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 all 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:

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)

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)

Khaled Hosseini is not an Indian writer, but an Afghan-American writer. But having read The kite runner (2003), I wanted to include my review of it here, because it’s a book about the region, and I know that a lot of people have read it in and around India. The literary phenomenon which the book represents, along with Hosseini’s second opus, A thousand splendid suns, also explains my breach of practice.

The kite runner has the charm, the naturalness and the emotionality of great works of world fiction, but its first quality is its obviousness: you start reading it, and you’re immediately at home. There’s no artistic pretexts, no frills, no style, almost. Hosseini, unlike so many writers, has a story to tell; it’s a great story, and he’s a great story-teller. Without realizing it, you’re there, in the Kabul of the 1970s, and the story has started. It revolves around the two boys, Hassan and Amir, and you’re witnessing their childhood games, and you’re drawn by the vision of that faraway time and place. In the streets of the city, on the hills not far out, Amir flies his kites with Hassan, who lives with him among other servants and friends, and the pair enjoy their boyish pursuits together. Then you’re pulled into the murkier waters of the relationships between Amir and his father, a widower (but great socialite) called Baba – who seems to have something to hide from a past which social prejudices prevent him from acknowledging. And then, all around, Kabul, Afghanistan, its culture, its customs, its hardships and its spirit.

But soon, somewhere, an uneasiness, a guilt perhaps, is lurking: Amir can’t help disliking something in that father of his, and it makes the story less transparent. His friend Hassan, the son of his father’s servant Ali, belongs to an ethnic tribe, the Hazara, which is seen as inferior to Amir’s. This unbalance, blended with Amir’s discontent, makes him play sadistic games with Hassan, who, almost unawares, still admires him and forgives him with a wonderful (and half-disturbing) generosity. From that early relationship, with its potential violence, a strain of events is going to flow, fuelled by a history of war and exile, darkened by jealousy and disrespect, torn by the craziness of ethnic rivalry.

“When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba or the myriad of Baba’s friends – second and third cousins milling in and out of the house – wanted to know was this: did the girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyah and fulfil his dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure?

  Was there happiness in the end, they wanted to know.

If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say.

   Does anybody’s?

   After all, life is not a Hindi movie.” (p.327)

Happiness: that’s the key to the book. In spite of its bleak outlook on human nature and human history, Hosseini is telling us we are created for happiness and freedom. Men are boys who find their joy in flying coloured kites high up in the blue sky of friendship and honesty, even if some of them have forgotten it, and play “other” games. The book voices the interrogation about religious terrorism, and denounces any violence in the name of Islam: but it also describes how deep hatred and intolerance are rooted in the heart of men. Generations will continue to suffer before generations can apply balm on the bruises and wounds caused by the religious and ethnic crimes. The pain and sinfulness described by The kite runner is as old as mankind itself, the folly and the animality too. Yet a message of hope and benevolence emerges of the rubble which so pitilessly crushes bodies, hearts and souls. As fragile as a kite in the winter sky, as faded as an old photo, as distant as a lost memory, but it’s there, waiting for children to be born again, and innocence to smile once more.

If The kite runner grips you so well from the beginning onwards, it’s because of the necessity of its plot. Crime, punishment, redemption: a classic pattern, but associated with a clever flashback structure, and the charm and appeal of a visit through a history one wonders at re-discovering, it works perfectly. What has Amir has done, why he has done it, the consequences of this deed and the way he will be brought to amend things: this slowly evolves against the backdrop of the father’s story, which we weren’t aware of at the beginning: and thus we follow the events on two planes, and a logic articulation slowly emerges from them. Some events which first appear like coincidences are in fact soberingly meaningful consequences of the double structure. We might even see the plot as a three-tier system, because we have Amir’s childhood events, his adult’s perspective, and, looming behind, Baba’s life events that have influenced everything.

