Fiction
Life is like this only...
ANNA SUJATHA MATHAI
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The novel reveals the drama that emerges from even seemingly ordinary lives.
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Naked in the Wind, Brinda Charry, Penguin India, p.272, Rs.250.
BRINDA CHARRY sets her fictional scene in a Bangalore familiar to many of us: By the railway tracks leading to the Tobacco Co., cutting off the Cantonment from the slightly more downmarket end of town. And it's very much like Bangalore (Bengaluru now!) to be hybrid in nature, with an Anglo-Indian, Roman Catholic family living close to an old Brahmin family.
The narrative voice
Charry uses the voices of some of the main characters to tell the story and reveal the drama that emerges from even seemingly ordinary lives. Throughout the book, a disturbing rumour is afloat. Some churches have been burnt, and some nuns raped. That such issues should not be sidestepped seems clear. It is particularly troubling for the Roman Catholic family. But, by a nice quirk of fate, with some authorial longing for a harmonious pluralism in our society, the daughter of the Anglo-Indian family is close to Vivek, of the Brahmin family. Unlike their parents, they are both modern, ambitious and forward looking, and not trapped by the ghetto mentality.
The most effective of the voices are those of the Anglo-Indian family. Says Dad, of the assault on the nuns in Madhya Pradesh: "What the hell is is happening, man? People being raped and attacked in their own country as if they were foreign spies or something, or even tyrant landlords. And after they have given up their lives for the scoundrel villagers." And later: "I don't live in this so-called `anywhere in the world'. I live right here! What minority-majority are you talking about, girl? Everyone is a goddamn minority in this country with its thousand and one languages and castes and what not." His wife's, Marie, voice is gentler, more given to compromise. She warns her daughter about her Brahmin boyfriend: "He's nice an' all, Kathy. But he's not R.C., you know." Of her gossipy, rather nasty friend, Daisy Noronha, Marie says: "She cranks up the Christian piety look that she manages to have on permanently. Joe says even God will clear out of heaven in a hurry if Daisy manages to get there!"
Savage irony
When Joe had courted Marie, holding her hand on a park bench together, a policeman had come and called them "a pair of cheap Anglo-Indian dogs... this is not Indian culture... keep such things behind your doors... I desperately tugging at my skirt though it wasn't short or anything like that, Indian culture was finally saved that evening by a bribe of five rupees." Savage irony here!
There is always a linguistic problem when you're trying to get the voices of people of different social strata, or non-English speaking people. You have either to translate or find the equivalent in speech patterns, racy and humorous sayings, and ways of seeing and thinking. The voices of sexy Rani, the maid and Sapna of the circus must be uniquely different. The voices of Shanthi, whose husband Vasu had disappeared 15 years ago, and her mother Jamuna, are more difficult. Jamuna's voice just doesn't work.
Metaphor for life
Charry uses the Circus as a metaphor for the glamour, chaos, hopes, dreams and longings of our many lives. Jaggu, the dwarf, who's having a baby by a "normal" woman, agonises that "she may shrink when sliding out of her mother's womb". Temples, mosques and catholic shrines jostle side by side in the bustling city. "Naale Ba" fever to keep ghosts away, Allahu Akbar heard from the pristine minarets, Sapna, queen of dreams, a hijra, who adopts an abandoned baby, and pours out her abundant love on the growing child. And when a fire destroys the Circus, Rani the maid is "running out of the circus tent, my magenta pink sari like a flower, like Deepawali fireworks ablaze." We can only say with Sapna, "What can we do, amma? Life is like this only."
Charry's novel is vivid, full of compassion and love for the human spirit in all its many forms. Which is why she can juxtapose, with confidence, lines from the Old Testament ("Then the glory of the lord ...stood up over the threshold of the house ... and the court was full of the brightness of the Lord's glory") with "God of fiery mane and bursting pillar, god of glory and light; god of thresholds, let me be able to see in more than one direction, let us all stay multiple."
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