Dareechah-e-Nigaarish

 Kiran Desai, an Indian novelist

Urdu translation by Talat Afroze of an excerpt from Kiran Desai's first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" follows:

Brief Biographical Sketch of Kiran Desai (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Kiran Desai (born 3 September 1971) is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize^[1] and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.[



Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai, herself short-listed for the Booker Prize on three occasions. She was born in Chandigarh on 3 September, and spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. She studied in the Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India at 14, and she and her mother then lived in England for a year, and then moved to the United States, where she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University.

Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received accolades from such notable figures as Salman Rushdie.^[4] It won the Betty Trask Award,^[5] a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.

Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, (2006) was widely praised by critics throughout Asia, Europe and the United States. It won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, as well as the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.^[2]

In August 2008, Desai was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme hosted by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3.^[7] In May 2007 she was the featured author at the inaugural Asia House Festival of Cold Literature.

She was awarded a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.



Opinion (Talat Afroze):

"The Inheritance of Loss" a 2006 novel by Kiran Desai .... I found it to be an absorbing story of coming to age of an orphaned Indian girl living in a mountain resort (Nainitaal or Mussoorie, I forget which) with her Grandpa who is a retired judge ... the characters are riveting and the story unfolds beautifully ..

Review of Inheritance of Loss from Amazon.com:

"In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world."

Review of Inheritance of Loss from Wikipedia:

The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Man Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007,[1] and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award.

It was written over a period of seven years after her first book, the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.[2][3] Among its main themes are migration, living between two worlds, and between past and present.

From the 2006 Review by The New York Times ...

ALTHOUGH it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980's, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.

From the 2006 Review by The Guardian:
"The Inheritance of Loss is set in the Himalayas, "where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim ... it had always been a messy map". A young Indian girl, Sai, lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, in a damp and crumbling house. Sai has started a relationship with her Nepalese maths tutor, Gyan. But, unknown to her, Gyan has become seduced by a group of Nepalese insurgents, some of whom are, as the book opens, marching to Sai's house to steal food, Pond's Cold Cream, Grand Marnier, and her grandfather's old rifles.

This incident makes up the first, grim chapter of the book. There is something about Desai's description that touches on humour, and yet it is much too painful to be funny. Even the judge's dog is wrong-footed in the encounter: "Mutt began to do what she always did when she met strangers: she turned a furiously wagging bottom to the intruders and looked around from behind, smiling, conveying both shyness and hope." The judge is so deeply humiliated by having to prepare tea for the intruders that Sai has to pretend not to see what has happened. "Both Sai and the cook had averted their gaze from the judge and his humiliation ... it was an awful thing, the downing of a proud man. He might kill the witness."

From the 2009 Review by The Guardian:

"The Inheritance of Loss is a geographically divided novel: in a mouldering house in the foothills of the Himalayas, a retired judge lives with his teenage granddaughter Sai, looked after by his nameless cook. Meanwhile, in the dungeon-kitchens of New York, the cook's son Biju scrapes a living in the cheap restaurants of the city, an illegal immigrant sleeping in cellars with others like himself. Chapter by chapter, we move between India and America. This is a novel all about divisions: between continents, between nationalities, between religions.

But the most important divisions are typographic. Each one of the novel's 53 short chapters is subdivided into sections, separated from each other by centre-justified lines. The typographic device is conventional enough (you can find it in Pride and Prejudice) but it is unusual for it to be as frequent as it is here. The author has introduced hundreds of gaps into her narrative. Sometimes the sections of text that she separates from each other are only a few sentences long. The experience of reading The Inheritance of Loss is shaped more than anything else by the cuts and jumps between them.

A novel of shifting points of view, The Inheritance of Loss flits from one character to another, from one emotion or sense impression to the next, its narrative form acting out the sense of dislocation that is its theme. The division of the narrative into these self enclosed sections conveys the peculiar mix of stasis and episode that distinguishes life at Cho Oyu, the extraordinary house "built long ago by a Scotsman" whose spirit had told him that it was "wild and brave" to live in this inaccessible place. Life in the house is fragmented into the different perceptions of its inhabitants, the three of them intimate yet utterly separate. Meanwhile, in America, there is no narrative pattern to Biju's endeavours (despite the tall stories his father tells back home about his progress). We get a mere sequence of his experiences – vignettes that are sometimes grim, sometimes comic. There is just the struggle to survive – to find work, food, sleep."



Amazon's Review of Kiran Desai's first novel .... 

 Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard—Desai’s dazzling debut novel—is a wryly hilarious and poignant story that simultaneously captures the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience. Sampath Chawla was born in a time of drought into a family not quite like other families, in a town not quite like other towns. After years of failure at school, failure at work, of spending his days dreaming in tea stalls, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much—until one day he climbs a guava tree in search of peaceful contemplation and becomes unexpectedly famous as a holy man, sending his tiny town into turmoil. A syndicate of larcenous, alcoholic monkeys terrorize the pilgrims who cluster around Sampath’s tree, spies and profiteers descend on the town, and none of Desai’s outrageous characters goes unaffected as events spin increasingly out of control.