Bubble-making...

Context, they say, matters nought. Historical. Biographical. Nought! The author, they say, is dead. The text is yours to fancy-weave meanings out of it as you choose.

I find people finding pleasure in this. I do not.

I have been studying something I keep safe distance from generally. Poetry. English poetry, to be specific. Indian English poetry, to be even more specific. I have been studying it for my M.A. exam. As I am going through my course material (prepared by the JNU professor and littérateur in his own right, Makarand Paranjape), I am pausing, thinking, wondering. Time and again he stresses on how open poetry is to meanings and interpretations. When he goes a little further along the making-sense path, he inserts the “at least to me” qualifier. He openly admits that many of the famed, esteemed, popular even, poets can often be very vague. You see the symbolism but try as you might it can prove hard to find a coherent meaning behind it. Connecting lines, finding out how one idea progresses into another from stanza to stanza and how they relate in the process can be quite a task too, and not always a fruitful one. So in the absence of that coherence, the reader is supposed to have full freedom at interpretation. THIS is what bothers me. I understand that words, thoughts, ideas cannot be straitjacketed but isn't there a line, a line of reason, one should not (ideally) cross?! How fanciful can our fancy really be! Imagination is the food of art (or in more un-Shakespearean lingo, the life-blood) but can it have any real sense or be wholly satisfying if "reason" totally departed from the scene?

I can see what a volatile field of argument this is and how fuzzy the boundaries, but I have always had a compulsive need to “understand” things before I can truly appreciate them, even if my senses lead me on. So it bothers me. This ambiguity, this unsettled state of affairs, these contradictions.

In the end, I can only cling to very basic and very personal lines, which do not suit me, but which is all I have. And those lines do not let me indulge in fancyweaving. They barely let me reach down to the subcutaneous layer. Beyond that, I like not to go. My universe asks for some definiteness. And this is why “context” is not nought for me. For me, it is that which can help me in sifting through this... umbrella of meanings, and follow the one that the poet might have intended to convey. It does not follow that what the poet tried to convey is the ultimate in meaning. Because what was tried might not have been as successfully achieved. But that is another debate altogether. The intended meaning, successful or not, can yet light my path of interpretation.

A friend of mine writes poetry very seriously. She must have her own literary ambitions but “ambition” is less in her case. It is more a way of self-expression for her, a deeply personal exercise, almost a similar outlet as diary-writing is for some of us. So her circle of readers is small and private. She sometimes urges me to read some of her compositions. My deadened-to-poetry mind does not always get her imageries and symbolic representations, but sometimes I do, and when I do, I try to think as she might have thought. Knowing her and her style in writing poems, I can direct my analystic beam of light (*poker face*) accordingly. I need not fear that I will produce far-fetched stuff.

In a similar way, when made to read poetry, it helps in finding a pattern of the poet's thoughts and expressions. I need not distrust myself so much then in making sensible sense.

I would like to contribute a small point to Sujata’s text on Blindness below. She said:

A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters.

That would make it seem that Saramago contrived such a punctuating system for this particular novel, with a particular view in mind. But the same idiosyncratic punctuation is found elsewhere in his earlier work (for instance, in passages of Baltasar and Blimunda) and also in later novels. According to the author, his parsimonious use of punctuation marks “is related to what, in musical terms, is called the tempo, or the measure [of speech]. It is less the rhythm than the measure and the tempo. It is related to how the sentence itself is built”; he adds, furthermore, that “when we speak, we don’t use punctuation marks”. Rather than a local contrivance calculated specifically for the blind, Saramago’s peculiar punctuation is part of a more general attempt to approximate the qualities of real speech on the page.

(Readers of Portuguese may check his declarations here: http://www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.php?cod=5081&cat=Ensaios&vinda=S)

BLINDNESS, José Saramago

We humans have a great propensity for getting habituated and taking things for granted. Sometimes the most cardinal things of our life. Probably this is what makes José Saramago's Blindness unique and succeed in jolting our senses.

An unnamed country is struck by an inexplicable epidemic of blindness, a blindness that is contagious. People stop seeing all of a sudden, but contrary to the usual darkness that envelops the blind their worlds turn all white. The government goes on high alert and quarantines the first batch hoping to keep the rest of the populace safe till a cure is found. But the medical world succeeds in finding no answers and steadily people keep turning blind across the country. Panic rises, chaos reigns, until a time when the whole nation goes blind and when it becomes a struggle for individual existence, basically a struggle to find food and live on from day to day.

