Globalization and Gender continued...

History and what we may call postcolonialism and globalization, is one of the biggest actors in Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss. Linking the  lives of several families, within a social sweep that is almost encyclopaedic, Desai writes a novel where a  circularity of design and a symmetry of structure, affirm some sort of closure as both aesthetic principle and life’s resolution. Since the purview of this paper is short, I will only focus on what is global or what refers to globalization in Desai’s text. It is sometimes humorously and sometimes pathetically realized. Parallel to middle and uppermiddle class diaspora to the New World, is the journey of the cook’s son Biju

Biju goes to America on a tourist visa and never comes back. Initially he works for Baby Bistro and Le Colonial which was,

 “On top rich colonial, and  down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian and Gambian…….There was a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York, but Biju was ill equipped for it..”(21-22)

 He next  works for a steak shop called Brigitte, where the owner’s wife smells a particular brand of oil in his hair. Selling “holy cow”(135) as beef and therefore “unholy cow”(135 ) to customers including Indians, becomes too much for Biju. He eventually goes to work for the vegetarian Gandhi Café whose owner is a man called Harish, who also bears the name Harry. In fact, his dual name Harish-Harry becomes a point of fine irony throughout the text as an example of the commodification of the self that many Indians abroad put themselves through.

“Harish-Harry—the two names, Biju was learning, indicated a deep rift that he hadn’t suspected when he first walked in and found him, a manifestation of that clarity of principle which Biju was seeking. ..He[Harish] tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was authentic, if any (147-148).

Biju who  “possessed an awe of white people”(77) and a “lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else,”(77) learns from other kitchens how Indians are disliked everywhere:

In Tanzania, if they could they would throw them (Indians) out like      they did in Uganda

In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.

In China, they hate them