This is a lovely, very readable, and at the same time, a rather unusual little book. Unusual because it doesn’t follow the common pattern of what might be expected from such entertainers. It gears itself towards an all-important cricket match, which the hero of the story, young Swaminathan and his 11 year-old friends, are eagerly preparing, with the very special enthusiasm of that age, and instead of the heroic chapter expected, something completely different occurs. We are deprived of victory, and even of the match! Instead, we follow Swami losing himself in the nearby forest, being recovered by a cartman passing that way, spending the next day recovering (when he should have been bowling for his team!) at the Forest Officer’s Cabin, where his distraught family come to fetch him. It’s a terrible shock for young Swami, who had been so keen about the foundation the cricket team, and then the regular practising, and of course their first important match! A terrible disappointment for the Captain too, Swami’s best friend Rajam, who has been let down, thus confirming his worst fears.

Of course there are explanations for all this, which will be explored hereafter, but you must know first that Swami & friends’s very particular quality is that it places itself to the level of the 10 or 11 year olds, and that everything is given an urgency, which is given only when you are that age. Had the story been told from an adult’s point of view, it would have been completely different. For example, we are often under the delusion (which is that of the children in general) that the heroes’ sizes are tall, because their talk is big! Their strength, too, seems enormous. Mani’s, for example. He’s perhaps a year older than the others, and has a formidable presence throughout the book. He’s afraid of nothing and nobody, and talks of clubbing and breaking the bones of whoever thinks different from him. Only once, when Swami goes to his house, and meets his Uncle, does he fail to recognize the formidable Mani. Then there’s Rajam, the bright and energetic son of the Police Superintendant. He owns an Alibaba cave full of shining toys in his room, has always good marks at school, and his father’s position as government Officer gives him privileges which are at first looked down upon, but later the miracle of friendship occurs, and he’s accepted in the group (very realistically though, he builds a bond a friendship with Swami and Mani, who used to belong to a first band, but destroys that former band – and the other boys soon fade away from the centre of things).

So the book tells a few of the various episodes in the life of Swami, who has just entered secondary school, and one wonders how much could be autobiographical, because it resembles life so damn closely! His family, for example: a strict and rather formal father, with a lot of authority but also his foibles; a supportive Granny but who doesn’t know much about anything, and just showers her love on just about anybody. The mother, Lakshmi, has been left a little more in the background - a phenomenon common in boys of that age - and the little brother who is born during the course of that year. Swami only has a corner of his father’s room to work, a little table where all his school things are bundled up after he returns from school every afternoon, and sorted out the next morning for early homework. The episode of the coming examinations is a fascinating psychological analysis of what goes on in a boy’s head, for example.

But what plays the greatest part in the succession of events is the influence of the national events of 1930, as they are reverberated in the little town of Malgudi. Some visiting political workers come to stir up a demonstration against the arrest of a well-known activist, and the children listen to the talk; soon they are asked to participate in the destruction by fire of all non-khaddar (homespun) clothes, and in his enthusiasm, Swami throws his “foreign” school cap in the fire (in fact, his father had bought it at the Khaddar store, but he doesn’t discover that until too late). Being without a cap makes him need to find an explanation for when he goes back to school, and so when the next morning, some “rebel” pupils outside the gates try to boycott school that day, his excuse is found: no school, no need for a cap! He joins the revolution, and because of his naïve and eager disposition, he takes part in the romping that ensues: the bands of children start throwing stones at the imperialist window-panes, frightening other pupils, bullying the hesitant ones, and end up entering the school, thus wreaking a mild havoc. They are stopped by the police, and Swami almost gets beaten up, and manages to escape with only bruises and scratches. But you can imagine how all this affects him. Because of his involvement in the rumpus, he is expelled (he’s been seen wilfully breaking ventilator panes), and joins another school. But things do not go well there either, and to avoid punishment for his absences (to go and practise cricket), he runs out of school again, and in a panic, turns into that fateful forest lane where night catches him…Little Swami somehow represents young India made dizzy by the winds of change.

Anyone who’s been a boy anywhere in the world can relate to R.K. Narayan’s account of childhood games and friendship. This is an age where everything connected with friends is 100 times more important than family, 100 times more urgent than school, where holidays are Heaven on Earth, when games could last eternally, if one didn’t have to go back home for bath or dinner, where victory and defeat can be equated to absolute bliss or bottomless misery, and your body has an energy and a resistance you just don’t think about, so supercharged it is all the time. Mani, Rajam and Swami are described to be out on the trunk road when there is nobody out, in the blazing sun of midday, but for them it’s quite all right, because they have their plans and pursuits.

