Lost moments
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
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Free of the fetters of plot and pace, the book drips, deeply and drearily, with symbolism.
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New Life; Sharmistha Mohanty, India Ink, Rs.295.
LYRICISM lurks in this rambling coming-of-age story of the dark Anjali. Born in Calcutta to a beautiful, but ritual obsessed, mother and a mostly nurturing father, Anjali is banished for falling in love with the Muslim Riaz.
Rescue beckons from the land of immigrated bliss. Anjali and Riaz are married and seem happy. Still maple leaves and creative writing courses notwithstanding, Anjali wanders into an affair with an angry Afro-American writer Richard.
Ménage-a-trois
And the ménage-a-trois, which began cordially enough, cracks. Making it is time to move on, an imperative addressed to herself thus:
"What did you think when you arrived here, on this continent? Did you think of staying here forever? No, you did not think so specifically of the future... you, like most others of your kind had come to another civilisation with empty hands, from nothing to everything. This change was supposed to make everything possible, but what if your understanding of the possible began to turn, what if the nothing began to fill, and the everything to empty itself?"
So Anjali finds herself back in Bengal among the fish ponds and banana groves of her ancestors. She communes with the ghost of her dead father.
From there, she flits fleetingly through the Indian States. Sometimes she has soul connections with strange people — an auto driver in Calcutta, seeking white westerners in a Himalayan ashram and finally the earthy mountain man lover.
All told in severely stylised prose. Free of the fetters of plot and pace, it drips deeply and drearily, with symbolism.
Symbolic crow
So there's a crow, who reappears with baffling regularity. Here he's flying across continents when he "began to understand that the ocean was dark, and vast and necessary". And again in competition with a nightingale, "The crow thinks of his own harsh voice, he thinks of the nightingale's gift, and he sees how the gift of another is not easy to accept."
And finally post the grand Himalayan finale where Anjali and Riaz stand among the deodars in a single shaft of light — "The crow he knows things from having lived, for what other way is there? He has lived countless lives before this one, but he has little memory of any of them. "
Still, there's an undeniable cadence in this, as in much of the book. Colourful characters, like the spinach-selling vegetable vendor and the chapatti-making pregnant village girl Gauri, are scattered staccato like across the narrative.
Poignant moments, like the one "in a borrowed house, at the edge of the city, with peeling grey walls and shut windows (where) Anjali and Riaz make love", are lost in the wordy windings.
Ultimately, none of it really adds up. It' s pleasant enough, even palely Wordsworthian, but that's all.
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