Amid but aside from all these is a horrifying chain of events unfolding inside one of the quarantine camps. An abandoned mental hospital where the first batch of blind men and women had been sent. In that first batch is an opthalmologist and his wife. As inexplicable as the blindness is the opthalmologist's wife's retaining her vision. She is the only person known in the novel to thus remain unaffected. Initially she fakes blindness to be with her husband but later on as things escalate inside the hospital it is this lone woman – this eye-witness to the grotesque reality – who holds out some hopes of survival for a small group of people, the group which takes the core story forward.

The novel has some striking authorial touches. The country is unnamed and so are the characters. The first might only just facilitate placing the story in an universal context but the second really has a role to play. We have the doctor, the doctor's wife, the first blind man, the boy with the squint, the girl with dark glasses, the old man with the eye patch and so on... but no names. Not once. In a world peopled by blind men and women, this is really significant. Names give us individuality. Names mark us out. But in the world of the blind, what means individuality and of what use such markings! The other marked stylistic peculiarity is the near absence of punctuation marks other than the comma and the period and the complete absence of quotation marks. The continued flow of dialogue without quotations sometimes blurs the difference between two speakers. A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters. With the demarcations between speakers removed, the reader has to grope his way forward just like the blind. This I consider a bit of an extreme reading. To me it seems more like an experimental ploy on the author's part. It definitely symbolises some of the confusion, but it does not go farther than that. Commas come at all the right pauses and once one gets into the flow of the story there are only a handful of places where one is brought to a confused halt.

" When the doctor and the old man with the black eyepatch entered the ward with the food, they did not see, could not see, seven naked women and the corpse of the woman who suffered from insomnia stretched out on her bed, cleaner than she had ever been in all her life, while another woman was washing her companions, one by one, and then herself."

Saramago's brilliance is in his leaps of imagination and his grasp of humanity. How often do we stop to think of what makes us humane, what bases our civilized state and how fragile is that basis? Saramago draws us deep down into an abyss where human dignity is crushed relentlessly. Robbed of the primary 'sense', life soon turns into an animalistic existence... living to eat and eating to live. But even in this world, polarities occur. Inside the hospital, we have the crooks who are still in the grips of greed and power-hunger and extort the other inmates and cruelly deprive them of food. In the end, when there is nothing of material worth left to be extorted, the women become victims of their base savagery. At the other end, we have the central characters who show true grit and sensitivity even when their world has been turned upside down. Thus even as Saramago keeps piling on the horror and accentuating the sense of nausea, he does not let the tragic circumstances spin out of control. The turn of events remain logical (even when stretched to their extremities), the horror remains believable, and instead of being paralysed by the grotesque spectacle, we are left shaken and stirred.

______________

Timothy Mo, SOUR SWEET


A kaleidoscope of Chinese cuisine and terror families with a generous helping of humour, Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet is a fine picture of multi-cultural England. Now, if that last comment sounds like a cliché, it deserves to be taken as a true compliment because the novel succeeds in transmitting the sights, sounds and even smells of the city’s colourful streets while treating that much-talked about phenomenon of multi-culturalism as a serio-comic experience.

Chen is a waiter in a Chinese restaurant who has been living in Britain for four years. His wife Lily is the daughter of a sifu, a slain fighter from Kwangsi. Till the age of ten, Lily, unlike her older sister Mui, has been trained in the complex and demanding techniques of traditional combat. So when we see her as the clever, yet solicitous wife of a waiter in London, we are a little surprised, so to speak. Son, or Man Kee (whose charm is enhanced by the fact that his head is disproportionately matched with his torso) is naturally the apple of his mother’s eyes, and for Chen, a future restaurateur who shall own a flourishing business:

Son was the most valuable long-term investment they possessed. On maturity the realisation of this asset could be worth far more than the business would ever return.

Elder sister Mui is for Lily, on various occasions, a help, an accomplice, and a rival for Man Kee’s affections. The sisters can deprive themselves of food, even as they overfeed Chen, but not for any stinginess on the part of harmless, good, kind Husband, poor soul. There is silent complicity between the pragmatic sisters who devoutly respect the place of the family head Chen, and any silent manoeuvres they make only seem to be intended at keeping the vital balance between Yin and Yang. They prove to be exceptionally smart and resourceful; Chen, taken by surprise, decides to allow that the women are far more capable than he has hitherto admitted. Supple, practical and charmingly unscrupulous Lily is soon perched at the counter of their own little food business as hard-working Mui runs around and Chen cooks behind the hatch connecting the seating room and the kitchen. Even clever Son starts contributing.

