FICTION
Of elusive truth
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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Letters for Paul is a layered narrative that emphasises the difficulty of arriving at a single explanation.
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Letters for Paul, Anu Kumar, MapinLit, p.202, Rs. 295.
ADITI CHATTERJI is a young girl growing up in Cuttack, where her father, a police officer, has been reposted after a stint in Delhi. After her tomboyish life in Delhi, Aditi finds Cuttack stifling. It becomes more so when a college student, a girl, becomes the victim of an acid attack outside the Circuit House that is the temporary home of Aditi's family.
Personal worlds
Aditi's brother has fewer restrictions imposed on him, being a boy; her parents have their own personal issues to sort out; and her grandmother is growing older day by day. Meanwhile Aditi, rebellious and achingly lonely, survives the provincial ways of Cuttack by writing long letters to a friend named Paul. As she withdraws into her imaginary world, her father and his friend Mehta, both senior police officers, debate the increasing trend of violence that they see around them. Their views differ on the causes of the trouble and, therefore, on the ways to quell it. Mehta sees the acid attack as perpetrated by Naxal insurgents making inroads into Orissa and nursing an old grievance against the victim's grandfather, a noted writer and Naxal supporter who wrote under the pseudonym Bhaktavar. Aditi's father, on the other hand, sees the attack as just one more example of the degenerating law and order situation in the State and the inability of the police to control crime effectively. As their debates continue into the night, we get a glimpse of the murky interconnectedness of events — politics, insurgency, growing lawlessness, personal tragedies — and the difficulties of arriving at a single truth or explanation.
Letters for Paul, Anu Kumar's debut novel, is a layered narrative that takes us into India, into a world of former cantonments, circuit houses, and aging government bungalows filled with the memories of several generations who have lived in them. This landscape lost its innocence in the early 1960s, when the Naxal movement was born and when Koraput grappled with the problems of the refugees from East Bengal. It is now 1981, and even the spirit of those early decades seems to have vanished. Even Bhaktavar the writer, once with the Naxals and whose books were once "full of fire", is now a befuddled old man writing his memoirs.
In the backdrop, always, is the State's chequered history of violence and calamity. The administration struggles to maintain law and order, but it is never clear what forces run under the surface, like deep currents under the slow-moving Mahanadi, waiting to disturb the fragile peace.
This is also an intensely personal novel about marriage, friendship, and the loneliness of Government service in small town after small town. It is about married women who borrow Bhaktavar's books about freedom and revolution — and never return them, even if that remains the only transgression in their lives. And it is about the claustrophobia of a young girl growing up in a provincial environment. "What was it about being a girl that invited trouble?" wonders Aditi.
Some things about the novel don't work. The Koraput narrative could have been powerful, but for Aditi's awkward narration of the personal secrets of her parents' lives. The background about Bhaktawar and his rivalry with a bucket industrialist-turned-politician is interesting but never really woven into the main narrative.
Mixed bag
The prose is sometimes overdone, but it can take us by surprise. When something actually happens to disturb the sleepy everyday routine, a crowd collects "like drops of water that coalesce into a puddle". An orderly claims that the dying girl has flown out of her hospital bed and is flying over the town. In Koraput, a refugee's harmonium suddenly disappears — the first sign of an impending disturbance. In Cuttack, a stone shatters through their circuit house window, the only thing that separated their life from the town outside. "A broken window is no longer a window," muses Aditi.
Letters for Paul is about a young girl growing up, a family struggling to survive a storm of uncertainty, and a nation trying to come to terms with its many, tumultuous histories.
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