Displacement of Desire in Kiran Desai’s <i>Inheritance of Loss<i/>

Abstract

Robert Frost in “Death of a Hired Man†and Kiran Desai in The Inheritance of Loss expound two contrasting notions of home. While Frost in his poem offers a solid notion of home evoking its physical and emotional aspects, Desai as a migrated Indian novelist talks about the loss of home, making it fluid it in her novel. Desai singles out two characters Jemubhai Propatlal Patel, widely known as the judge, and the poor cook's son Biju, to exemplify this fluid concept of home. They both consider London and New York as cities full of promise and possibility, and wish to leave the homeland, India, to make new homes there. Jemubhai visits London when studying law at Cambridge while Biju goes to New York to make a fortune, during the colonial and the postcolonial eras respectively. Harsh realities do not live up to their expectations. Jemubhai confronts an intolerable existence in the master's land due to his racial, linguistic and biological otherness. On the other hand, Biju suffers from miserable working and living conditions in New York mainly because of his status as an illegal immigrant. Consequently, given the failure of their dreams and desires, they return to their place of origin. On returning, Jemubhai ensconces himself in a cocoon informed by colonial values, recoils from his home as a sordid place and becomes self-consciously an aggressive mimic man. Conversely, Biju comes back enticed by a romantic vision of a homely Kalimpong, only to be robbed of all possessions except the last scrap of cloth on his body. This almost complete physical nudity denudes him mentally as well, bringing forward an upsetting realisation that his fantasy of the homely homeland is illusory, resides only in his mind and has little basis in reality. The paper discusses this home/new home issue with the assumption that both colonial and postcolonial situations can displace the diasporic people‟s desire to be re-rooted, rendering them split and double simultaneously.