Winning a Booker prize one day is my dream, so it is an annual ritual for me to wait for who has been nominated and who won the prize. Thereafter, I make it a point to read all novels which wins Booker prize to see what exactly are the judges looking for. This has not been easy because some of these writings are so bad that one has to force oneself to continue reading cover to cover hoping that in the next page or page after that one will discover the beauty of the book which enchanted the judges.

Take Arundhathi Rais “God of Small Things” as an example. The story is so crappy that I wouldn’t have crossed tenth page had it not been for pursuing my dream. So I continued, like reading differential equations or fluid mechanics the day before the semester exam. The story and the language continued to be bad or worse till the very last page and then I threw the book away in disgust. Later on, unable to bear that fact that I have been fooled,  I sold it to somebody in Brunei so that I did not feel that I was cheated of my money. I only wasted my time.

Arundhathi Roy was famous even before she got Booker prize. Her mother is well known (and well respected, including by me) for the fight she made on behalf of Christian females in Kerala for right in family property. People said, though I don’t know if it is true, Arundhathi Roy is also related to Prannoy Roy, who is a celebrity in Indian Televisions. I tried to reason that it may be because she is from a famous family that she is getting the prize. Knowing how the western world still perceive Indian woman as underprivileged and oppressed, I also assumed that it could be because of her thirdworld identity that she got the prize. Whatever the reasons,  I was sure that it not because of anything I read.

One day trying to think positive, it dawned on me that it is neither the language nor the substance and not even her personal qualifications, which gave her the prize. It could be a trick she played in creating the book. Those of you who have read the book would notice that there is no continuity of time or space in the book. Chapters go back and forth in time It could as well be that she wrote a crappy story, sorted that into 40 or so chapters, then just mixed the chapters all together and then bound them. What resulted was still a bad story but one had to actually read the full book to find what the story was. The reader had to reconstruct the story into its logical sequence in his or her own head even to feel cheated. Now I don’t read a lot but I hadn’t come across this trick before and may be that is what won her the prize. Good for her, I thought. She is now even a bigger celebrity and is lending her name to causes worthy and otherwise. I think she is aiming at the Nobel Prize

So when I picked up The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, Booker prize winner for this year, I was still chasing the same dream. I knew she had even more famous lineage and literary contacts than Arundhathi Roy, but I wanted to check out the book anyway.

Well, it turned out that this book is very bad too, both in story and style. However, there is no trick either. Bad story is told in the very old style of narration, though occasionally going back through flashbacks in the mind of the cook and the judge.

The story is set in the foothills of Himalaya around the time of the Gurkha agitation. The main characters are the judge Jumunbhai Patel (a former Indian Civil Service officer), his granddaughter Sai, his cook, the son of the cook (who is an illegal immigrant in the US). Into the rather empty and meaningless existence of the Judge’s family comes Gyan, the science tutor for Sai. Then there are some peripheral charetecters who live both in the hills and in the US. The story is not developed in any direction, neither he full story of the judge (why did he leave the civil service), nor that of the Gurkha agitation (where it came from and where it ended) is taken to its logical conclusion. The romance between Sai and Gyan is cut off abrubptly for the most unlikeliest of the reasons. In the end, only closure in the book is that of the cook as his son returns to him in the very last scene of the book.

On second thoughts I shouldn’t have read the book, not at least when Siddharth was away and Babu was down with chicken pox. The atmosphere a home was already gloomy and the book did not help. Page after page, the book produced volumes of negativity. Everything and everybody in the book was a failure and a disaster. Not that they were failing in real life. Jumunbhai Patel, born into a poor family, survived on 10 pounds a month in the UK and passed Indian Civil Service successfully. A most laudable achievement by any standard. However Kiran manages to pour ice water (shall I say liquid nitrogen) over it and demeans the achievement by first saying he was not in the first list, then saying he was in the extended list meant only for Indians and finally making him the last in the list.

Every other character, their love, their desires are all painted black, blacker and blackest. Bijus struggle for survival is portrayed as meaningless existence. The wonderful affection which brings him back to India to see his father as the hills of Siliguri are burning due to Gurkha agitation is painted black with luggage delays and mean behaviour of Air France staff. In the end he is not even given decent clothes to go home to.

The fate of Indians is painted in blackest possible terms everywhere. In Nigeria, In Tanzania, in South Africa and so on. In the end the author falls to the same mindset which she is trying to expose, one of inferiority and helplessness. Now I must make a confession here. This is a period novel, of a time around 1986. I first came out of India in 1995 and the fate and repute of Indians have changed dramatically since. People no longer want Indians out, they want Indians in. Germany wants them, UK wants them, Finland wants them and so on. Not only that, others are now coming to India too. But I escaped the blackest of the periods I think.

The only positive character in the whole book is Saeed Saeed, the guy from Zanzibar (and not Tanzania). He manages to outwit the fathers of pretty and not so pretty girls in Zanzibar, he outsmarts the immigration officer with forged passports, he go around with all sort of women white, black, good and ugly, he move from job to job with ease. I must thank the author for not letting him die of aids in the end. White amount of black ink she had, that would have been an easy stroke.

Anyway, as I finished the book, I felt depressed. I felt like a person who have been peeling black onions, with other peel coming off as black, hoping finally some bright stuff will emerge. Well in this particular case nothing emerged. Only black, black and then emptiness. And probably it is this blackness which gave her the award. How black could one go/