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Literary Review
Echoes across time
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
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Two strands of stories, separated by 200 years, each with its catalogue of miseries…
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Silverfish, Saikat Majumdar, HarperCollins, p.293, Rs. 295.
It is the early 19th century . A young girl in the city of Calcutta looks out through the window, at the opening of this novel, at streets she hasn’t stepped out in for the last 10 or 15 years. “They say the wives of this family pass the
marble lions of the main gate only twice,” she tells us. She herself came in when she was married at 12 years, to a man 59 years old.
Cut to the second chapter. To the same Calcutta streets. It’s two hundred years later, and retired school teacher Milan must make his way past the miseries of “the solid block of sweating cursing flesh caught in the airless exterior” of a bus caught in a traffic jam. He must shuffle past pavements tense with the imminent violence of protest rallies, to the frustrations of trying to get his pension cheque from an apathetic government office.
The two worlds connect in a romantic, writerly sort of way. Through silverfish. The silverfish that Milan finds amongst a hand written autobiography — that of Kamal, the girl from two hundred years ago. It’s a tragic tale that the schoolmaster finds himself driven to read, and one that seems to mirror the frustrations of his own life.
Debut novel
Stanford assistant professor Majumdar’s debut novel moves back and forth in time between these two woeful worlds with descriptive ease. Young girl/ wife Kamal becomes young widow Kamal. As a young bride she had once been frightened by one such “white-draped, slow-moving ghost in the corner”, with its “scariest head…shaved closely” and its “string of blistered black beads hung around its scrawny neck”. And now she has become one such apparition herself. “I wasn’t going to die,” she says. “But at twenty-nine was I going to live?” Meanwhile 100 years later, retired Milan painfully traverses the streets. He thinks back to days as dreary, when the local hoodlums of caste and communal politics scarred the life of Sabeer, his most promising Muslim student.
Both strands make for a vivid catalogue of miseries .Certainly anyone who has lived in Kolkata will recognise the truth of Majumdar’s street descriptions. Take one such, on the occasion of Milan’s walk with a foreigner who asks for directions to the Kali temple — “They skirted past the snail-paced stream of crowd-bloated buses, the gaping abysses in the middle of the road for the construction of the city subway. Harrowing street-vendors, dollar-craving middlemen, begging urchins, all plentiful in this part of the city, all caught at a painful limbo at the sight of the unlikely pair. The backpacking blonde American tourist was the juiciest flesh of all…and just as scarily mean was the paise-splitting, mean tempered seasoned citizen, the middle-aged babu”.
And so it goes on. Even the briefly nice things that happen — like Kamal’s pickle making episodes with lively friend Suhasini and the birth of her son Pratap — end badly.
Maybe slow and sad books don’t work for me; eloquent though they maybe. Certainly I found myself reacting (and increasingly so) to the desolateness of it all. Plus the fact that redemption, if at all, comes only from the expatriate, from young Shirin, daughter to Milan’s best friend who can offer hope only because (like the writer himself) she’s left the city and now teaches in America.
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