‘Now, Son, how much brown cash equals one green cash?’
‘Twice ten shillings is one pound.’
‘Son!’
‘Ah Mar-Mar, we play buying things at school…’
‘Clever Boy’. Kiss.

Mo’s eye for the comic is unfailing. Humour arises out of situations, speech and attitudes, leavening the narrative with a lightness that by itself makes the book unputdownable.

Lily burnt a whole series of prophylactic incense sticks in front of God… God was quiet black with smoke now but as ferocious as ever and the mantle of soot surely was appropriate, bearing in mind he was an adoptive Londoner.

The Chens' little eatery is named the ‘Dah Ling’ restaurant where sour and sweet pork is served to truck drivers and the naughty, giggling English girls whom Lily looks down upon with disdain. Strangely, the customers display great jollity in repeating the name of the restaurant and even use it to address the girls! :D

In Lily’s attitude Mo finds much to laugh at. Her mistrust of “foreign devils” and her horror at their condemnable habits reveal the prejudices immigrants nurture about the natives. But Mo is not interested in cultural politics: whatever is funny attracts his attention and it ever so subtly brings out the ludicrous in every stereotypical view.

Lily needs to convince herself of the superiority of Chinese culture and makes repeated attempts to drill this idea into Son's mind:

Really, there was no question how superior Chinese people were to foreign devils… They all looked the same to her. And how quickly their pink skins aged. How few types of face there were compared to Cantonese physiognomies: rascally, venerable, pretty, raffish, bumpkin, scholarly.

But when Grandpa is given free acupuncture treatment, Lily, who misses no opportunity to express shock at the English society’s treatment of old people, is forced to take a more considerate view of the foreign devils.

Intersecting with this innocent story of the enterprising family is the equally riveting tale of the other Chinese family, the Hung family mafia or the ‘Triads’. When the four disjointed histories of ‘Red Cudgel’, ‘White Paper Fan’, ‘Night Brother’ and ‘Grass Sandal’ appear without warning early in the book, the narrative threatens to break up. But this spell of incomprehension does not last long as Mo deftly weaves detailed descriptions of the meetings, plans and offensives of the Triads with simple sketches of the Chen family. As a trained boxer, Mo can visualise and describe fighting tactics as though he were writing the screenplay for a Jackie Chan movie. He also reveals close understanding of the innumerable stratagems and rituals that go on within the underworld where tradition and loyalty are invoked to trap pawns in ruthless games.

Mo’s style changes effortlessly from humorous to solemn, pidgin to poetic, always retaining the twin flavours of combat and cuisine.

So, again, the household changed (that amoeba), presented with change and challenge, shuddered like jelly on impact with the obstacle, but jelly-like suffered no damage, poured itself around the problem, dissolved what it was able to and absorbed what it could not. And went on its amoeba way.

If any sinister threat looms large, it is postponed repeatedly as people are given a few more -- and again a few more -- moments to watch television, water plants, listen to loud Chinese opera, drive a car without licence, crazily twist on a swing, chase a turkey across the backyard or make coffins for living friends. It is hence than when tragedy approaches on stealthy footsteps, it is absorbed into the story like all those foregone days of playing with life.

A thriller for those who like action and a heart-warming story for those who are fond of the humane. Sour-sweet indeed!

