Kiran desai

When Kiran Desai's Inheritance Of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize, a few eyebrows were raised. Although she had a famous mother (Anita Desai) who had herself been on the Booker shortlist three times, Kiran was relatively unknown. Comparatively few had read her book, and the bookies had her down at fifth or sixth favourite. So far so normal – Hilary Mantel's victory this year is the first time I can remember a favourite winning. What was unusual that following on from its success the book was subject to Sadly, it wasn't fans of fellow shortlisted author Edward St Aubyn's Mothers' Milk stoking the bonfires, but the outraged residents of Kalimpong. The novel tells of a 1980s rebellion of the ethnic Nepalese in the Himalayan town, who were fed up (in Desai's words) of being "treated like the minority in the place where they were the majority". As the book details, the rebellion was bloody and chaotic. Its fictional portrayal must have hit a raw nerve, especially since Desai herself was, as one man put it at the time, " There's perhaps a small grain of truth to these claims. Desai certainly doesn't glorify Kalimpong's non-Indian majority. But the irony is that they get off lightly compared to everyone else. As she teases out her multiple narrative we meet over-privileged Indians who put on absurd English airs; racist, ignorant and distinctly under-intelligent English people; Indians in America who use Gandhi's image to make money while exploiting other Indians; and Indians in Am...

When I visit my mother, I catch the train from the Harlem stop and travel north along the Hudson river, named Muhheakantuck by the Indians, "the river that flows both ways". Her 170-year-old house has a silvery stone for a front step, horsehair insulation in the attic, wide floorboards of pine; they glow a fox colour in the light that is always luminous in this house, and is twinned to silence. It is a writer's house, an exile's refuge. Magazines and papers pile up, bookcases spill over. When we are together, I feel we are alone on a raft. Family is scattered, India is far. All that has truly persisted in my life is here. I sometimes used to buy India Abroad for my mother on the way, or mangoes from Haiti or Brazil, or typewriter ribbon. This time I dared a recorder from Radio Shack of which we were both scared, worried we would proceed to play out her novel In Custody , where Deven visits the poet Nur to record Nur's words. He fails, his tape recorder fails. But this one works, and I ask her to talk about her past. Her work has, over the years, centred on forgotten, vanishing worlds, art and language that exist on the margins. The epigraphs to her novels (TS Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Borges …) often make reference to the persistence of memory. She writes: "The ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past." Her new book, The Artist of Disappearance, is made of three delicate stories about the frailty as wel...