MEMOIRS
Quiet colours
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`Chasing the Rainbow is a rendering of Das's childhood experiences in Orissa.'
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"THEREAFTER I enjoyed every moment of my walk through a dozen or so villages — as the dogs barked at the smell from the basket and students and teachers of a couple of primary schools surrounded us with the request to take the lid off the basket for a moment as the news of the trophy we carried had somehow spread ahead of us...."
Then, a few short paragraphs later, a boy's proud status is shattered, and a Dusserah holiday worth cherishing turns sour as reality hits hard after tragedy strikes.
"Look here, my boy," said somebody wanting to console me, "it would have grown up day by day like the waxing moon and think of a day when we would have been obliged to live with a fully grown tiger. The government would have compelled you to deport it to the forest anyway!"
"And I would have gone to the forest with it. Do you understand, Uncle?" I shouted.
Thus ends the moving tale of an orphaned tiger cub, adopted and then found dead near a snake hole in the short story "Befriending the Dangerous" (p.98), noteworthy among the 28 pieces in author Manoj Das's collection of memoirs.
Called Chasing the Rainbow: Growing Up in an Indian Village, Das's 160-page compilation is a rendering of his many childhood experiences, set in his village Sankhari, in Orissa; an account between his fourth and 14th years of age, except on occasion when he has related the tales to a happening or observation of a later period. In fact, the title of each episode is a pointer to the passage of these "growing up" years.
Though an exercise in nostalgia, recreating many lost moments, situations and characters (this includes the famine of the 1940s), it is not, as the author admits, a sociological one.
Worth noting too is Das's preface, which sets the tone before one proceeds to venture further. In this, he touches upon the identity of village India — which though peaceful, was by no means passive — before focussing on the state of his village. Here, he says, the system of untouchability was unknown, and "the only `drunken' man I had seen leaving the village was in a drama".
While most of the pieces, including the Oriya versions, have been published earlier in various literary supplements, this volume is still welcome.
The minor irritant in this otherwise placid read is the occasional wrong use of tense, as in pages 7 and 33 for instance.
MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY
Chasing the Rainbow: Growing Up in an Indian Village, Manoj Das, OUP, 2004, xix+ p.160, Rs. 275.
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