Source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/manbooker2006/story/0,,1920237,00.html ***************** A passage from India Kiran Desai's Booker-winning novel tracks back and forth from the Himalayas to Manhattan. Just like the author, in fact. But rediscovering her Indian-ness was vital to her success, she tells Laura Barton Thursday October 12, 2006 The Guardian Kiran Desai: 'I see everything through the lens of being Indian ... I can't really write without that perspective.' Photograph: Guardian/Eamonn McCabe One day in mid-September, Kiran Desai went looking for herself. The Man Booker Prize shortlist had just been announced, and her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, was among the final six, along with works by Kate Grenville, MJ Hyland, Hisham Matar, Edward St Aubyn, and Sarah Waters - none of which she had read. Desai left her apartment in Brooklyn and headed to the largest bookshop she knew. "To the big Barnes and Noble. And none of the books were there," she says with a prickle of surprise. "Including my own." Article continues -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was only a few days ago that Desai finally met her fellow nominees. She arrived in London via the Frankfurt bookfair and a reading tour of Germany on which she was accompanied by a glamorous German-Iranian actress serving as a translator who kept her up late, drinking in Leipzig. "So I crawled on to the plane, went straight to Hatchards and met all the authors, which was very nice." She strikes the word nice so hard that it somehow rings true. It was, one gathers, all such a muddle of time zones and red wine and literary fiction, that when her name was announced as the winner on Tuesday evening, she was doubly shocked. "I was very surprised. I was very surprised." She says it twice, as if to cement the thought in her head. "I don't think you can ever expect to win." She resisted the urge to look at the bookmakers' odds. "Was I last? Second last? It's so funny really, isn't it? Suddenly you are a horse, and friends are calling up saying, 'Eat your oats and apples and don't break your leg or a hoof!'" This morning she sits eating her eggs Benedict neatly, looking faintly bewildered. "I didn't sleep at all," she says. "I drank lots of champagne and then tried to sleep for three or four hours and didn't manage to." Her phone, she says, is "full of messages from three continents" and she has yet to even speak to her parents. There is an added charm to Desai's win, as her mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the prize three times. "I hope she has heard," says Desai. "But she's living in a house without a phone." Desai's hunt for herself on the shelves of a New York bookstore, and the circuitous route to claim her prize, are curiously apt. The Inheritance of Loss is a sprawling novel that runs from the Himalayas to New York city, taking in Marks & Spencer knickers, Grand Marnier and Nepalese insurgents along the way, and offers an insightful and often humorous commentary on multiculturalism and post-colonial society. One wonders, therefore, whether she felt altogether comfortable accepting the Man Booker prize, considering the inherently colonial nature of the award. "Mmmm, I know," she nods. "Someone said to me, 'Will you turn down the Booker prize because it is a commonwealth prize?' And I said 'I'm not crazy!' It's also a hedge fund, so you have big-business qualms about that. There's all kinds of reasons to turn it down." Did she seriously contemplate doing so? "Nooo! NO! Because you can drag that ethical dilemma into every single aspect of your life - and that is very much what my book is about. You are unable to make any kind of rule, really, without it being messy and mixed up with the rest of the world, and mixed up with sad and difficult things. Would I buy this sweater? Where is it made? It's by someone poor in China and someone horrible is making money out of it. Am I going to eat this bit of fruit picked by whom? It infects every single thing. But I stand by the book's ethical sense, and it's a book that certainly says the opposite of many things that flags stand for." Desai, who is 35, lived in India until she was 14, when she and her mother left first for the UK and then for the US, where she has lived ever since. However, she still holds on to her Indian passport. "Now I could become an American citizen, but then George Bush won and I've just been unable to bring myself to do so," she explains, half-apologetically. "But again that's silly because of course I pay taxes there and don't vote, so it's hypocritical in a way, but it held me back." Increasingly, too, she is unsure that she would really want to surrender her Indian citizenship. "I feel less like doing it every year because I realise that I see everything through the lens of being Indian. It's not something that has gone away - it's something that has become stronger. As I've got older, I have realised that I can't really write without that perspective." It was only when she began writing about the immigrant experience in New York that she realised she would have to return to India. "And then, of course, I find myself at a disadvantage because India has changed, moved on. I go every year, yet it belongs to Indian authors living in India. The subject belongs to them. So the only way I could put this book together was to go back to the India of the 1980s, when I left." It is this feeling of being caught between two continents that infuses The Inheritance of Loss. At times, it appears to rejoice in the intermingling of cultures; at others it seems to inspire a wistful melancholy. Does Desai feel liberated or limbo-ed by her odd dual citizenship? "Both." She laughs, a wriggling laugh. "In many ways it's incredibly lucky, enriching, to see both sides. On the other hand I do worry. You think, what's next? This book is made up of many little bits and pieces, of half-stories, and immigrants in a basement you just see briefly as you pass by. So I do think, will I ever have an entire story to tell?" The advantage is that she feels she could settle almost anywhere. "I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere," she says. Just as she has faltered in accepting American citizenship, she has been unwilling to embrace the American style of writing. Having attended a creative writing course at Columbia University, of which she says her first novel Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard was a product, she decided to start afresh. "It was very hard for me to write like that," she explains. "They demand you write a certain way because you have to present your work in half-hour instalments. You are having to polish only a little bit of it. It suits the short story more than the novel. "You certainly can't sit there with the big, huge monster [novel] and function in any kind of way as an American writer, because you are constantly having to make grant applications, and you either have to exit that world or your work must change." Desai chose to exit. "I didn't apply for grants or writers' centres, I didn't join writers' groups. I just couldn't do it. It didn't seem an honest way to write to me. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to." Instead she lived on her advance, stretching it further by moving to Mexico for a while, occupying small rooms in overcrowded houses in New York. She did not expect, however, that she would have to live like this for eight years until the book was finished. The end came, she admits, partly out of financial necessity. "I was very poor, and everyone in my family was saying, 'Oh, you're going to have to get a job.' My mother was the one person who stood by the book, but everyone else was saying 'It's awful, you really have to be responsible, you must get a job, you have to get health insurance!'" In a few hours Desai will leave her anonymous hotel in central London and take a plane to Frankfurt. A few days later she will head to New York. One wonders where in her heart she would like to be celebrating right now. She does not hesitate: "I would like to be in India." She smiles broadly. "Because they care for the Booker so much. Sometimes it means something in America and sometimes it doesn't. It would have been a lot of fun to be in Delhi, with lots of family and all the generations." Her tiny hands grip her knife and fork tightly, and she suddenly looks terribly small and lost.