KIRAN DESAI IS tired of being called modest. 'I get called modest so often that I now want to do something immodest,' she says, laughing. Some might say she has much to be immodest about. At 35, this year's Man Booker Prize winner is the youngest woman to win - and for only her second book, The Inheritance of Loss. How does she remain grounded? 'It's easy to stay humble, because writing humiliates me on a daily basis,' she says.
Desai is in Mumbai, halfway through a gruelling tour of India, where she has been garlanded, feted and her opinion sought on everything from racism to homophobic laws. Bootleg copies of her novel are sold by urchins on street corners.
'Winning the Booker was surreal,' she says. 'All this fuss is so different from the years I spent in isolation writing the book. I wouldn't even pick up the phone most days, because I didn't want to be interrupted.'
Desai spent seven years as a virtual hermit, living in New York in what she describes as 'utter penury'. She had no health insurance and stayed with relatives to save money. 'I'd save up all my illnesses for when I was visiting India,' she jokes.
Despite her precise, almost school-marmish voice, Desai laughs easily and often - usually at herself. 'I do wish I had given this book a more cheerful title,' she says. 'At cocktail parties, people keep asking me if it's a self-help book.'
The dark yet often funny saga focuses on immigration, economic inequality and globalisation. Jemubhai Patel, an elderly judge, lives in Kalimpong, a tiny Himalayan town. He's a bitter recluse, warped by racism and loneliness he suffered during his education at Cambridge. His life is disrupted by the arrival of Sai, his orphaned granddaughter, who begins an affair with her Nepali tutor, Gyan. Then Kalimpong is taken over by Nepali separatists agitating for an independent homeland. In a parallel narrative, the cook's son, Biju, struggles as an illegal immigrant in New York. The judge, Biju and Gyan are all stunted by the experience of immigration. Each is humiliated and humiliates in turn.
Desai says this bleak view of immigrant life comes partly from her own experience. She left India at the age of 14 with her mother, Anita Desai, a pioneer of Indian writing in English who was three times nominated for the Booker Prize. They lived first in Britain and then in the US. She went to high school in Massachusetts and then attended Columbia University. Her family history is full of travellers and immigrants. Anita is half-German and many of her novels are about displacement. One of her grandfathers was a refugee from Bangladesh; the other was educated in Cambridge. Desai studied briefly in Kalimpong and still has family there.