THE BOX

bumpkin version,

by Roger Maioli

Here is the box in my hands at last. Uncle U is dead these three days, and he left it to me. So odd, I was in this very hammock, it is tooenty years since, when Uncle U told me about the box, that he would someday quit all, and now indeed the box is be-quitted. Post-tomb-ously. It is a fine box, all endowed with corners, and guess: you throw it up, down it comes again. Ha ha ha. What is inside? That Uncle U didn’t tell. What do you expect, he was so meagre with words, never spoke much except it was to ask Mom, when will I leave the hammock and get myself into a job? I never approved much of his sowing ideas into Mom’s head, for then she grew full inquisitive herself, and I had to tell her, imperial tone, that this was between me and the hammock, adding some un-complementary reflections on Uncle. And then Mom said I was too hard on him, and if only I could see through him, but I was such a chap. But then Uncle was such a chap, you couldn’t have enough of his leaving you alone. He was the sort of person who would wake up of a morning and go tiptoeing to your bedside and watch you sleep, scrutinising you all over with great mirth while you were slumbering and drooling, all helpless. How does one like such an intermeddlesome fellow, even if one is his Heir Nominee? Furthersides, he was so puzzling, so fond of riddles, one of his most favourite was, A ghoul does boo and a cow does moo, what does a cockatoo doo? I told him I wouldn’t know a cockatoo if I found one in my porridge, and so he might as well tell me, what does it doo? And he only grinned and never told, and I was so provoked. He was such a chap, I am glad he died. But I keep my peace, for Mom would be wondrous pissed if she heard me abuse the dead. And then there is the box. What is inside? I am curious, I will soon open it. There is them stories when one receives a like box and one never stops talking philosophie despite we only want to know what is in the damn box. I read one such story, with all them long words, and what do you think but that the box was never opened? I was so provoked, I remember I gave poor Chummy a whomp, despite he was not to blame, the fault was an Irish lady’s: Miss O’Jajee, I gather. You don’t mess with mee, Sarah O’Jajee! Ha ha ha I gather I should write poetree: I have such a way with words, never saw the like. But later, now I am wondrous busy with this here box. I even told Mom to keep her mop company in the meanwhile. But before I set about opening it, I would fain know if it is worth the trouble. What can be inside? The only thing I would want now is Catherine Z. Tajones, and it is not her. I know it because I pressed my ear against the cardboard and called, Is it you, Miss Tajones?, and waited a good many minutes with no answer coming. Ha ha ha, as if she would fit in this here box, I deserve a whomp myself. Serious, the only thing I would want now is a beer, one of those that go fzzzz when one opens it, but then the fzzzz gets gone so soon, I don’t believe it would stand tooenty years in the box. Uncle U, if he died some nineteen years ago, at least there would be some chance that I had opened it and Lo, there is the beer, what with I am dying in this heat. But then nineteen years ago I was all for candies and little Laura Lee. Not that I am less fond of Laura Lee now, but beer, I found it stank so. Die whenever Uncle might, seems this box just can’t satisfy. But then, Uncle U was forever disappointing me. There is Aunt, she is damn pretty, I wonder what she saw in Uncle. He was short of one foot, and had such a gap between his teeth, he might spit a chestnut at you and never lower his jaw. Ha ha ha, this was huge funny. Where is Chummy, I need tell him this, he will laugh his molars out. Item: if anyone is peeking into these my loo cabrations, Chummy is my nephew, I am his uncle. I am an uncle of sorts too, but of a superior sort than Uncle U. I think I might be called Uncle Double U, just like George Bush and George Double U Bush. That is an improvement, I gather. But I was prosopopondering on Aunt: I would get a crush on Aunt if she was not Aunt, but then she was and what is one to do? The most I did was to watch her bow down to pick up her shoes, she sported such charming underthings, with stars, balloons, pandas, altocumuli, flagships, tango dancers, Eiffel towers, walruses. I once told Uncle to buy her shoes very sticky and hard to pick up, and he only grinned and never bought them, he was such a chap. But if aunts are sacrossacred, a cousin is only a lass who shares your aunt’s zip code. They are famous to practice kissing with, and so one prefers them pretty. And since Aunt was so looring, you might bet I would have the prettimost cousins in all Gloomystershire. But my cousins, if they had Aunt’s columns and arc-boutants, their façade was all ruined by Uncle’s brand of front teeth. But then I’ve already told you that Uncle was forever finding ways to plague me. When Loocy or Rapoonzel smiles, it seems it is Uncle teasing me by proxy. Now, redux: I am a superior sort of uncle. Chummy, he will have the prettifullest cousins, as soon as I manage to heighten Laura Lee’s opinion of my predicates. But it is safer for Chummy not to go about a-kissing, or I will have him whomped handsomely. I told him so the other day, and even procured him a sample, so as to render him watchful. I didn’t put too much emphasis on it though, for my purpose is disciplinastic, I am what they call a man of them worthy intentions. And I am fond of the brat, I own it. He has tooenty thousand freckles too much, but he is still the best thing Pam did. And I am his famous uncle. Now Uncle U, he could be a better uncle, hadn’t he been so morose and all. I gather he morosed down after he lost his foot back in the hazelnut festival, when one of them boisterous fellows who get by selling fireworks made a big show of his pyrotechnics, sending up a good many crackers, bangers, squibs, torpedoes, mortars, jack-of-all-devils and Old Cholmondeley’s gas station. Now Dad himself went rocketing over the parson’s roof and wasn’t any moodier for that, he even wore a placid countenance in his coffin. Uncle took it too much to heart, I say. I was only a boy (the dullest on sale), but I remember: before that he was a man-about-business, always talking masonry & roof-building, and I never heard he went about the place be-quitting boxes without Miss Tajones inside. And then he grew all laidback, and that is perhaps why he became in time so vociferous that such a one and such a one was jobless: I gather he wanted to hush down his own do-nothingness by trumpeting other fellows’. Mom says I am too hard on him, but then he took care to win her over: ever since Big Bang he took to visiting us religiously, bringing herrings and soap, and fixing small things, and sowing ideas into Mom’s head, and staring in silence, and it was then that he mentioned the box: that it would come to me after God took his other foot, as he put it. Now here is the box, and I never seem to get around to opening it. But Uncle U was such a chap, he gave me the creeps. Not that he was all funereal or that sort of thing: he grinned aplenty. But he had such ways. He would look at the birds and then look at you, and make you feel there is something wrong in not being up there with the buzzards. All shut up in himself, like this box. I tell you: I wouldn’t wonder if I found his lost foot in this box. That would be glamorous, and just like Uncle. (I might make Chummy deadly a-frightened with that foot, I say.) Or perhaps there is just a long letter, where he finally tells me what it is that a cockatoo does doo. That would be glamorous too, I wouldn’t mind some knowledge at this time of day. Talk of time, Mom is calling. The herrings are ready, the last herrings Uncle brought. They are splendiferous with butter, I will miss them. Will see to them in a minute, as soon as I am done with this here momentous business. Know what? In the end I am glad I have this box. Made me think of Uncle, I hadn’t really thought of him these many years, despite he was there so often, hop-hopping around and displaying a full Gibraltar at every grin, looking at them birds and sowing ideas into Mom’s mind. Such a chap. Perhaps he knew I would think of him. But then how would he know that, he didn’t have five ideas in that bald skull. The only way is, Uncle’s uncle left him a box too, and Uncle thought of his uncle then. The box may even have been the selfsame this one. There you have it. Wonder, I am full thoughtful today. Now, suppose this box is so prognostically entailed to mee, what is inside? I wonder if Uncle U knew. The way he was, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that boxes come with an inside, promising in contents. Go figure. Says Mom what she may, I never made head or tail of the old corpse. And I even tried, every Friday. But he gave me the creeps. Mom says it is time set people apart, it is generations. How come then Aunt and me were so pally? Here, peremptory and out loud: Uncle should have treated me better. He never realized I took exception to all his scrutinising and intermeddling. It is not generations, Dad was different after all. And I am myself different, a better sort of uncle, all open, a regular beeped. Chummy will tell you that. Ibid: he would. Good Chummy, I am so fond of the brat, above all now that Pam is gone for good with that rogue Fitzwilliam, if I set my hands on him he won’t hold a card before this full moon. But I am here for Chummy. I wonder if some day he will stop and think of what a famous uncle he had. I tell you: I know what I will do with the box. I will let it be. I will have the herrings & butter, and then I will call Chummy and talk business with him. Come one day I am off-hammocked (I really should write poetree), the box will descend to him. Then let him open it.

