Fiction
Understanding the past
HARINI NARAYANAN
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Akbar has a genius for placing ordinary occurrences in a broader historical matrix.
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Blood Brothers: A Family Saga, M.J. Akbar, Lotus Collection/ Roli Books, Rs. 395.
AS this reviewer read the last, moving pages of M.J. Akbar's latest book, Blood Brothers, there was news of fresh communal violence in Gujarat. Sometimes, it seems like the more things change, the more they stay depressingly the same... For, Akbar's fictionalised family history ends in the late 1960s with a brutal coming-of-age experience for the 17-year-old narrator, as one of his closest friends, a Hindu, falls to a bullet meant for himself. After the madness recedes temporarily from Telinipara, a one-jute-mill town near Chandernagore, which is home to the young Mobashar (M.J.) Akbar, he returns to college in Calcutta.
The narrator's father and grandfather have both lost close friends to communal killings, too. In the dark days after Gandhi's death, the family is forced to flee to Pakistan, but after three months of exile, they choose to return. The father is then subjected to a short period of incarceration on fabricated espionage charges during the 1965 war with Pakistan. Depressed and demoralised, young Mobashar asks his father why he returned to India. "There were too many Muslims in Pakistan," his father replies, then adds: "This is my land."
But it would be entirely wrong and unfair to suggest that despair or bitterness are the dominant emotions in the book. Quite the contrary: the narrative is suffused with hope, flavoured with lovingly retold tales of growing up with friends of all castes and, especially, communities, against the often painful, but even more often exhilarating backdrop of a nation on the move.
The feel of popular history
In part, it is perhaps inevitable that every major event in the everyday lives of three generations of a Bihari Muslim family in Bengal occurs at significant moments in the life of the country. But more importantly, it is the writer's genius for placing ordinary occurrences in a broader historical matrix that gives the story of one family the feel of something like pop social history.
The great famine of the 1870s provides the starting point to the story. The narrator's grandfather, a Hindu Kshatriya named Prayaag, loses both parents and everything else and, close to death of starvation, climbs ticketless on to a train. The 11-year-old gets off at Chandernagore and walks to the gates of the newly opened Victoria Jute Mill, where he collapses, half dead, in the middle of the night. Fortunately for Prayaag, he has fainted against the door of a tea shop that is opened by its brusque but generous-hearted Muslim owner at four in the morning, and he is saved. Much later, after his foster father dies in a cholera epidemic and Prayaag is in his early twenties, his foster mother urges him to marry. Prayaag asks her to find him a girl from her own community, and chooses to undergo a formal conversion before he marries Jamila. As he transforms into Rahmatullah, he is told the story of Mohammad. One detail in particular endears his new prophet to him: Mohammad was an orphan, too.
Rahmatullah turns out to have a shrewd head for business, and has soon built the town's first two-storied house while his son, Akbar Ali, becomes "the first spoilt child of Telinipara". Everything in Akbar Ali's life, including his first visit to the cinema with his English friends, is an Event for which careful preparations have to be made: "My father wore a beige linen suit tailored by Barkat Ali Brothers of Park Street, a gleaming white Favre Leuba watch, and brown leather boots made by Henry, the bespoke shoemaker from Chinatown... [They travelled] to Calcutta in his chauffeur-driven Raj Cadillac. Mathew asked him to leave his sola topi at home; it had become unfashionable. My father took deep puffs of Capstan cigarettes... at the bar of the Metro theatre, sipping his lemonade as casually as his English friends tipped their Scotch..." One can almost hear the background score to scenes as vivid as this one.
Distracting details
However, this very attention to detail sometimes turns into a burden that fractures the spine of the narrative. The desire to inform, to share background research material, is sometimes indulged to limits that can strain one's patience. By the time one is subjected to a page-long history of the Methodist church by way of a backgrounder to a section on the young Mobashar's schooling at an institution run by that church, one has learnt to "recognise a sermon when [one sees it] coming", and to bypass it, just as the characters in the book themselves repeatedly do.
Ultimately, it is these characters that linger on in the mind. It is not easy to have such a large cast and then also to flesh each one of them out as a recognisable individual — someone we might have known intimately, loved, hated, despaired about. But Akbar has managed to do this, and his book is immeasurably richer for this skill, as it is for his sense of history. As Akbar says in an earlier book, Kashmir: Behind the Vale, "You may recognise the present without the knowledge of the past, but you cannot understand it."
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