Friendship is the real subject of the book; friendship and his pal loyalty. There are many books on friendship, and many combine friendship and childhood (think of The kite runner); this one has the freshness, the spirit, the realism and on top of all those qualities, it has the fantastic tone of childhood. Because it written at child-level (not above five feet), it sees the world the way children do: grown-ups are up there; in front of you are the other, much more real, people: the other first formers, threatening second-formers, or despicable Infant Standard midgets. Life depends on making the right alliances to get from the entrance of the day to its exit with the greatest amount of fun possible. Fun. Fun is something you can only really comprehend if you aren’t any older than 11 (or perhaps 12). Fun is something absolutely serious. It is what life is made of. Anything that comes in the way of fun is to be avoided at all costs. This includes: house chores, homework, the idea of school, school lessons, school rules, school teachers, looking after one’s smaller brothers and sisters, helping mum in the kitchen, going on errands to the shops, washing, undressing, going to bed, switching off the lights and going to sleep. Fun can never be had with your parents or your teachers. They just don’t know what it is. Listen to this: “OK everyone, today everyone is going to clean his room: isn’t that gonna be fun?” Hopeless.

But Swami and friends wouldn’t be really about childhood if it didn’t contain that other element of early days, fear and anguish. On of the opening chapters, entitled “what is a tail” tells the hilarious yet also painful experience of being ridiculed and abandoned by your friends. When this happens, your world seems to crumble to pieces. Swami goes through this excruciating experience when his pals call him that, the tail, because he’s always behind that new boy, Rajam, and it’s as if he has forgotten them, as if he’s swapped loyalties. That upstart can’t be a friend! And if you become his friend, then you’re a traitor, you’re nothing more than the traitor’s tail. Swami also goes through the throes of deepest fright that night in Memphis Forest. Of course, the darkness, the noises, the strange sounds and shapes, everything conspires to create a horror movie in which false relief and shattering of hopes occur at precisely the right moments! Physical feelings and mental representations add up: a child is really well equipped in the daylight for mischief, but at night, all alone, my, how quickly he’s defenceless! The common theme between friendship and fear is solitude. Childhood is the enemy of solitude. Childhood is friends and fun with friends. Read Swami & friends, and thank M. Narayan for reminding it to us so vividly. Here’s a wonderful extract:

“The next morning, he formed a plan to be free all evenings of the week. He was at his desk with The manual of Grammar open before him. It was seven-thirty in the morning, and he still had two and a half hours before him for the school.

He did a little cautious reconnoitring: Mother was in the baby’s room, for the rhythmic creaking of the cradle came to his ears. Father’s voice was coming from the front room: he was busy with his clients. Swaminathan quickly slipped out of the house.

He stood in front of a shop in front of which hung the board: “Doctor T. Kesavan, L.M. & S. Sri Krishna Dispensary.” The doctor was sitting at a long table facing the street. Swaminathan found that the doctor was alone and free, and entered the shop.

“Hallo Swaminathan, what is the matter?”

“Nothing, sir, I have come on a little business.”

“All well at home?”

“Quite, Doctor. I have got to have a doctor’s certificate immediately.”

“What is the matter with you?”

“I will tell you the truth, doctor. I have to play a match next week against the Young Men’s Union. And I must have some practice. And yet every evening there is drill class, scouting, some dirty period or other. If you give me a certificate asking them to let me off at four-thirty, it would help the M.C.C. to win the match.”

“Well, I could do it. But is there anything wrong with you?”

Swaminathan took half a second to find an answer: “Certainly, I am beginning to feel of late that I have delirium.”

“What did you say?” asked the doctor anxiously.

Swaminathan was pleased to find the doctor so much impressed, and repeated that he was having the most violent type of delirium.

“Boy, did you say delirium? What exactly do you mean by delirium?”

Swaminathan did not consider it the correct time fro cross-examination. But he had to have the doctor’s favour. He answered: “I have got it. I can’t say exactly. But isn’t it some, some kind of stomach-ache?”

The doctor laughed till a great fit of coughing threatened to choke him. After that he looked at Swaminathan under the eye, examined his tongue, tapped his chest, and declared him to be in the pink of health, and told him he would do well to stick to his drill if he wanted to get rid of delirium. Swaminathan again explained to him how important it was for him to have his evenings free. But the doctor said: “It is all very well. But I should be prosecuted if I gave you any such certificate.”

“Who is going to find it out, doctor? Do you want our M.C.C. to lose the match?”

“I wish you all success. Don’t worry. I can’t give you a certificate. But I shall talk to your headmaster about you and request him to let you off after four-thirty.”

“That will do. You are a very kind to me, doctor.”

Unfortunately for young Swaminathan, the doctor forgot to do so.

 _________________________________________________________________________________

You can read Swami & friends online here. The book has apparently been turned into a play, check here. And I found a very good reader’s review here!

Have you heard of an author called Heather Wood ? Have you heard about this book “Third-class ticket” (1980)? No? Neither had I, until recently. But someone gave it to me, suggesting it might be interesting to read, and I took it along with me during this trip to India.

There has never been such a book. It’s unique. Somebody says somewhere inside that it’s more a story of gods than of men. What he means is that it’s a story which belongs to reality, not fiction. Men can only tell stories which come out of their imagination, and in that they are limited by their imagination. But gods do not need imagination: they see things as they are; their stories are the fabric of our lives, and what our lives reveal.

