Lacking the knowledge or ability to provide the love and warmth his granddaughter needs, the judge hands over her care to the cook and her education to Gyan, a young Nepali maths tutor. They have few acquaintances other than a Swiss priest Father Potty and two anglophone sisters. It’s occupied by a cranky retired judge and his orphaned granddaughter, Sai. The focal point is a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the Himalayas. It’s an unflinching, unsentimental portrayal of what happens when people lose their way.

Nearly every character becomes humiliated and in turn humiliates others. We encounter over-privileged Indians who try to adopt a mantel of culture by using English terms and mannerisms, English settlers who are racist and desperately cling to the past and ignorant tourists who use the most desperate hovels to add authenticity to their holiday snaps while ignoring the poverty under their noses. But then she doesn’t seem to have sympathy for most of the people in her novel. It’s true that Kiran Desai doesn’t paint her Nepal characters in a very positive light. Kiran Desai was accused of including “condescending statements” and portraying the Nepalese as little better than criminals, thieves and fools. The town’s residents were outraged at her depiction of a 1980s bloody and chaotic rebellion by the ethnic Nepalese inhabitants. The issue was one of setting and in particular how she had represented the community of Kalimpong, a town in the Himalayas.

The controversy had nothing to do with the fact she had been considered an outsider for the prize or that some critics were less than enamoured with her book. Keiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss was a controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 2006.

The inheritance of loss novel