And see.

THE BOX (rustic Indian version)

By Saroja Phoney

There was the box in my hands at last.

Uncle had passed away after a brief illness, leaving behind many heirlooms from his own curiosity shop.

* * * * *

“Where are you, Little Anju?”

I pretended not to listen. The strange mounds in the semi-dark room frightened me, but I dared not switch on the light for fear that it would reveal other shapes with deliberating claws and tiny, menacing legs. A quick shudder ran down my whole body. But my eyes remained hypnotically fixed on the casket.

The wooden box was never hidden away; indeed it had always been the most obvious object in the room, the only one which was not covered or wrapped in lengths of cloth. But there was that dainty lock, deceptively tenacious.


My cousin’s eyes gleamed. Only the thought of breaking something could get him genuinely interested. He put in all his effort and expertise with professional dedication, but the lock stayed where it was: unperturbed, tolerant, twinkling at us.

“Hey, catch it, catch it! Groaaan!” “Come on you good-for-nothing, when will you learn to field?”

That call from the playground was enough to remind our Shattersmith of his greater loyalty and he darted out of the room snatching the cricket bat from the corner.

“The grapes are sour!” I muttered to myself scowling at his vanishing back.


Now I was here once more, but this time I was resolutely alone.

I reached for the box. I ran my fingers over the lid, delicately carved with the shapes of white elephants, a few coconut palms in relief. I remembered the time Granny had wanted a small brass vessel from the attic and, jumping at the opportunity, I had walked in with her, all set to take her into confidence, hopeful of finally having something out of a well-informed source. She opened her mouth wide in a luxurious yawn.

“That kind of jewel-box was such a rage a few years ago! I remember many friends picking up similar boxes on visits to hill stations. Ideal gifts for weddings and house-warmings.”