Third-class ticket follows a group of Bengali elderly villagers along their lengthy voyage across the Indian subcontinent. Here’s the map:

The reason for this 7-month trip, by train, is a village landowner who has herself travelled throughout the world, and knows of the knowledge it can bring, and wishes the people of her village to open their minds to the reality of this world. She has no family to whom bequeath her fortune, and goes to Delhi to open a fund from which the Indian Railways will draw to enable parties from the village to go on tours of India. The first to go are the village elders, all 44 of them. And the introduction of the book says that the author, Heather Wood, is a Canadian anthropologist who has been able to follow them during their travels.

But why is the story so fascinating? Because of the proximity of truth. Because the voices we hear, the faces we imagine, the figures we feel beyond the words are real, and the overall balance of personalities which compose the group of villagers is one of unity against hardships, of thirst for discovery and knowledge, of honesty and disinterestedness, patience and generosity. There is folly and bigotry, resentment and silliness, but the negative is so well counterbalanced by the positive that one is given a picture of a growing community because it bases itself on common sense and friendship. The difficulties of the long and adventurous travel are faced with the ingenuity of children, but also the wisdom of the old. Away from the sheltering and recognised biases and habits of their homes, the villagers must revert to their collective consensus before they go on with a decision. They cannot invoke traditions or village practices any more. The rules which work there are no longer self-evident, or do not apply because the initial conditions aren’t the same.
The group is in fact testing their own lifelong resources in new experimental situations, out of their familiar environment. And we are made to witness this experiment in humanity: a group of poor Bengali villagers thrown out of their lifelong milieu, equipped with their traditions and limited understanding of the world, who must confront and compare other worldviews, other social, religious and economic perspectives, and try to make sense out of them. But they aren’t youngsters; they’re elders who carry with them an experience and wisdom of human affairs. One could expect them to have built their worldview for good, and not be able to change it. Well, if some cannot, or won’t, most will be able to do it, and that’s what the book is about, we witness how their acquired knowledge of a very limited portion of the world, a small Bengali village, and the fifty or seventy years of life there, has prepared them to abandon or at least bend their former conceptions.

Their travels quite normally bring questions into their minds, such as that about “India” – what is this India? Why are we part of it? Are we really “Indians”, and what relationship does this new identity have with the fact of being Bengali? Same thing with democracy: they discover it is they – by this system – who elect the members of Parliament, and that they should not let the money-lender tell them for who to vote. A lot of practices seen or heard about are a source of much puzzlement and debate. The book is full of these debates, and the villagers are made to talk in succession, often without the indication of who is talking, thus giving their exchanges a Chorus-like effect. We are no longer, in those cases, faced with Reena or Nirmal, with Babla or Surendra, but only the voices are heard, that evaluate the problem, express agreement or disapproval, question, criticise, admire. Inevitably, they come to realise that they have changed; their ways are no longer those they used in the village, where everybody knew them and placed them in their histories. Confronted with other travellers, people from different origins, different languages, there are forced as a group to define and defend their identity, they understand that what Uma Sen, their benefactor, has done for them is something which everybody wonders at, sometimes disbelievingly, or disparagingly (“waste all that good money on old illiterate Bengali villagers”) and this gives them an importance, a recognition which they have to cope with. Among the group, some think their pride will be their downfall, that they have offended the gods, that their destiny wasn’t written out in that way.

Most importantly, the voyage challenges their eating habits. Elderly people on a trip need good meals to remain active and pleased. But they only eat food prepared by their own hands, or by a cook who knows what they eat in Bengal. But this can only last for a while. One day, their cook leaves, and they have to resort to their own limited resources, and soon suffer from hunger. They will not eat what other people prepare. Some fall ill because the travels and the visits are too tiring with limited food. A doctor has to come to look after them, and after that they understand that their lifelong beliefs will have to be changed, that they won’t be able to last long if they don’t eat food prepared by other hands, with other ingredients than those they know. They agree to this alienation because something more important has dawned in their minds: understanding and discovering means changing, and relinquishing customs once thought intangible and self-defining. Through this alien nourishment, their bodies will no longer be controlled by themselves; they depend now on others, and have become different from who they were first. This is the classic benefit of travels, of course, but it takes a special interest here, because the villagers for most of them are uneducated and poor. And so their education is humbling to us who have been lucky to profit by it at an early age.

Education! What a paradoxical theme for a story which revolves around 40 odd senior citizens, some of which are illiterate. Could they learn something? And if they do, what will they do with what they’ve learnt? Won’t it be wasted on them? Yet, strangely, these poor elderly villagers are the best pupils. Their simplicity and honesty have kept them ready to see and learn. They are able not only to recognize beauty and truth, but appreciate them and proclaim them. They have no prejudices (or lose them as they go), to stop them from going towards truth and goodness, even when the latter are shown under a foreign attire. Most of us have a hardened system of references which often stops us from welcoming what is good and true outside this frame. But if you haven’t been too educated (you need some prior tutoring), then you do not feel a new fact or emotion is running against what you already know. This is their position.

