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Literary Review
At home in India
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With this book, Esther David has done for the Bene Israel what Rohinton Mistry did for the Parsis, says RIVKA ISRAEL.
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THE tiny community of Bene Israel (BI) has lived peacefully on India's western coast for centuries. They speak Marathi, wear the sari, look just like their neighbours, eat similar food — but cling to their monotheistic faith, their total belief in one almighty "Parmeshwar", and their Jewish rites and customs. They nurse a fond tie with the land of Israel/Palestine from where they believe their ancestors came, fleeing persecution, around 175 BC. According to Bene Israeli lore, seven men and seven women survived a shipwreck off the Konkan coast, and their descendants were India's "Children of Israel".
Esther's book starts in the Konkan village of Danda, which gave her father's family its name Dandekar. With Solomon away with the British army in Mysore fighting reluctantly against Tipu Sultan whom he admires, his wife Bathsheba helps her father-in-law manage the wadi, growing supari, coconuts, fruit and vegetables and running the oil press: the traditional BI occupation. Their story moves through generations to the city of Ahmedabad where grandson Joseph practises medicine. This is a family of artists and doctors. Joseph's son David (whose name stuck as the family surname), also a doctor, is Esther's grandfather, a formidable patriarch. His wife Shebabeth, Esther's beloved grandmother, and their unmarried doctor daughter Jerusha, both characters from Esther's first novel, The Walled City, reappear here. The narrative effectively illustrates BI attitudes and aspirations: their sense of total belonging in India while they still cling to their Jewish identity, very different from the attitude of the Baghdadi Jews who identified with the British, and with whom the BI had rather strained relations. In their attempts to preserve their Jewishness the BI sometimes become inward-looking and superstitious. Their tightly-knit community life however is no different from that of other Indian communities, indeed of other Jewish communities all over the world.
Many of the important characters in this book are animals and birds — from Chitta the panther cub saved by Solomon and Shiva the three-horned bull who is Bathsheba's protégé, to Keya the peacock, Ellis the cockatoo, Stella the sarus crane, Gangaram the parrot, and pet chital, nilgai, and numerous dogs of every kind, all of them have stories of their own: touching, comic, sad. The family's extraordinary affinity with all living creatures reaches its climax in `Joshua', Esther's pahalvan/hunter-turned-veterinarian father, the famous Reuben David who founded Ahmedabad's zoo, the "miracle man of Ahmedabad", India's answer to Dr. Doolittle.
Throughout this "work of fiction" one's curiosity is active: how much is fact? Episodes on David's relationship with Lokamanya Tilak or Sardar Patel, and Joshua's meetings with Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi are obviously documentary. And almost too real and close for comfort are the passages on Esther's own life: her uneasy relationship with Naomi her mother, and the men in her life with significant names: Ahaseures, the artist who loved her deeply and whom she desired but could not have; Haman, the man who molested her at art school; Shree, her abusive husband; Golem her second husband who took her to France where she finally found herself and realised that India is Home. Her short stay in Israel too made her feel "I did not have to live in Israel to feel more Jewish than I felt in India", a sentiment many BI will share.
Esther David has the storyteller's gift together with the advantage of a most colourful set of ancestors. The characters are honestly entertaining, neither the humour nor the tragedy is exaggerated or forced. A little more editorial care over correctness of names and continuity would have helped; in this repect Book of Esther compares unfavourably with The Walled City (Manas, Madras: 1997). Through these two novels Esther David has done for the Bene Israel what Rohinton Mistry has done for the Parsis, in her own very distinctive style.
Book of Esther, Esther David, Viking, 2002, p.xii + 394, Rs 395.
Rivka Israel is an editor at Marg.
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