So that even if Amir is the literary hero of the book (the narrator), his “heroism” owes much to the two other heroes, Baba and Hassan, who are the real moral heroes. Who they are and what they have done before him helps Amir to become a hero, but after them. The moral stature of the father grows throughout the book, as more and more witnesses testify to it. Courage vs. cowardice becomes one of the novel’s great themes. One illustration: whereas one would say, because this belongs to the XXth century’s historical legacy, that cowardice is in the end wiser than courage (wars recognizing no moral values anymore), Baba represents the enduring virtue of courage even in the face of contemporary nihilistic wartime amoralism. The scene where he stands up to defend the unknown feminine co-traveller during the flight out of Afghanistan, and so nearly misses being shot down by an unknown Russian soldier who had been eyeing the young woman: such courage might seem futile and reckless. Post-nazi, post XXth-century-horrors conventional wartime wisdom have long prepared the spectator for another code of morals. Why risk your life for a show of courage which your enemy will never recognize as such? Why remain human in front of beasts? Well, Baba standing up that night, superbly defiant of such calculations is a witness to a courage we all need, in fact. Courage contains perhaps a certain naivety, or thoughtlessness. Too much thinking, and you are in Hamlet’s boots. But that’s being unmindful of a reality which the book stresses so well: the penitent’s courage.

Throughout religious history, pilgrimages have asked, and needed a special form of courage: one that is made of patience, endurance, and acceptance. But those who left their comfort and their peace to endure the troubles of travel and unknown territories were goaded along by another force: a need for atonement and purification. When one’s consciousness of sin, or perception of unworthiness reaches a certain degree (neither too shallow nor too deep; between acceptability and collapse), one normally reacts in ways to re-establish the level of purity or self-esteem one has lost. Hence the energy. Amir’s return to Afghanistan, away from the comfortable life he’s created for himself in San Francisco, is one such pilgrimage. His character is a combination of acceptance and disgust of cowardice, which he knows belongs to his personality. On the other hand, even if he feels responsible for what he as a child did to Hassan, he knows that children cannot be held responsible to the same extent that adults can. So what really makes him go back? And, when he’s back in front of Rahim Khan (the old friend of his dad’s who phoned him at the beginning of the novel), in Peshawar, why does he accept the terrible mission that Rahim asks him? Why doesn’t he tell himself  (and thus justify his adult’s mental construction) that life needs oblivion, that memory itself helps people forget, as a good protection for the balance of the self?

Here is Amir at that crucial moment. Let’s see his strain of thoughts:

“Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly. But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I’d change my mind. I was afraid I’d deliberate, ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going. I was afraid the appeal of my life in America would draw me back, that I would wade back into that great big river and let myself forget, let the things I had learned these last few days sink to the bottom. I was afraid I’d let the waters carry me away from what I had to do.”

The impulse that makes him go towards his destiny (which takes the form of his duty) is, we can notice, less decision than fear. He repeats it: I’m afraid. What is he really afraid of, in fact? All cowards have felt this sort of fear. In fact, he’s afraid of the other Amir, the subconscious Amir who has been pulling the strings of his memory and of his sense of guilt ever since he started growing up with it. He’s afraid that that Amir might win, the selfish, forgetful, fatalistic Amir. What’s poignant is that another Amir still exists, the other Amir who will be revealed during the journey back to Kabul, and one can wonder where this Amir comes from. This one tries to resist to the tide of forgetfulness, struggling against the enemy within, a padding memory that protects him (and all of us) from the pain which guilt inflicts upon us, and makes us forget. This reluctant Amir finally accepts to go back to Afghanistan and deal with a responsibility which he recognises as his.

