["The Inheritance of Loss"]

Kiran Desai uses her great descriptive power in service of negativity, and that makes for vividly gloomy reading. Think photos of urban decay in HDR.

• All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.
• Gradually the vapor replaced everything with itself, solid objects with shadow, and nothing remained that did not seem molded from or inspired by it.
• Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipa- tion, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.
• For poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy. The cook knew instinctively how to cry. <> These familiar lines allowed the boys to ease still further into their role, which he had handed to them like a gift.
• He would receive a daughter-in-law to serve him food, crick-crack his toes, grandchildren to swat like flies.
• The police had exposed the cook's poverty, the fact that he was not looked after, that his dignity had no basis; they ruined the facade and threw it in his face.
• Awe swelled his words, made them tick smug and fat as first-world money.
• The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.
• They were poised; they were impressive; in the United States, where luckily it was still assumed that Indian women were downtrodden, they were lauded as extraordinary-which had the unfortunate result of making them even more of what they already were.