Then of course everything takes on a religious or spiritual meaning. Their travels are soon understood as a pilgrimage; Uma-Sen is their guide; her picture in the railway carriage is garlanded with flowers. The villagers confer special significance to chance meetings, sometimes to little words or events (which some say is superstition and others not); the temples and rivers are all devoutly visited, even rapturously so. They criticise the tourists who just tour without an overall mission, intent on photographing everything without really seeing, and apparently giving no heed to gods and religion. Some of them even consider other religions’ gods as worthy of respect or veneration, and they fight over this issue, as some believe that entering a heathen shrine will bring impurity on all of them. But this minor attitude is soon brushed aside, because together they evaluate other people’s lives with a clear-headed common sense, and learn a lot by way of tolerance.

The group itself is a marvellous collection of personalities. There’s Surendra, the sturdy, resistant cultivator who’s always smoking his biris, and who acts as an unconventional philosopher; there’s “simple” Deepaka, the wonderful open-hearted and generous mama. She’s the ever welcoming, ever loving, profoundly religious protector of the group. There’s Reena, the incredible story-teller who enchants everyone with her talents, and knows how to soothe with words, making everybody forget time and space, worries and sorrows. She goes round India collecting books of stories to bring back home and in the end is praised as being India’s living memory. Narend is the dependable giant of the group, who saves many while on their exhausting climb in the Himalayan hills. He’s a wise man, a strong soul who slowly evolves from silent guardian to great friend and educator. His old wife, Rhunu, also burgeons out during the seven months; at first retiring and shy, overwhelmed by the social negation that women are made to feel in her village, she is slowly given confidence and praise, for she’s a wonderful colourist. Like Mitu, another villager who sketches their sights and lives throughout the travel, she captures the essence of the group in her drawings, and is spotted by a museum curator who asks her to paint after the trip is over. Most extraordinarily, her formidable husband accepts that she go, leave the village and stay in Calcutta for the period of this practice at the museum. Such is the beauty of the transformation that has taken place!

We are also introduced to many other charming characters, Harischandra, the most learned of them all and the translator, Ashin, the little teacher who dies of pneumonia, Amiya, the revolted widow and aspiring doctor who has been denied her medical career and learns to cure everybody before she is shocked into folly and death in one of the book’s most moving incidents. Old Nirmal, who has to be sent back by plane, Uma and Jaydev, Elder De, traditional Babla, proud Arundati, Bankim, not forgetting caring M. De, from Baroda House, who follows the group from afar, entrusted by Uma Sen with the mission of organising of the travel details and resources. One person is strangely absent, and that’s the author, Heather Wood, who is supposed to have travelled with the party “for a short time” (says the Author’s note). But she’s probably that “western girl” whom they meet first in Aurangabad, who is never identified as the author of the book, but holds a special place in the story. She comes back later, near Cape Comorin, and is considered as their “daughter”. If she’s the one who wrote the story, one can only marvel at her reconstructive powers, because according to the narrative, she only stays with the group a short time, and yet she tells the story from beginning to end, 340 small script pages long. A long and patient work of investigation is implied in that reconstruction.

There is a beautiful ending to the book, when everybody has reached Calcutta, and before they take the final train back to the village; the story focuses independently on a few of the aforementioned characters: Deepaka, who goes back to see the priest who had given her a lotus before leaving on the journey at the beginning, and who meets a little beggar girl that night in the streets. With the help of the priest they manage to offer her a position in an orphanage where perhaps she’ll stay, provided Deepaka comes to fetch her for the holidays, at the risk of being branded as crazy by her family back home. Surendra goes through the city in search of a tiger to complete his overall capture of his country’s diversity! He knows it’s a little foolish, but he’s that kind of dreaming, unpredictable old man who still retains some of the child within him. Reena pays a visit to the Belvedere Library and despite difficulties to enter (she’s considered as a beggar, something which all of them have had to fight against all along), she earns the right to be considered a citizen of the world of letters. Then there is the scene already alluded to, when Harischandra, Mitu, Narend and Rhunu go to the museum and are met by this intelligent curator (they have met so many dumb or prejudiced people during their travel that even if intelligent persons are not infrequent, it’s always a relief) who detects real talent in both Mitu and Rhunu, and offers them the possibility to come and study and work for the museum institution. Then Harischandra who has kept a written record of the journey is asked if his book can be copied by the museum services as a precious testimony of village traditions and anthropological document. All are abashed and bemused; nothing, almost, had prepared them for this recognition. Here is what the curator tells them:

“Listen friends, what gives a people hope? Is it good harvests? Is it the weddings? Is it a feast? No, these pleasures will pass. We hope because we have children and we see again all things new in their eyes. You say that cannot be so for all, since you all do not have children, and all who have them are not happy. Yes? Is it so? Listen again. For a nation, for a land of many people, children are the times to come, the lives we have not led, the houses not yet built, the pictures not yet made. All that gives us hope, gives us reason to struggle through the illnesses and the loneliness and the years of drought. Why? I shall tell you. Because we are taught by all we know of the past that what each can do becomes greater if his chances become greater. (…) You have just lived through something which one year ago could not have happened. Out of it you have made a treasure for those who come after. (…) It gives me hope that all that is good can never be crushed away and hidden. There must be a remembering. As long as there is remembering there is hope. The power of India lies in the cities, and mostly I think it is wicked. But what endures all powers? The village. The life you lead which is here in your pictures. That is the memory which India must hold to hope and withstand whatever the powers do.” (p. 313)

here are two « mysteries » in Rohinton Mistry’s 2002 novel Family Matters.