I’d say this Amir is a child of Baba’s courage. For when Rahim Khan phones, long after Baba has died, it’s Baba’s friend on the phone, it’s Baba’s memory that speaks to Amir’s conscience, and wins over Amir’s memory. In a sense, and contrarily to the common pattern (“the child is father to the man”, Wordsworth), we have Amir the adult winning over Amir the child. But that child had been lied to, and so the violence and the shame felt by the child had to be fought against as a result of the lying. It’s interesting to see that Amir, upon coming back to the US, will nip the burgeoning lie concerning Sohrab (book p.331). He will not repeat the process which led to his catastrophic behaviour with Hassan. America’s freedom enabled at least that. And his redemption.

It’s going to be difficult to mention this redemption without giving away the plot, and I won’t do that (much of the book’s appeal depends on the power of its plot), but on the other hand, I cannot rightly not speak about it! Amir’s crime, his sin, originated in a violence that he was made to inflict upon others, having taken his part of the responsibility in the process. And he is redeemed thanks to a symmetrical violence inflicted upon him. That is at least how he describes the liberating process. One must add that he was saved war and perhaps death by his father’s escape out of Afghanistan, and so similarly, for his redemption to be complete, he also has to save someone. Now this symmetry, with all its satisfying balancing of guilt and reparation, belongs to the essence of justice, of course. The kite runner, in effect, describes an appropriate judgement (or retribution). On the other hand, one might question such an obligation on the very grounds discussed above, ie, that of a child’s responsibility to whom one has lied: a double clause for legal irregularity. From that point of view, Amir might even be said to be innocent, and the guilt that was thrust upon him, declared an additional act of inhumanity.

So the question is, what nevertheless justifies his battle against himself, and the eventual victory of the adult Amir over the child he has been? The answer to this question opens the door to the novel as controlled fiction, because if Khaled Hosseini has decided to write such a story, it’s because he has seen that justification. Could it be that something in an author’s creation corresponds to a recovered childhood? Art as becoming a child once again? Or perhaps, through this process, becoming an adult?  Choosing one’s life? Towards the end of the book, Sohrab says: “I want my old life back”. That sort of declaration is that of a suffering body, a suffering soul. The secret of happiness is looking not back, but forward, and wanting to live what’s ahead. Yet childhood in its essence also lies ahead, because a life worth living is one of innocence and freedom, and that giving children the chance to live these to the full depends on parents who have made peace with the child within.

(Funny how I know I am stopping here, but  am only in the middle of what I could say about it! But all good things have to end, haven’t they?)

The kite runner came out in 2007 (director Marc Forster, who also directed Quantum of Solace), and on the whole, the spectators who left their reviews on IMDb were very enthusiastic. Even the delicate book-film transition was generally deemed good. I haven’t seen it, and I feel I don’t need to see it, that it might actually spoil the story’s representation which is now planted in my brain. Anyhow, that a good film was made so soon after the book was written certainly testifies to its quality as the classic it is already.

Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, 1977. Nanda Kaul, an old solitary lady lives in her house on the mountainside. Something depressing about her presence there, as if she was hiding away from some family secret. The house: a witness of generations of Colonial time residents, when British gentlemen and ladies used to entertain soldiers and organise parties for the rich expatriates there. Then came Independence. 1947. Everything stopped, and the house was vacated. That old lady bought it probably in the sixties, to settle away from her previous life. She appreciates the emptiness of the place, its solitude, the parched hillsides. She feels pacified when listening to “the scented sibilance of the pine trees” (this is from the opening page of the book, and you can notice already Anita Desai’s style in this simple image: the scented sibilance! A lot of the book’s charm, like that of Clear light of day, comes from the author’s fluent poetic precision. I’ll try further down to point at some of the differences with that other book).

Things really start when the aged lady must accept the visit of her great grand-daughter, because of some medical happenings in her family. To say she doesn’t welcome that visit is an understatement. She’s in a state of panic. She leaves Ram Lal, her obsequious cook, think of a menu that such a little girl would appreciate (potato chips!) She doesn’t even remember Raka: even if the author, Anita Desai (mother of Kiran), doesn’t mention the possibility, we wonder whether Nanda Kaul isn’t suffering from some form of Alzheimer’s disease. She has the stiffness, the forced amiability, the occasional incoherence and the lack of liveliness, which I have seen in documentaries showing that sort of people. On the whole, her character is extremely present and realistic; there’s a feel about her that’s unmistakable. Old age, its oddities, its painful limits and its sudden immense vistas over unexpected fields of experience. 

