Let me start this off by saying that The Inheritance of Loss is described as "sumptuously written." I've never heard a book, or anything else for that matter, described as sumptuous, but now I may add that as a criteria on certain lists I keep.As one of the main characters, a judge, sets off from his native India to pursue higher education and elevate his class:
"The judge was accompanied by his father. At home, his mother was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of good-bye and the briefness of the last moment."
As the judge's granddaughter sits with the family cat, Mustafa:
"Then there was the cat, Mustafa, a sooty hirsute fellow demonstrating a perfection of containment no amount of love or science could penetrate. He was, at this moment, starting up like a lorry on Sai's lap, but his eyes looked blankly right in hers, warning her against mistaking this for intimacy."
As Biju, the judge's cook's son who is trying to make a go at it in America with the hopes of elevating his class, is delivering food on bike for a Chinese restaurant in the dead of winter:
"...he began to weep from the cold, and the weeping unpicked a deeper vein of grief -- such a terrible groan issued from between the whimpers that he was shocked his sadness had such depth."
As Sai, who has been studying under a male tutor named Gyan, confers with an older female ex-pat:
"'Time should move,' Noni had told her. 'Don't go in for a life where time does not pass, the way I did. That is the single biggest bit of advice I can give you.'"
As Biju reflects on the life of his nemesis, Mr. Shah, an Indian who was working toward the American Dream as the Indians at home saw it:
"Photos of the exterior (of the house Shah had bought) had been sent to all the relatives in Gujarat, a white care parked in front. A Lexus, that premier luxury vehicle. On top of it sat his wife looking self-satisfied. She had left India a meek bride, scrolled and spattered with henna, so much gold in her sari she set off every metal detector in the airport -- and now here she was -- white pantsuit, bobbed hair, vanity case, and capable of doing the macarena."
As Sai celebrates Christmas with her older ex-pat friends:
"For the occasion, the sisters had brought out their ornaments from England -- various things that looked as if they tasted of mints..."
As the judge consumates with his wife from an arranged marriage, who he's just caught powdering herself with his treasured American powder and puff:
"Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury -- penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of -- he stuffed his way ungracefully into her."
As all the characters are affected by India's fight for liberation from England:
"For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell."
As Biju calls home to India from an American payphone to check on his father during the revolution, only to have the conversation stifled by a terrible connection:
"He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war... He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual FuckShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swatikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse -- the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart."
As Sai searches for the object of her affection, Gyan, in his lower class neighborhood after he rejects her for no apparent reason:
"The churches were dark; the missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace."