One concerns the character of Nariman Vakeel, the 79 year old Professor suffering from Parkinson and osteoporosis, who lives with his two adult unmarried step-children, Jal and Coomy, in their large family house. His wife died some years ago, in circumstances that connect directly to the drama which starts when, because he’s a burden to his two step-children, he is sent away to live in his daughter Roxana’s minuscule flat. There he lies all day long on the sofa, unable to move because of a plastered ankle. He has to be continually looked after, especially in the most unsettling bodily functions. But what is the meaning of this character? Is he a modern King Lear? What does he teach us?

And then there’s Yezad’s conversion to the Zoroastrian religion. Yezad Chenoy is Roxana’s husband; he works as salesman for a Mumbai sports shop, and together with Roxana, they have two boys, aged 13 and 10, Murad and Jehangir. Their little flat was bought for them by Nariman when Roxana got married, and they have started living a typical middle-class, hard-working life. Yezad’s position is vulnerable to economic variations, but he’s based his life on rational principles and careful management, and so far, it has worked. How and why does he evolve towards this mystical and soon intolerant conversion?

These 500 pages of small type contain Mistry’s precise, powerful and enchanting prose. Mistry’s creative powers, already prominent in A fine balance, lifts you above all calculated, escapist fiction to a world of psychological and emotional beauty which I have rarely seen. So Paul Elie (VillageVoice.com), who believes Family Matters is nothing more than melodrama, just has it all wrong, when he writes: “Family Matters is vexingly mediocre - thoughtful, great-souled, generous toward characters and readers alike, but badly in need of a little artistry.”

Family matters might be sometimes lengthy, but is never boring. In this novel, one is bound to say that there are absolutely no concessions to any of the conventional ingredients of fiction. No sex, no facile suspense, no satisfying coincidences. There is nothing but the unfolding of family life and emotions, the description of moral choices and their consequences. Nothing but the logical interplay of interests and affections. Where there is love, it’s like oil, the social machinery runs smoothly. Where hate reigns, it grinds to a halt, and snaps under the subsequent pressure buildup. Is this over-optimistic? Is there a missing dose of negativity? No, this is how it works in real life, as a rule, even if in some cases love fails and vested interests are too strong to budge.

At regular intervals, we follow Nariman’s previous life (it is told as in a dream, and is the only love-story of the book): we discover that “forty years before, as an eligible, secularly inclined young intellectual in newly independent India, he had wanted to marry Lucy, a Goan Christian. Reluctantly, and with tragic consequences, Nariman succumbed to family pressure and took instead a Parsi widow (with two children) to wife.” (John Sutherland, in the NY Times). What are these consequences, and what do they mean? Well, Lucy never stopped loving him, and became half crazy with his decision to conform to family wishes (which “mattered” more than Nariman’s feelings). She hounded him, took up premises close to where he had started living with his new wife Yasmin and their children (Chateau Felicity, a hypocritical name where Nariman still lives at the beginning of the novel), and inveigled herself in his life in spite of all reasoning. Nariman, who has never stopped loving her, is forced to see her, talk to her, much to the displeasure of his Parsi wife. One day, Lucy climbs on the roof of their block of flats, and trying to bring her back by sheer force (whereas in previous cases, Nariman had used soft words), Yasmin falls off the ridge with her.

The two stepchildren are marvels of characterization. Coomy, especially, the righteous and cantankerous spinster who pretends she’s altruistic and concerned, but who has let hate eat her up, and tragically has a hole instead of a heart. The scene where, at Nariman’s birthday, she is forced by her stepfather to bring out the bone china instead of the everyday plates and dishes is a piece of anthology. She secretly blames Nariman for having killed her mother, with his unruly love of that Goan woman. Let’s say she’s her deceased mother’s avenger. And so even if she cannot say it, her whole life is full of hatred and self-righteousness (as a compensation), and she’s on the lookout for the first opportunity to get rid of the detested free-thinker, who represents a crossover form of civilised culture very much at risk in today’s India. Coomy on the other hand represents intransigence and sectarianism. And the soft-willed brother Jal represents opportunistic powerlessness, because even though he’s friendly, he cannot resist his sister’s fury and rage, and objectively sides with her.

The broken ankle is the needed opportunity. At first, Nariman is taken care of at Chateau Felicity, but being bedridden, he’s now an invalid, and Coomy’s hatred spawns a Machiavellian scheme: she pretends they don’t have the money any more to look after him, that the doctor told her this and that, and one day she arrives at Yezad’s flat with Nariman in an ambulance. He is to stay only a few days. But after the period is over, she deliberately damages Nariman’s ceiling (in fact she obliges Jal to do it) and informs Roxana and Yezad that the “accident” in his ceiling makes his room impossible to have him back. This wilful hammering has a symbolical meaning: it stands for a generation’s disregard for the higher values of mercy, forbearance and integration. The deliberate destruction of Gandhian values, in fact, which India’s independence had elevated for the world to see. This ceiling of values is shattered in order to enable separatism, and the refusal of transgenerational education.

