Sound, fury and no substance
SHEBA THAYIL
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Amrita Kumar writes well but doesn’t have a story to tell, as Damage shows.
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Damage; Amrita Kumar, HarperCollins,
Rs. 295.
Even Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the murderer in Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, has a horrid fascination; he is an anti-hero that ‘works’. The same cannot be said for the anti-heroine in Amrita Kumar’s Damage. She remains what she is: pallid, grim and prone to intermittent, self-indulgent tantrums that consist of sound and fury and no substance. The book, unlike her tantrums, is merely self-indulgent.
You may well spend a sleepless night wondering why, why, why publishers don’t understand that much less than feed their own survival monster, what they ultimately succeed in doing is a twist on that well-worn phrase “Print and be damned”. There is little humour, one empathises when the converted mangle the word of Jesus, but no provocation whatsoever for the reader except an urgent desire to throw something at the nearest wall and the only thing this work explores is the fragile nature of your patience.
Gudda lives with her Jesus freak mother, as we used to call the born-again brigade when we were growing up, while her three sisters have moved away.
She then pushes off to Bombay for work, desultorily marries some guy because she can’t think of anything better to do at the time, then after 12 years that go by in a blink of a page, and goes back to her mother. Here, she will bask in her bitterness, which has no genesis and take off on her journeys into the heart of darkness where we can only hope she gets forever lost. This is not a protagonist one wastes any emotion over.
Kumar’s use of themes is formulaic. She wants to tell a grandiose family drama but sinks it into a dry narrative instead, primarily again, because there is no reason behind Gudda’s brutishness, no reason for her cruelty or indifference to others. She is unattractive in manner and appearance. Why would we be interested in anything she has to say? One of the chapters is titled “Dead Woman Walking”. Unfortunately, that’s Gudda. And she ain’t no Sean Penn.
Easy way out
Kumar takes the easy way out by providing ballast to her novel with a foray into history. Byatt’s Possession got it right by using letters and balancing the past with the present, in Damage we are left gasping for a conclusion regarding both Gudda’s character and her lineage.
The dream-like sequence where she walks in the desert and comes across a mythical river doesn’t resonate, except in the memory of what Hari Kunzru did with something similar in The Impressionist. Here, it leaves us in the worst way any novel can: Unmoved.
The only factor we may consider while reading is India has certainly changed if we now treat our parents in the ruthless way that Gudda does. How do we forget that our mother’s Alzheimer’s today is our Alzheimer’s tomorrow? But if elder abuse could happen to Brooke Astor, who are we to complain.
If you think Gudda is bad, you haven’t met her three witches, sorry, sisters. Without a drop of sibling love between the four of them, their relationship is as arid as the novel’s attempt to spring a trickle of fellow feeling in the reader. They squabble over property towards the end, and none of them will notice that their mother has decided to stay home for a wedding until the video comes out.
Meanwhile, Gudda’s neighbour runs off with Gudda’s husband. The neighbour’s mother had been the husband’s lover who had killed herself after learning that Gudda was now with him. And if you can keep track of that sentence you are better than I.
There are mysteries in life: Why Indians argue over the demerits of “Slumdog Millionaire” after it has won eight Oscars, (as though the film’s makers had created our poverty); why the best actress in India, Aishwarya Rai, is constantly jabbed at by the Indian media, and why HarperCollins doesn’t know that the world-famous china manufacturers spell themselves Wedgwood, not Wedgewood.
The maddening thing, ultimately, is that Amrita Kumar writes well. That is undeniable when we come across gems like Arun Shourie’s “intellectual gas chamber” or grandmother who drops her dentures into the curry and says “there’s nothing but bones in the meat today”. She just doesn’t have a story to tell.
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