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NEW LOOK

The Zigzag Way

DR.Abraham Verghese: Sensing new landscapes.

When I first arrived in El Paso, Texas, I discovered that the hospital where I worked was right next to a cemetery, which in turn adjoined a dive called the Lucky Café. The cemetery was small, threatening to spill onto the sidewalk, only a chain link fence holding back the headstones as I walked by each day. One November morning, I was surprised to see the cemetery bustling, a fiesta of sorts; families clustered around the graves, cleaning them, decorating them with colorful marigolds.

I saw toys and candy stacked on a child’s grave, and corn and a bottle of tequila on an adult’s headstone. I found out later that this was Dia de los Muertos: The Day of the Dead. I’d never seen this kind of acknowledgment of the spirit life in the parts of North America where I’d lived, though I had seen it in Africa and India. Over the years, I came to associate November with this ritual, which announced also that Thanksgiving was around the corner. A cold wind would be blowing in from the Chihuahua desert and across the Rio Grande, and snow would appear from over the Franklin Mountains. Perched there on the border, I had a sense that this part of the country would always be more Mexico than it would be America, disinclined to change.

There was nothing about this world that I could see intersecting with the territory of Anita Desai; after all, she lived and taught at M.I.T. in Boston, and at Cambridge in England. I had come to Desai’s novels out of order, first with Baumgartner’s Bombay, still my favorite. I’d been mesmerized by the tight, precise prose, so quietly confident in itself, the details precisely observed, evoking houses and crepuscular (a Desai adjective that I have borrowed) spaces that enclosed a solitude only she could describe. I was hooked. I read the novels that preceded and followed Baumgartner’s Bombay. But nothing prepared me for The Zigzag Way when it arrived in 2004. The novel was set in Mexico, with not an Indian character in sight. She had previously written in Bye-Bye, Blackbird about Indians facing the reality of an England that did not want them; she had looked at foreigners coming to India in search of enlightenment in Journey to Ithaca, and of course the marvelous isolation of a German Jew stuck in Bombay in Baumgartner’s Bombay. But with The Zigzag Way, she had set her story in my backyard!

I read eagerly, but with apprehension, hoping that she had not over reached. I confess I was ready to be critical, because I felt possessive about a culture that I had adopted, married into, and thought I grasped. What I found out was how little I really knew; in reading Desai,I saw and understood Mexico anew. It was a wonderful and humbling lesson to see a master create a sense of place, a sense of destiny wrapped around geography, a sense of a nation still defining its nationhood.

The notion of Dia de los Muertos, the dead incarnate at least for that day, is central to The Zigzag Way, critical to its denouement. The story of a young American, Eric, seeking to learn more about his grandfather, who he knows made an improbable journey from Cornwall, England to the silver mines of Mexico, is the means by which Desai approaches Mexico, not to understand it (because Mexico is beyond understanding, most of all to its own citizens), but to lay out its conflicting parts: the politics of identity, the irony of its warring selves, its stark physical beauty, its mingling of the secular and spiritual into quotidian rituals, the bastardizing and deboning of indigenous culture to leave a hollow shell, and the parallel parody of a class posturing as European, claiming a Europe that disowned it long ago.

The word ‘zigzag’ appears exactly twice in the book, in reference to the path the miners with their heavy loads had to take, to descend and ascend from the bowels of the earth from which the ore must be extracted: ‘They walk in a zigzag direction because they have found from long experience that their respiration is less impeded when they traverse obliquely the current of air which enters the pits from without.’ Eric’s zigzag journey forms the skeleton of the narrative, and on those bones are draped other stories, like that of Dona Vera. She is an unforgettable character, a woman who finds the meaning that has eluded her in her life, and also seals her escape from her husband by becoming the unlikely champion of the Huichol Indians. Academics and visitors throng to her hacienda where she presides at the dinner table; seated at the far end of the table are three Huichol Indians, tricked up in elaborate native costume, ignored by the other diners, on display to lend ‘authenticity’ to her soirees.

The omniscient narrator’s point of view is Eric’s, then Dona Vera’s (in flashing back to the gold-digging skills that allowed her to escape Europe and the impending holocaust by snaring and marrying Roderigo, the heir to a mining fortune), and then that of Eric’s grandmother, the unfortunate Cornish woman, a miner’s wife, trying to make a go of it in Mexico, only to watch helplessly as the mines and the mining company fall in the revolution that unseats President Porfirio Diaz.

What comes across is Desai’s great sympathy for all the characters, especially those who at first blush seem less likable; what comes across also is gentle instruction, wisdom about the human condition, which, whether in Delhi or Bombay, or a silver mine in Mexico, is endlessly instructive. In describing Dona Vera’s first glimpse of her future husband, Roderigo, at a hotel where she had gone to see ‘if one familiar face could be found’, she instead finds Roderigo: ‘large, foolish, fumbling, but all fresh linen, gleaming leather and the smell of bay rum. An outsider, a foreigner, presenting an opening to a foreign world. Not that she had ever craved one before, or had any idea of what it might be—the places and people he named were unknown to her—but compelling for precisely that reason.’

Desai never imposes these observations upon readers. What makes The Zigzag Way so enjoyable is her faith in us, her confidence that our imagination will paint just the right images and details so that the story will and its people. Of Eric’s arrival in the interior of Mexico after his long journey, she writes, ‘. . . he thought of the days and nights he had spent on the train, slowly, sadly rattling over the lonely plains, struggling to achieve the horizon where hills rose to break the oppressive flatness only to find them mysteriously receding and remaining elusive, and then the hours on the bus through the valley with its strange twisted forms of cacti rising out of the volcanic rubble like stakes rising from secret graves.’

Having finally arrived, Eric begins to fear that the town he is seeking does not exist: ‘He thought of himself cutting the figure of a timid pilgrim who sinks down in despair again and again along the way, needing to be coaxed and assisted into rising and going on, and avoided looking at himself in the tin-framed mirror as he rubbed his hair dry.’ These winding sentences with their small, telling details—‘volcanic rubble’, ‘the tin framed mirror’, ‘fresh linen, gleaming leather and the smell of bay rum’—contain an entire universe.

Desai knows that in Eric’s story we will see ourselves, we will recognize the kinds of self-delusions that allow us to go on, the undignified rituals we need to salvage dignity. This is why The Zigzag Way is so powerful. Eric’s quest is ultimately a search for meaning, a voyage of inner exploration. By finding his place in the chain of history, by finding the narrative of his ancestors, he can pick up the thread of his own life and go on with renewed faith. It is just how I felt after putting the book down—a renewal of faith. What more can a writer give you than that?

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