As a professor of English, Nariman Vakeel stands for the universality of culture, for the freedom of spirit against the narrow-mindedness of casteism and bigotry. And as grandfather he stands for the necessity of community and togetherness. And some of his “step” children (are today’s Indians still Ghandi’s children? asks Mistry) have all but refused his humanist and spiritual legacy. The fate of prophets is never an enviable one. And so when the iron girder (meant to repair the ceiling) falls on Coomy, it’s a logical punishment for her behaviour, but most of all it’s the author’s condemnation of the social and historical attitude based on the Coomy’s principles. 

The detailed account of Nariman’s ordeal is so psychologically true, so morally compelling that I often read on with a kind of unease, the novel’s accusing eye on my own life’s compromises. Indeed who hasn’t, like Coomy, or worse perhaps, like Jal (because Jal lets violence take place, and does not act) sold at least some of their ideals and values, in order to live in more comfortable selfishness? Here the book’s narrative precision and, yes Mr. Elie, the all-knowing narrator’s interventionism serves a moral purpose intended at exposing our delicate and untold personal settlements with society and this makes Mistry a moralist of the best sort.

Let’s turn to Yezad now. Like Nariman, he used to be a staunch believer in secularism; he used to look down upon any religious belief as irrational and anti-modern. He used to indulge in the pleasures of ordinary life, laughing with his boys, enjoying his wife’s loveliness when he came back from work. But this finely balanced life is altered when Nariman, whom he respects and enjoys when he goes to visit his in-laws, is obliged to stay home, permanently, it seems. There’s the ever-present financial aspect, of course, and then the bedpan and bottle one. The genial father becomes a rigid purist when it comes to hygiene and cleanliness. He won’t allow “his” sons (possessiveness as the source of social chaos, cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau) to touch Nariman’s instruments, and lets the old man in agony if Roxana is away. The bad smells and change of habits bring out the bad aspects in him. And this unbalancing of ordinarily virtuous life (virtuous because it was balanced – virtue is often that, a precarious balancing of humanity and animality) reverberates on the innocence of his boys: because joy and happiness are no longer the rule at home, because a poison of greed and hatred has been inoculated somewhere up the line, Jehangir lets himself trapped in a bribe-taking scheme at school (he helps classmates to cheat on their lessons), so he can bring money home to pay for grandpa’s medicines.

This wouldn’t be much of a crime, seen from a certain perspective, but Rohinton Mistry dramatises these little events so we can understand their moral importance as open doors for greater disasters. You start cheating and then you lie about your cheating, and the cheating becomes trivialised, the lying becomes trivialised, and so on. Yezad also abandons some of his principles, and goes to see a fortune-teller neighbour, who takes bets on numbers she’s seen in her dreams, and because it has worked once on a little sum, he’s tempted to do it again on a large one. It fails, of course, because the whole betting organisation is raided by police, and Yezad loses all the family’s money. The drama is less the financial distress he brings to his wife and children than the misery he inflicts on them and himself as well. Because of this incident, the joys of honesty and simple life are eaten up by worries and silent guilt, and this elementary moral lesson is always important to remember, I think.

There are forces which are present to repair and soothe: first and foremost Roxana’s dogged resistance to adversity. She looks after her children, after her husband, after her father, forgetting herself in the process: she’s the real saint of the story. Then there’s Daisy, the violinist next door, who comes and play for Nariman, and to whom he asks to come and play for him when he will die. She promises him she will, perhaps out of politeness. That scene is perhaps the only moment of real melodrama: realizing his grandfather is dying, Jehangir runs through town to fetch her, and finds her at a rehearsal and reminds her of her promise. She had forgotten, but she respects the promise, and goes back home to dress in grand style before meeting the agonizing professor and his family, and playing at his deathbed.

There’s also Vilas, the letter reader and writer, whom Yezad befriends on his way to work. For me he represents Mistry himself, trying to make sense out the chaos of human stories and listening to each person’s perspective. When the news he has to read to his clients is too harsh, he doesn’t ask for money. That’s his contribution to the alleviation of the general sorrow of the world.

What’s interesting is that some of this good-doing works: Yezad one day accepts to look after his father in-law’s bedpan, and Roxana realises that she’s been the instrument of something greater than her patience and selflessness. It’s after Yezad has decided to take up his religious practices which will eventually lead him to half-bigotry. But before that, they have undoubtedly lifted him up above petty trouble and put him put in the right way. Hence the gesture towards the old man. Yezad has found in his Parsi identity a new sense of accomplishment, just like Nariman had found accomplishment in the stoic acceptance and abandonment of his personal initiative. The old religion roots him in his position as son to his own father, and so father himself. But in the epilogue, which takes place 5 years later, Mistry shows him to have gone too far, and become bigoted and intolerant, as intolerant in fact as Nariman’s parents had been when they had refused that he marry the Goan Christian woman. Yezad’s son, Murad, is in love with a non-Parsi, and the confrontation is acutely described. Yezad is dangerously on the verge of sectarian intransigence, the fun-loving dad is now a frightening bigot who won’t let anyone step close to him when he’s doing his holy rites. The peaceful solace that he had managed to find in his religion has turned into a family war that Roxana looks upon helplessly.