“Granny!” I exclaimed with impatience and disappointment, for this was far from the mental picture I had formed of Granny’s reaction when she would see the box. “This is wrong!” protested a pleading voice within me. “Granny should go all wide-eyed and speak in a mysterious, hushed tone!”

In short, I got nothing out of her.


“Anju, aren’t you hungry?”

If Little Anju had been able to ignore her precocious olfactory sense that day, she may have made away with the box and hid it in the fold-mountains of her wardrobe. But her grit lost to the terrifying vision of ravenous Cousin and his equally gluttonous father – who happened to be the proprietor of the article she was about to thieve – devouring every morsel of grandmother’s mango pudding made sparingly on exactly two Sundays every summer. Anju’s unfailingly sensible mind told her that an immediate and guaranteed blessing was not to be thrown away for a merely probable one.


What made me so curious, so covetous of the box? I can find no explanation but the obvious one: the fascination of a child with an active mind and fertile imagination nourished plentifully with a perennial supply of illustrated storybooks. And Uncle’s enigmatic ways.

Every once in a while, Uncle would visit the attic room and survey the objects there. He would always keep the door shut, but would leave it unlocked. So we often managed sneak peeks into the room. On these occasions, he would pick up the box in the corner, scrutinise the lock and wipe the dust off the box with a thoughtful expression.

Unable to contain my inquisitiveness, I made oblique references to the box whenever I could. But Uncle would only offer the remark, “Ah! That is a special box.”

On one such occasion I was convinced that I had finally got him talking. “Let me tell you a story”, he began, and I held my breath at the prospect of the revelation.

“Do you know what happens when you are too greedy?”

I quickly averted my eyes.

“Let us go back to our story then. Portia, The noble and beautiful maiden, had several suitors…”

I listened captivated, sure that uncle had had adventures in strange lands.

Three boxes appeared in the tale. I waited and waited for Uncle himself to make an appearance, but Portia wed and there was no sign of Uncle. Shakespeare had hoodwinked me.

Four summers passed by in this treasure hunt, but I still had had no luck with the box. Next summer I would not be back at my uncle’s house, for he was to lock up the large ancestral home and leave for Singapore. Meanwhile, I was ‘growing up’ and was to be soon packed off to a boarding school. I decided in desperation that confrontation was the only course left.

“Uncle…”

Uncle was seated on his favourite swing, enjoying the cool shade of the veranda, with a dreamy expression on his face and half-closed eyes.

“Hello, Anju”, he replied without opening his eyes.

“Uncle, may I ask you something?” I ventured, nervously fingering the tassels of my skirt.

Uncle was by no means a formidable person. Never would he reprimand children or so much as look sternly at them. But there was an inexplicable air of self-possession in him, mingled with a tinge of astuteness and a glint in his eyes that bespoke of what all clever children learn to be watchful of: intelligence. Uncle was regarded as the very epitome of virtue by every one of his acquaintances. Respected and admired by all the adults in the family for his uprightness and few words, he had a special place among the children as well. The kids were both immensely fond of him and wary of him, for he had the uncanny knack of gliding into the exclusive fortified world children build for themselves, that most obtuse adults can never enter.

I struggled to phrase the next sentence.

“What about the box, Anju?”

I was so startled that I nearly ripped off the delicate tassels. When I looked up, I saw that Uncle was smiling broadly at me, evidently enjoying the effect of his remark. When I finally managed to shut my mouth, which had hung open for a full minute, he said to me kindly, “You are an inquisitive little girl. Let us have a deal. The box shall be your inheritance after my lifetime.”

This was such an unexpected statement that I could not grasp anything for a few minutes. He couldn't have been joking, for he had said it with a quiet finality. I understood that it was now a law: I was not to have any more designs on the box till it was rightfully mine.

* * * * *

Sixteen years later, the box still had the same lustrous, timeless look. The clasp was as strong as ever. The lock showed no signs of rust; it twinkled familiarly at me in a mischievous way as it had whenever I had tried to tamper with it. With a slight jolt I took in the perplexing feeling that it was the same twinkle I had glimpsed so often in my late uncle’s eyes.

I opened the pouch handed over to me with the box and extracted the small nondescript key. Immediately, all those faded years in between gave way and Little Anju took possession of me. I ran to the terrace of the now ramshackle house. The lock clicked open as if it only needed the touch of my hand to oblige.

Two envelopes.

