Fiction
Love amidst strife
SHEILA KUMAR
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This is a well-defined story with touches of beauty and pain.
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Hardy brings no baggage to the telling of the story; there is no question of taking sides or delivering covert sermons.
The Wonder House, Justine Hardy, Anthem Books, p.370, Rs. 250.
AFTER a slew of writers, like Vikram Chandra, Tavleen Singh, Shankar Vedantam and the incomparable Rushdie, who have appropriated Kashmir and held it captive on the printed page, along comes author/ journalist/ documentary filmmaker and committed Indophile Justine Hardy with her fifth book, The Wonder House. It's a well-etched story that holds the right amount of atmosphere and emotional underpinning, unravelling at a measured pace and is altogether an absorbing read.
The wonder house is a cedar wood houseboat in which Gracie Singh, a relic of a Hindu minor princess, irascible octogenarian and India-lover (England, she says, encourages one to die, while Kashmir makes one want to defy death) lives, looked after lovingly by a pair of Kashmiri women, the mute Suriya and her lovely daughter Lila. For a devoted friend, Gracie has Masood Abdullah, one of the brothers Abdullah, who owns the houseboat Gracie has taken on long lease. Into their far-from-placid lives comes young Hal Copeman, out from London, to do a piece on Gracie and of course, the strife-ridden valley Gracie has chosen to make her home. Hal and Lila fall in love, as indeed they must, and reap the consequences, as indeed they must, again.
Hardy brings no baggage to the telling of the story; there is no question of taking sides or delivering covert sermons. This is basically a well-defined story with well-defined characters; it just so happens that the tale unfolds in Kashmir, imparting and infusing it with touches of beauty and pain.
Deft touch
Hardy's touch is deft and sure, she knows the land she writes of. For the India that has always viewed Kashmir through a prism, the view showing either a flower-filled Paradise or a vale of death, The Wonder House is full of small discoveries: the tendency of the Kashmiri to spit about him in unbridled fashion, the Mr. Marvellous flower sellers, all descendants of one family, the half-widows, caught in a limbo not knowing if their husbands are alive or not, the piquant position of the men in uniform set to guarding Kashmir. There's a brilliant interlude where the valley is likened to a delicate porcelain cup, India the milk that acts as buffer for Pakistan, the scalding hot tea... or, it may well be the other way around; it is, in the end, a matter of perspective. It's all related in a manner deliberately cleansed of excess emotion but not wrung so dry that the empathy doesn't show through.
Creditable debut
The Wonder House comes after The Ochre Border, Scoop Wallah, Goat: A story of Kashmir and Notting Hill and Bollywood Boy. Talking about moving from non-fiction into fiction, Hardy wryly comments that some people thought she was committing literary suicide. "I think I was quite naοve about how terrifyingly competitive the world of the novel has become," she says. "The whole world of publishing is very hard to access. When you write a book about, well, say working in an Indian newspaper, as I did a while ago, there are not that many other books out there in the same field. When it comes to novels, off you go and write a complicated love story set in a very beautiful and tragic place and, every time you walk into a bookshop, you suddenly realise that there are shelves stuffed with love stories set in beautiful places."
For all the author's misgivings, Hardy's is a creditable debut into the world of fiction.
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