Books as News

As children walking up to mountain tops, we often shared a joke couched as a challenge. Who would be able to throw a stone to a place where our eyes couldn’t reach? From a mountain top, the world is not only all visible, it looks comfortably graspable. I like to think of the childhood game, the eye versus stone reach, as a good analogy for the oxymoronic character of provincial cosmopolitanism that marks life—and consequently its literature—in the Eastern Himalayas. What is it about the mountains that makes its literature a function of provinciality?

Reading Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, set in Kalimpong and America, I had the sense of someone folding the pages of books into triangles to make them resemble the landscape that had birthed this novel about an embittered judge living with her young orphaned granddaughter in a crumbling house in Kalimpong. The only other inmate in the house is the cook who serves them English meals, a legacy of the judge’s long stay as a student in England. The cook’s son, Biju, is now an illegal immigrant in America, working at cheap restaurants, sleeping in kitchens, all this to fulfil his version of the American Dream, to return wealthy to Kalimpong someday. All these tiny movements within these nearly stagnant relationships take place against the swift and rushed ambition of a secessionist movement in the Darjeeling Hills (a demand by the ethnic Nepalese for political autonomy and statehood).

The Eastern Himalayas, with their long history of migration between countries that are now marked as China, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and India on the map, have always had a nuanced relationship with cosmopolitanism. Provincial in every geographical sense, it is home to several geopolitical passes that have allowed the easy infusion of cultures that is to be seen, for instance, in the culinary and linguistic influences. I indulge myself with the thought sometimes—how mountain tops allow the local and the world to live in the eye, to look out and allow oneself to be studied at the same time. In the Kalimpong Novel, this is made possible by the invocation of the Kanchenjunga. Desai begins her novel by describing “the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.” From there, the peak, Desai takes us right to the bottom of the sea in the succeeding paragraph, almost setting up a code for the provincial cosmopolitanism around which she will structure her novel. Sai, the young girl whose destiny is central to the career of this novel, is “sitting on the veranda…reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its phosphorescence with a shiver.” Sitting on a mountain and reading about the sea, this vertical and lateral simultaneity that energises provincial life, is to be found in the lives of almost all the characters who live in Desai’s Kalimpong.

As I read about Sai and her curiosity about the world that she hoped to see but never might, I recognised myself as a teenager reading second hand “foreign” magazines with similar gluttony—they were once the world’s only telegrams to me. This teenage girl in a Himalayan town, an orphan in the care of a grandfather whose anachronism is the cause of much tragicomedy to those who share his house, is not only curious about the faraway in space. This is her unconscious and unstructured cosmopolitanism—the faraway in time, history, its record of people’s behaviour, people older than her stubborn grandfather, arouse her interest as well:

Burrowing the shelves, Sai had not only located herself but read My Vanishing Tribe, revealing to her that she meanwhile knew nothing of the people who had belonged here first. Lepchas, the Rong pa, people of the ravine who followed Bon and believed the original Lepchas, Fodongthing, and Nuzongnyue were created from Kanchenjunga snow.

If the provincial had any magic prop with which to...