I saw Anju tiptoeing up to the room, carefree and assured that the afternoon had lulled all but her to sleep. Here Anju put out her hand for the box, as if it were an enchanted object. Ten-year-old Anju prodded at her grandmother’s false teeth, a furtive look in her eyes. Cousin and Anju stared with intent faces, trying to persuade the lock to yield. Anju’s scowl captured in all its natural grace glowered at me. And… in Anju’s hand lay a little colourful pendant stolen from a two-year-old cousin. I winced as the guilt of a motiveless childhood crime resurfaced like an unhealed wound.

My first reaction was hatred of my uncle for his brazen voyeurism into a child’s deepest secrets. But how and when had he managed to click all these photographs? It was eerie: he seemed to have followed me purposefully, as if he were aware of precisely what I would do. My hatred soon turned into embarrassment and amazement.

The second envelop seemed to be much older. It contained two photographs. One was of a teenager I recognised from an old album of uncle’s. I gave a start as I saw him clearly nicking money from the purse his mother had tucked beneath her pillow, even as granny dozed, her head resting on the pillow. At the back of the photograph were the words, “The Virtuous Man”. The second picture was of uncle on his swing, as I knew him, smiling at me his kind, wise smile.

In a moment he had won back all my affection redoubled.

Only one question remained in my mind: why had he never told anyone? I was about to shut the box when I saw a small slip of paper that had escaped my notice.

“None of us like to be caught, do we?”

As I retraced my steps back from the terrace, I saw my cousin huddled over something in the attic room, which was now almost bare. He raised his eyes as I walked in, a baffled look on his face. An assortment of tools lay about him. In his hands he held an old camera, so carefully as if it were the most fragile object on earth.

“Father left this to me saying he could not think of a more precious possession to bequeath his son.” I could detect a slight tremor in his voice.

“Funny I never saw him use it”, he added, as he sat there carefully mending it.


------------------------------------------------

The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

It was not without uneasiness that I took it upon myself to comment on this novel when both my co-bloggers are Indians; but The Namesake is the best novel I have read in a long while, and that is always reason enough to be a little forward

Despite her birth in London and her lifelong residence in the US, Jhumpa Lahiri confesses herself resigned to the label “Indian American”, and her preferred subject matter does justice to this description. The Namesake deals with the experiences of a family of Indian (Bengali) immigrants in America, the Gangulis; Ashoke, the father, and Ashima, the mother, are cleft between their loyalty to their Bengali origins and the need to adapt to their adopted country, while their son Gogol is bent on shedding his Bengali legacy and embracing an all-out American existence. Out of this material, Lahiri has created what is to my view an impressive and delightful narrative.

So far my Indian friends have been unanimous in liking the book less than I did. (I must exonerate Sujata, who is still to take the plunge.) One obvious reason for this is that they are much more familiar with Indian English writers, which renders them less impressionable and much keener to spot the stereotypical. Another is that they take for granted a great deal in Indian culture that may surprise the interested dummy. I am slowly getting acquainted with India and its complexities, being already able to have occasional insights where all used to be darkness. When Ashima’s mother tells her to “go straight to the bedroom and prepare herself,” because “a man was waiting to see her,” my recent knowledge of arranged marriages in India loaded her sentence with implications that are lost on a dummier-than-me while being commonplace for Indians. The same applies to Gogol’s difficulties in learning to write Bengali, a language I have been toying with myself: I could easily sympathise with his pains, which wouldn’t sound so true to people who have never struggled with a Brahmic script or who have known one since forever. For these and other glimpses of understanding and sympathy I couldn’t help feeling grateful. The same applies to the conspicuousness of the American university circuit in the book; I am now hoping to enter that very world, which makes any realistic depictions of it deeply interesting for me.

So, yes, my present interests were a major personal factor behind my good opinion of the novel, and they can’t be shared by readers differently placed. That said, I still think there are considerable merits of another sort in The Namesake, merits which are less dependent on personal circumstances. If it is true that Lahiri’s theme (the so-called “diasporic predicament”) is now stereotypical among Indian English writers, it is also true that stereotypes may be originally and skilfully handled. Lahiri’s characters are engagingly portrayed (Ashima is a tour de force), she has a special eye for the telling detail, some passages are truly well contrived (the package lost in the train, the phone call from India contrasting with the local, “American” noise of water running from an open tap, Ashima's lonely nights before a TV with the sound off), and descriptions are overall well controlled, avoiding at once the extremes of prudishness and that concentration on sordidness I was sorry to find in Arundhati Roy and Anita Desai. Moreover, the usual charge that The Namesake lacks thematic cohesiveness (for instance, in the seeming irrelevance of the title and in the alleged looseness of its second half) doesn’t seem fair to my view. I will try to justify the opposite claim: that the title is all-important and informs the main thread of the novel, which is consistently pursued in both halves of it.