I wonder if this change occurs because he has won. He’s won the struggle against the selfish forces in the family, but this victory becomes a failure. So doesn’t Yezad behave the way he does in the end because Coomy is dead, because Jal has invited them to come and live at Chateau Felicity, and finally they all live in the comfort they deserved? Could it be the balance has tilted too much on the positive side this time? Is Mistry telling us that all passion for religion rankles and becomes intolerant? Because on the other hand, we could say that true religiosity contains a sanctification process, a disconnection from worldly concerns which can seem intolerant to those that don’t share its radicalism.

Yet my appreciation of the novel focuses on Nariman’s example, his delicate and moving passing away into the silence of Parkinson’s disease, his friendly and refined humour, his dedicated sense of duty and finally his light-hearted stoicism. I’d say Yezad is left at an intermediary stage, the stage when one realises the importance and seriousness of religious commitment, but hasn’t yet acknowledged the vanity of  clinging to one’s achievements. Yezad is religious by atonement, not out of love and this condemns his radicalism (not his faith!). Let’s then take the positive view that he might evolve, that experience will bring him the wisdom to realize his excess. Because what will save Yezad is that for him, “family matters”, he has Roxana, and after his sons have finished rebelling against him (as they must), they and their wives and children will be around him, and he’ll remember Nariman’s towering example. At one stage, Yezad does a brave thing: he tears up all the documents that he had kept in the loose hope of emigrating to Canada one day. He decides to stay in his country, and belong (something which Mistry has regretted not doing perhaps):

He sat upon the bed, and shook out the large envelope. The letters, forms, photocopies, news clippings fluttered out in a heap. He began ripping them up.

The sound of tearing brought Roxana to the backroom. “What are you doing?”, she asked, horrified.

“Getting rid of garbage”.

For a second she thought of rescuing the documents. Then she understood, Yezad was right, it was not worth keeping.

She joined him on the bed, cross-legged, and began tearing. It felt good. They looked up from the pile, smiling, and their eyes met.

When everything had been shredded into a mound of paper petals, he reached over it to pull her closer to him. He put his arms around her, cradling her head on his chest.” (p. 255)

I have to add here my son's Matthieu's very interesting commentary which he has added to this review on his Indian blog!

R.K. Narayan’s short novel The vendor of sweets (1967) is the story of a wise man, called Jagan, who lives in the narayanian town of Malgudi and prospers by selling quality sweetmeats appreciated because they aren’t overpriced or watered down with cheap ingredients. He’s a believer in honest practises, and a living proof that free enterprise when practised within the rules not only brings money and satisfaction to its initiator, but also satisfaction and development in a community. At a certain level of entrepreneurship and provided the adequate circuits of supply and demand are long-lasting enough to enable investment to pay off, people can flourish and their individual interests coincide with those of the group. This economic introduction might seem a little out of place, but in fact R.K.Narayan’s novel touches the themes of individual and collective satisfaction, and Jagan’s shop, which employs five or so people and caters to people’s pleasurable needs if not nourishment, is typically a small viable firm with a social and human mission: that which demonstrates that work values bring about peace and a sense of togetherness, which larger companies, where financial realities are sometimes of more important than people, always risk dehumanisation instead of civilisation.

This social dimension is perhaps best represented through the character of the “cousin”, who acts as Jagan’s confident and counsellor throughout the story. He isn’t family really, but he comes to the shop every afternoon and after having taken his bite of the sweets in the kitchen at the back (something which Jagan doesn’t mind at all, and even if he notices it, lets him do it, out of pure generosity), comes out front and sits next to Jagan to chat and listen to him. From a certain perspective, he is the quintessential parasite, but precisely, because Jagan’s shop is based on honesty and sound practises, where there is no selfishness, there are surpluses, and the cousin, along with the cooks and a few other people, benefit from them. Besides, the cousin has an invaluable service to give, which is well worth his daily pilfering. He listens to Jagan, he understands him and really puts himself at his disposal for anything he might need. This is a disinterested service which certainly comes from his good nature, but also from Jagan’s benevolence: you are open-handed, I’ll be open-eared.

Now the salesman is a widower, who has been left with an only son, Mali. And the problem is that Jagan isn’t an educator; he’s hesitant and weak-willed; he’s an admirer of his son’s intelligence and originality, or what seems so first. So when his son decides he’s had enough of his schooling, he takes it for a form of self-sufficiency; when Mali decides he wants to become a writer (he will say later he cannot imagine himself as a vendor of sweets!), Jagan bows at so much talent, and when Mali steals his money to pay for his trip to the US, where he will learn the writer’s trade (having spent a year doing nothing), the father convinces himself that this is a sign of commendable enterprising spirit. Finally, Mali decides to start a business, based not on the sale of his stories, but of a story-writing machine (of all ideas!) It is only then that Jagan finds it hard to swallow. Mali is Jagan’s opposite, almost. He could easily be read as new India going modern and technological (which cannot be done without a certain amount of moral cynicism), whereas Jagan, a staunch Gandhian, stands for traditional India and its insistence on autonomy and self-reliance. But there is more: Mali openly criticises the culture of his native land; for him, India is wrong, and because it has been wrong so long, it cannot adapt other than by force. Mali doesn’t believe in talking people into change, he doesn’t believe in listening to people’s needs. This story-machine of his is thrust upon the public without even making a survey as to whether or not it can be in demand.

