HULLABALOO
IN THE ORCHID GARDEN
Sandip C. Jain

It certainly is in no way any inheritance of loss for her- infact if you consider the above thirty-five lakhs in Indian currency that she pocketed as prize money for winning the Man Booker Prize and the other several millions that her book is making for her being on top of the Indian Best Sellers list, its more of a case of that type of inheritance which a twenty something trophy wife, of a stinking rich eighty something husband, receives on his death. A more appropriate title of Kiran Desai’s book would have been “Inheritance of a Windfall”.
While no one should have any objection to this “windfall” that she “inherited”, on the basis of the literary merits of the book, we in Kalimpong should and do strongly condemn and object to the falsities on which the plot of the book is built on.
Ok, we agree, and are the first ones to do so, that not everything that happened during the Gorkhaland agitations for a separate state (within India) was right. There is no way one can justify the meaningless violence, the loss of so many innocent lives and the burning down of government property, but then one just cannot rubbish an entire society and a mass uprising, just because it makes a good plot for a book.
Desai, probably was just thirteen-fourteen at the time the agitation was at its peak (which makes her too young to actually make any rational judgment of what was going on around her) and probably was not even here in Kalimpong during those days ( which again impairs her judgment making capacity), to actually know the correct ground situation prevailing during those troubled days. Her ignorance of ground realities is reflected in a big way as one actually goes through the book that she has written. Her branding the agitation as communal, her implying that the Bengalese population in Kalimpong was virtually treated as out-castes, her labeling the most reputed tailoring house in Kalimpong as “deaf”, her pointed suggestion that the very revered Father Booty was a homosexual who ogled at Buddhist monks and her describing the colour of sunset on Kanchenjunga as “pornographic pink” , are some examples of her insensitivity to local issues. (By the way how did Desai know how or what pornographic pink looked like at a time when she was barely into her teens???? )
Miss Desai, do you realize or do you even know that Kanchenjunga is the most revered object of worship for the indigenous Lepchas of the region?? No responsible person, specially someone of your lineage, is expected to describe someone else’s object of worship by comparing it with anything that, even remotely, has something to do with pornography!!
Miss Desai is lucky that it is Kalimpong, its people and its history that she chose to rubbish. Had she chosen to do the same for any other place, there would have been a massive “hullabaloo” against her and her book. She is lucky that she chose Kalimpong which is a place which just does not react. After all Kalimpong has become something like a long dead, rotting tree stump, where every dog(or bitch) can come and relieve himself or herself and go away contended, without an iota of protest by the tree stump.
You owe us an apology Kiran and it won’t cost you a single penny out of the millions that you have already made at our expense.