Fiction
A certain inevitability
UDAY BALAKRISHNAN
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Sepia Leaves is the chronicle of a dysfunctional home, written from a child’s perspective.
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Sepia Leaves, Amandeep Sandhu, Rupa and Co., p.185, Rs.195.
For a short work, Amandeep Sandhu’s novel Sepia Leaves wrings an astonishing variety of emotions from the reader — perplexity, anger, feelings of utter hopelessness, claustrophobia, and, surprisingly those of tremendous hope as well. Amandeep’s powerful mix of understatement and deadpanning makes this very autobiographical book a powerful and unique work. A child’s perspective of adult mess is movingly brought out here, much in the way some famous novels such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird or Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, do.
The central figure in Sepia Leaves is Mamman, the schizophrenic mother of the narrator, Appu, and the wife of Baba, an extraordinary human being, stoic in the face of sustained domestic horror and often public and family ridicule. Mamman is, on and off, at peace with her son but what makes the situation awful at home and in public is the violent hatred she exhibits towards her husband, Baba — one that is often physically expressed and which is frequently witnessed by Appu.
Sepia Leaves is the chronicle of a dysfunctional home, much of it from a child’s perspective. But, as Sandhu tells us movingly, however terrible, a home is a home; nothing can come close to replacing the sense of security and warmth it exudes — notwithstanding salted halwas and pummelled fathers. When finally Baba succumbs to familial pressure and sends Appu off to a boarding school, it is a most unpleasant experience for the boy. If only to be sensitised on this, today’s dual income, hard driving professionals thinking of incarcerating their children in one, ought to read this book. A boarding school, even the very best, is indeed only a glorified boot-camp and no alternative to a home that naturally is a child’s place to grow up; for Appu, even one as dysfunctional as his, is the one he longs for and is delighted to come back to.
There are several wonderful characters in the book, the long suffering Mando for one, a maid Baba engages to help him cope with home responsibilities and with whom Appu establishes an enduringly affectionate relationship. Amongst the many moving passages in this work are the ones about a know-all who later becomes her loving companion.
The real hero
If Sepia Leaves has one hero, it undoubtedly is Baba. Faced with the unremitting schizophrenia of his wife made worse by her terrific hatred for him, one could have understood if Baba had neglected his family, taken to drink or found comfort with other women. He could just as easily have poisoned Appu against his mother. Instead Baba displays an incredible forbearance and understanding that is so well brought out by Amandeep — an understanding and tolerance that enables his son to cope with his mother’s condition, like his home with all its shortcomings, while seeing him through an education that gives him a life.
When Appu, after a particularly bad fight between his parents asks his father why he should not leave her, the response once and for all forecloses all such discussions: “Baba calmly placed his hand on my mouth. ‘Don’t speak like that again’. He added ‘She could have gone mad after our wedding or had an accident and lost her limbs. Should I have left her then? We have to earn her trust. Yeh sab sanjog hai. This is fate.”
In many ways than one, Sepia Leaves is a spare and beautiful paean to the author’s late father and also a note of gratitude — “it also helped that I listened to Baba and began seeing the world as my home. Fair or unfair, I belonged to it”.
Amandeep’s book also makes a powerful statement for the need to understand a disorder that has begged to be made sense of through time. He writes with a quite elegance and the book is as strikingly honest as it is deeply moving.
Deeply honest
One cannot but be astonished that someone from India has authored such a profoundly personal work. Loquacious we Indians are, but so few of us are known to convey our innermost feelings, even orally and surely not in print! Amandeep, through this work, has broken the mould; perhaps writing has been a cathartic experience for him.
Sepia Leaves is indeed remarkable. Rarely does one come across something as good as this; at the end of a read, one feels touched by goodness in the face of overwhelming odds and Appu’s resilience truly astonishes. The book has its shortcomings. Description of places and events — Rourkela, Punjab and the Emergency — are rather prosaic; the somewhat anaemic title is a bit of a letdown. Amandeep’s book is however such a good read, one can let all that pass.
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