There is a symbolical image here, that of writing a story. Mali first wanted to be a writer; this is what made him want to quit the old educational system. He told his uncomprehending father, at that stage, that what he would be writing was nothing like what his father could imagine. But he wrote nothing. Then, after having gone to learn about writing in America, he comes back with a business idea: to sell story-writing machines in which would-be writers would only have to enter the number of pages, the number of characters, the place and time, the type of atmosphere, etc. and the machines would churn the story for them! For Jagan, who spends his vendor’s time reading the Bhagavad-Gita (1), and who had first applauded his son’s literary pursuits, this is impossible to understand. In fact, Mali is trying to market the most unmarketable thing: inspiration, man’s spirit. He doesn’t choose to sell art, which would be parasitic enough, perhaps, but the source of art. His business would, if it succeeded (but the book doesn’t say he fails), drown people’s imagination with preformatted productions which could be reproduced mechanically given the right ingredients. As opposed to the cousin’s idleness, which is in reality deeply needed, because it provides meaning and communal companionship, his business talents would develop only individual barrenness. Instead of the sensible creativity of true listening and down to earth story-telling, his mechanized stories would replace doorstep chatting and neighbourly exchange by hypnotised and repetitive reading habits. I don’t know if Narayan was aiming at any precise targets, but today his message rings like a warning that was well ahead of its time, especially concerning some Bollywood productions.

Miles away from the parasitic consumer society that is plaguing not only India but the whole developed world, Jagan’s character is a reminder of the possibility of detachment and simplicity, which even he has had to learn: the book shows him first fighting against his son’s encroaching possessiveness. When Mali had first decided that his father (along with his father’s money) would agree, as always, to pay for his selfish plans, he had not counted on a limit: that of Jagan’s self-respect. Putting his father’s name on that advertising leaflet in order to force him into business and make him pay was one step too many, and Jagan’s reaction, perhaps childish in a way, is quite normal. He shuts himself up like a hermit crab, and avoids confrontation. Not very mature, definitely, but what Mali is doing is not mature at all. In fact what Jagan will need, like Rama in the Gita (who, says Narayan, prods the hero on when he is in doubt), in order to understand what to do next, is a divine intervention. Let's see which one!

Having childishly reduced the price of his sweets in the hope this would discourage his son from asking him for money, he incurs the wrath of sweet-selling competitors, who soon flock in to bring him back to economic reason. And with them comes a stranger, a sort of sage who lives in a nearby garden. He’s a sculptor of statues, Godheads, and he asks Jagan to come and visit his garden. The climax of this visit occurs when he asks Jagan for help to lift out of the water a stone out of which a god will later have to be carved. Jagan is afraid that this sculptor might be a stooge acting on behalf of the dispossessed rival merchants, and that he might be drowned by him, suppressed as a disturbing competitor. But nothing happens, and this ordeal creates the shock which Jagan needed. At the end of the book, he leaves his house, and holding on to nothing but Gandhi’s example and his back-door key, which he asks the cousin to give to Mali, because the shop and everything he has will belong to him one day. He has won the final victory not over Mali but over himself and his comfortable and virtuous life that still held him prisoner. His new janma (life-stage) can begin. He joins the sage in his sculpture garden.

One could look upon Narayan’s story as a vindication for the need of India to open up and attain political and economical adulthood. Today in 2009, this is a plea which has been heard, after all. When Mali comes back to the motherland and confronts his cranky old father who is looking back towards the past, whereas the boy, with his young Korean girlfriend (not even his wife) impatiently waits for him to pull India out of its dustiness… One might sympathize. The young lady, called Grace, is charming, she does charm Jagan (who isn’t very hard to charm anyway), and she represents perhaps the essence of a civilisation freed of nationalistic shackles. For Jagan of course, all this modernity is just flouting the principles and the order that he not only believes in, but for which he has fought and gone to prison for (because of his connections with the Satyagraha movement). How can the two understand one another? And in fact Narayan’s answer will be: there will be no understanding, but thanks to old India’s principles of resilient spirit of tolerance and open-mindedness, the old will let the young have their way, and try their walk of life. After all, even the old don’t always understand the young, they are still their sons and fellow human-beings.

I suggest an interesting review by Frederick Glaysher here.

(1) Gandhi wrote of the Bhagavad Gita, in a tone that would certainly apply to Jagan: “The Bhagavad-Gita calls on humanity to dedicate body, mind and soul to pure duty and not to become mental voluptuaries at the mercy of random desires and undisciplined impulses.” (link)