it's not just what happens, but how the author writes. the rape scene really made my skin crawl. her description was vulgar. i'm crossing my legs and curling up into a ball just thinking about it.

Anyway, he said to himself, money wasn't everything. There was that simple happiness of looking after someone and having someone look after you."

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In Chapter 11, the cook tells his story. He began serving the judge's father years at age fourteen. He feels disappointed for not having secured a cook's position with a white family. Despite his mistreatment by the family he serves, the cook makes up nice stories about how he is treated well by the judge. The lies help him keep his dignity. He needs to feel respected.

Desai says that her novel “tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant” and goes on to say that it also explores at a deeper level, “what happens when a Western element is introduced into a country that is not of the West”. Desai also asks “What happens when you take people from a poor country and place them in a wealthy one. How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time?” While through much of The Inheritance of Loss, the reader learns the past stories of the characters and how they came to be together, it should not be forgotten where they are. The experience of leaving India forced both the judge and Biju to confront their sense of identity in a way they never questioned when in India, but did they really need to leave the country to have that experience? The Himalayan foothills where the judge now lives is a landscape, a climate and a culture not easily recognisable as what most people think of as ‘Indian’, nor are the ethnicities that populate it. There, the characters are also in the midst of an armed insurgency whose recruits are fighting with the aim of realising their own country. The Judge and Biju’s experiences outside of India made them consider their identity and what it meant to them for the first time but perhaps only in terms of non-Indians and a foreign environment. For the Judge and Biju, the question of who is an Indian is perhaps less confronting but more uncertain within India. But from Gyan’s perspective, there must be an answer to the question since it appears to exclude him. The elusiveness of the answer is moot. Every word has been cleverly selected giving the text an overall thoughtful and thorough description. The action of the novel takes place in 1986. The novel follows the journey of Biju, an undocumented immigrant in the US who is trying to make a new life; and Sai, an Anglicised Indian girl living with her grandfather in India. ...Chapter 3 focuses on Biju, the cook's son who lives in New York City. He works selling hot dogs for Gray's Papaya. Biju constantly compares himself to the overly confident workers he is surrounded by. They are crude and take him to a prostitute, insisting that he participate, suggesting that he is not a man unless he has sex. Biju feels humiliated and does not feel himself to be a man. But there are also gentler pleasures. As much as anything this is a descriptive tour de force. There are fine evocations of the clean beauty of the Himalayas, the all-pervading dank of the monsoon, huge crumbling colonial mansions, crammed basements where bed shortages force immigrant labourers to sleep in shifts. Her prose is strong and vivid and generally a delight to read. Before long, he finds himself yearning for India. But it may not be an India he remembers. In the region where his father is also an underpaid, unrespected, food worker, there is a growing insurgency gathering arms. India’s Prime Minister was assassinated the year before and there is a feeling the country is being torn apart. This is one of my favorite novels written about Indian immigrants in the USA. I generally consider myself a fast reader. But I took one whole month to finish this book. There were too many ideas that made me close this book and contemplate it for a long time. The characters' lives are intertwined with the story of the cook's son, Biju, who experiences the negative aspects of living as an illegal alien in New York.

The cook sends letters to Biju asking him to help others get to America. Biju feels overwhelmed by these requests, and Saeed empathizes with him because he is experiencing the exact same thing. More than anything, the two aim to get their green cards. One day, they are swindled by men in a van who say that they can get them green cards, but in reality simply steal their money. Shortly after this incident, the Queen of Tarts Bakery closes. most of the characters are selfish and cynical, if not downright mean. the ones who aren't get treated badly. the environment is moldy and decaying. i felt like taking a shower after reading passages from this book.

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Besides, I cannot brush the idea that this novel was as though each story in each chapter had just been patched together as Desai’s successful breakthrough after seven years of writing it. Still, it is a tour de force. Congratulations Ms. Kiran Desai! I envy your febrile imagination. The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai is a magnificent, impressive novel that ultimately is disappointing. As a process, the book is almost stunningly good. As a product, it falls short. In Chapter 23, Gyan starts to think of Sai as being like the British. He begins to blame her for the poverty of his family. Biju finds work at the Ghandi Café, but the Indian owners exploit him and the other workers. They lower his salary, take his tips away, and make him work seventeen hours a day. From the start it is hard to engage with the characters as Desai chooses not to "formally" introduce them to the reader.