Readers of the book know that the protagonist was named after the novelist Nikolai Gogol, whose tale “The Overcoat” led to Ashoke being rescued from a train disaster in India before his son’s birth. The protagonist, then, is the novelist’s “namesake”, and his obscure relation to the true Gogol is a major source of wonder for readers. What is then the parallel, besides the fact that the historical Gogol also dropped a surname and visited Rome? I will suggest one below, which won’t be very relevant, however, unless I advance a previous bit of information. The younger cousins of Jhumpa Lahiri had a friend, a little boy, whose pet name was Gogol, and since her acquaintance with him Lahiri had wanted to write about a character with that name¹. She was in a position to appreciate the problems such a character would face, since her own name (originally meant to be a pet name — a Bengali daknam) had been an early source of vexation to her. Now, although I am sure she could have found some more meaningful parallel in case she had looked for it, “Gogol” does bring an important implication: like the novel’s protagonist, Nikolai Gogol was a man who steered away from his Ukrainian heritage in order to embrace Russian culture and language. Given Lahiri’s previous fondness for the name, this parallel was probably enough to justify her choice.

If that was all, we might justly say that the title is a trifle. But the word “namesake” here has symbolic implications as well: it stands not only for the association of Gogol with a writer he prefers not to know, but also for his association with a culture he prefers not to acknowledge. From the start, the name “Gogol” stands for the Bengali immigrant contained in the protagonist. When his father finally tells him the secret reason behind his name (the train accident that also made him decide to leave India), the sound of that name suddenly

means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years. “Is that what you think of when you think of me?” Gogol asks him. “Do I remind you of that night?”

“Not at all,” his father says eventually, one had going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. “You remind me of everything that followed.”

“Everything that followed” is the immigration experience, the complex attempt to find a new place to live without becoming deracinated in the process. The word “Gogol” is intrinsically related to all that, so that in the context of the novel to keep that name, to be a “namesake”, is to be a Bengali immigrant, only half-American.

Emancipation, on the other hand, must involve a change in status. Gogol’s status as a “namesake” is accordingly fleeting: he changes his name to Nikhil, which coincides with his move away from his family and from his Bengali inheritance. The second half of the novel concentrates at first on his attempts to bury Gogol and be Nikhil for good. This quest for a thorough americanness is illustrated by his long affair with Maxine. His father’s death, however, shatters his determination, and his relationship crashes down. It is from this point, when “Nikhil” has already built an existence of his own, that echoes from his former life as Gogol — from his former status as a namesake — start calling him back to his family. His next big affair with Moushumi is a result of his re-approximation to his mother. But Moushumi herself is way too de-Bengalised to be a fit match for him at such a juncture: she was determined from childhood to avoid Bengalis, she can’t write the language, she knows about his name but makes a joke of it. “Gogol” has no serious place in her life. And “Nikhil” can no longer stand on his own.

What started as a movement towards independence has become a movement towards disorientation, with Gogol willing to accept his Bengali side in the very moment when he could no longer sustain it. This feeling reaches its height for Gogol when his mother, after years of widowhood, decides to move back to Calcutta:

Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace at all.

This kind of fear — the fear that the passing away of the original immigrants will result in the offspring having no firm identity — is very much shared by the writer. In Lahiri’s words:

I have always believed that I lack the authority my parents bring to being Indian. But as long as they live they protect me from feeling like an impostor. Their passing will mark not only the loss of the people who created me but the loss of a singular way of life, a singular struggle. (...)

Everything will change once they die. They will take certain things with them—conversations in another tongue, and perceptions about the difficulties of being foreign. Without them, the back-and-forth life my family leads, both literally and figuratively, will at last approach stillness. An anchor will drop, and a line of connection will be severed.²

That movement from denial to acceptance to deracination is the main thread of the book, and the author, as I hope to have shown, never loses sight of it. In the final chapter Gogol finally realises that never again will he be able to be a “namesake” (bearing in mind the symbolic implications of the word), and that his life will be thereafter confined to his partial identity as Nikhil. It is then that he goes back to the old volume of Gogol’s short stories that his father had left him. It was his first and last link to a world that from then on would belong to the past.

Notes:

1. She tells the story herself in a video about the book:

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/video/lahiri_high.wmv

2. Newsweek, March 6, 2006:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11569225/sit