British army, alights from a bus in Kalimpong, a toe missing and silence holding back memories of his travels. But once he is asked what England had been like. The uncle responds that he does not know, he had never been there.

His listeners are stunned: “All these years in the British army and he had never been to England! How could this be? They had thought he had prospered and forgotten them, living like a London lord.”

Where had they been, indeed. It takes all of Desai’s joyous prose and sensitive understanding of history to track the cities and countries the men and women in her novel are displaced from, and the cities and countries they try to remake themselves in. Migration has long been a staple of literary fiction. But what makes The Inheritance of Loss exceptional is Desai’s patience and wit in staying close to each of her characters to work out their back stories in order to bind them in quiet understanding that each is the sum of the places in his/her life.

At the heart of the novel are the parallel stories of Sai and Biju. Sai came to this Kalimpong hillside to reside with her grandfather, an ICS man who took early retirement and retreated as far away as he could from his native Gujarat to solitary teas of scones and games of chess. Sai’s parents - estranged from him - had died while training to be space pilots in Moscow and she was expelled from her Dehradun school.

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