Indian-born Booker Prize winning novelist Kiran Desai says she would like to be in India to celebrate the occasion as Indians care a lot for the prize.
Asked a day after she scooped the 50,000 pound prize where she would like to celebrate, 35-year-old Desai, without hesitating, told The Guardian: 'I would like to be in India.'
'Because they care for the Booker so much. Sometimes it means something in America and sometimes it doesn't. It would have been a lot of fun to be in Delhi, with lots of family and all the generations.'
Desai said she was doubly shocked when her name was announced as the winner on Tuesday night. 'I was very surprised. I was very surprised.'
After she was chosen for the prestigious prize, Desai said she didn't sleep at all. 'I drank lots of champagne and then tried to sleep for three or four hours and didn't manage to.'
Her phone, she said, is 'full of messages from three continents' and she has yet to even speak to her parents.
There is an added charm to Desai's win, as her mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the prize three times. 'I hope she has heard. But she's living in a house without a phone,' she said.
Her prize-winning book, The Inheritance of Loss is a sprawling novel that runs from the Himalayas to New York city, taking in Marks & Spencer Knickers, Grand Marnier and Nepalese insurgents along the way, and offers an insightful and often humorous commentary on multiculturalism and post-colonial society.
Asked whether she felt comfortable accepting the Man Booker prize, considering the inherently colonial nature of the award - a commonwealth prize - Kiran Desai said 'I'm not crazy [to turn it down].'
She lived in India until she was 14, when she and her mother left first for the UK and then for the US, where she has lived ever since. However, she still holds on to her Indian passport.
'Now I could become an American citizen, but then George Bush won and I've just been unable to bring myself to do so,' she explained. 'But again that's silly because of course I pay taxes there and don't vote, so it's hypocritical in a way, but it held me back.'
Increasingly, too, she is unsure that she would really want to surrender her Indian citizenship. 'I feel less like doing it every year because I realise that I see everything through the lens of being Indian. It's not something that has gone away - it's something that has become stronger. As I've got older, I have realized that I can't really write without that perspective.'
It was only when she began writing about the immigrant experience in New York that she realized she would have to return to India. 'And then, of course, I find myself at a disadvantage because India has changed, moved on. I go every year, yet it belongs to Indian authors living in India. The subject belongs to them. So the only way I could put this book together was to go back to the India of the 1980s, when I left,' she said.
It is this feeling of being caught between two continents that infuses The Inheritance of Loss.
'In many ways it's incredibly lucky, enriching, to see both sides. On the other hand I do worry. You think, what's next? This book is made up of many little bits and pieces, of half-stories, and immigrants in a basement you just see briefly as you pass by. So I do think, will I ever have an entire story to tell?' The advantage is that she feels she could settle almost anywhere. 'I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere,' she says.
Just as she has faltered in accepting American citizenship, she has been unwilling to embrace the American style of writing. Having attended a creative writing course at Columbia University, of which she says her first novel Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard was a product, she decided to start afresh. 'It was very hard for me to write like that,' she explains.
'They demand you write a certain way because you have to present your work in half-hour installments. You are having to polish only a little bit of it. It suits the short story more than the novel.
Desai chose to exit. 'I didn't apply for grants or writers' centres, I didn't join writers' groups. I just couldn't do it. It didn't seem an honest way to write to me. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to,' she explained.
Instead she lived on her advance, stretching it further by moving to Mexico for a while, occupying small rooms in overcrowded houses in New York. She did not expect, however, that she would have to live like this for eight years until the book was finished. The end came, she admits, partly out of financial necessity. 'I was very poor, and everyone in my family was saying, 'Oh, you're going to have to get a job.'
My mother was the one person who stood by the book, but everyone else was saying, 'It's awful, you really have to be responsible, you must get a job, you have to get health insurance!'
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