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Literary Review
FICTION
Landscapes of memory
RANVIR SHAH
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The Silent Raga is an authentic portrayal of the flavours of Tamil Brahmin culture.
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The Silent Raga, Ameen Merchant, HarperCollins India, 2008, p.452, Rs. 395.
The story works on a very thin line of fiction. Two sisters and their lives in and out of a Tamil Brahmin agraharam and leads the reader up to the final meeting between the two. Yet the book is a triumph.
Ameen Merchant, an old Madrasi who moved to Canada some years ago to pursue a career in creative writing, has given us a first novel worthy of the time he has taken to write it. The Silent Raga talks about the nuances and flavours of Tamil Brahmin culture with an accuracy and palpability that is as close as real can be. One can smell the fragrances of the jasmine, the fried tingle of a fresh appalam and sense the claustrophobia of a conservative and controlled household.
Explorations of the past
Merchant takes us on a journey which dips into the landscape of memory and the texture of the present in a polarity that layers the time space dichotomies beautifully. While one may fault it to be an exercise in nostalgia, seen from the perspective of the author who could said to be in self imposed exile from his dear Chennai and Southern Indian Tamil Brahmin sensibilities, it is in fact an exploration of times gone by and times revealed through a touching story that rings very true. The fact that Merchant has lived away and is able to recollect with such a fine eye for detail the entire Tamil Brahmin world view of light, sound and texture is a victory to his creative ability and craftsmanship with words.
On the art of kolam that Janaki remembers:
On some mornings it was an elaborate welcome to dawn, ambitious and full of snaking grandeur and and my hands would weave a tapestry of blooming flowers and intertwined stars. I would grab fists full of kolapodi — one, two, three even four sometimes — and pour my heart into my masterpiece, my sublime welcome mat to the sun. And on other days it was hurried note of dots and curves — a snappy perfunctory kiss of cordiality — achieved with just half the amount of powder.
I have not dipped my hands in kolapodi for many years. I can’t say I miss the grainy feel of powdered rice and white rock on my fingers.
I am no longer a prisoner of pattern.
While the sprinkling of Tamil phrases are all over, like mustard seed in curd rice, one wonders how the western reader would connect with some of the specifities. The only concession I found to a non-South Indian or even Western reader was that everything was cooked in a “wok”. That being said the story segues in and out of the lives of two sisters and an unbearably difficult parent who conjoins their fates in a story of sorrow, longing and yet deep love and a fine gossamer hope.
The real star
The language is the true star of this story and allowed this writer the ability to experience the book beyond the story. Cleverly evoking feeling and touching one beyond what is often times expected in the genre of Indian writing in English. It is in this sophistication of phrases and word play that one can plug in completely into the world of the book.
The other surprise is that Merchant is from a Aga Khani Muslim background and has grown up in such a household and must be congratulated for his ability to basically recount and recreate a reality that is not necessarily his lived nostalgic memory and in this day and time, with Islamaphobes abounding, this is a deeply and truly heartening work of a writer who feels and writes, nay reassembles a world we can almost touch. This revivifying experience is itself a conjuring of the magical, even if of somewhat upper caste lives, reconstituting a significant “other”.
Metaphor of music
Music is the metaphor for the book as suggested in the title. The chapters are named after the various divisions of a raga, starting from Aalapana and then going on to Padam and Varnam, followed by a Ragam Thanam Pallavi and finally culminating with the Thillana and Mangalam. Though not a trained musician, Merchant weaves the story around the musical notes in chapters also as Sa, Ri, Ga ... and so forth. While the rhythm of the longish book is completely in sync with the story alternating between past and present as in a tala, the star of this silent raga is the sahityam. A must-read work from a raconteur of immense talent.
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