Towards the end of the book we meet a third character, another old lady, Ila Das, who is as eccentric as Nanda Kaul is conservative, as loud-spoken as she is hushed. And that’s another narrative feat. This short volume (145 p) is inhabited by these three female figures, and each of them is as clear cut and sharp as the edges of the agaves growing in the ravines around the house. BTW, another quirkiness, which creates a very realistic effect (because something too expected, too well-fitting echoes more the writer’s world, and moves the reader away from the essence of reality): the house is called Carignano, an absurd Italian name whose origin is explained in the book, but this piece of reference simply doesn’t “fit”, in this Himalayan context, and points towards an important aesthetic choice: reality should not, cannot be harmoniously symbolised or signified in novels. Fire on the mountain is very much the result of this aesthetic choice.

Now the little girl: she’s described as a sort of insect, thin, graceful, but strangely wild and silent. At one moment of revelation, Nanda Kaul realises they are both very much alike, they are of the same genetic mould. She tells this to Raka, who characteristically recoils away from the comparison, as she recoils away from anything the old lady says or wants her to do. Everything Nanda Kaul reluctantly feels she should do, as her aged relative, is lost on the little waif. All she likes is to roam on the ragged mountainsides, near a burnt hut on the ridge, among the disturbing and dangerous refuse of the “Pasteur Institute”, a research institution which actually exists in Kasauli, where snakes and rabid jackals have bitten people under the very walls of the Institute.

What a strange creation, this Raka! What is her role in the novel? There are narrative answers, which I don’t want to disclose, but one may wonder if they’re really satisfactory: probably what Anita Desai is doing, in fact, is trying out her talent, pitting individuals one against the other, and watching the result. There isn’t much of a story in the classical sense, and while this could be very dangerous in terms of novelistic achievement, here, believe me, it works. The reader feels drawn towards the very unusual story that is made up by the coming together of these three beings, with their unfinished and bottomless personalities. Desai has that great talent: characterisation comes first, the story is only secondary. Yet a real story is written, up to a certain extent. It is made up of the bits of lives we visualise, and even if this story doesn’t coalesce in a pleasantly meaningful whole (not at all), it doesn’t matter: at the end of the book we have had our fill of human presence, of human depth, its vivid uniqueness, their completely unforeseeable destinies. For Desai, a human being is as creatively unique as cloud in the sky, yet as clearly and sharply recognisable as the pattern of seasons, the structure of a flower.

Compared to Clear light of day, Fire on the mountain strikes me a more fully successful work, even if it is shorter and earlier (the first dates from 1980, the second from 1977). Clear light of day strives at recreating a historical context of which she has freed Fire on the mountain. There is perhaps a greater literary scope to Clear light of day. But the 1977 book captures artistry in the making that the 1980 volume lumbers to display. I remember saying that the theme of Time was the great subject of Clear light of day. Well, it could also be said of Fire on the mountain. What is Nanda Kaul doing, up there on her mountain, in her retreat? She’s waiting, watching, listening, fearing, hoping. All of these time-connected activities are rather negative, as far as she’s concerned, but there will be some sort of change in her, some revelation, because of her forced interaction with Raka and Ila Das. Time will once again create something in her, as it always does if we open ourselves to it. In fact, it always opens its way through us, whether we want to protect ourselves from it or not. One could say that the story of Fire on the mountain is that of Time at work: two young creatures (I’m calling Ila Das young in a sense that the reader of the novel will understand) assaulting Nanda Kaul’s fortress, breaking down her fortifications, exposing her soft underbelly, her protected past. They only half succeed, but the message is clear, it seems to me: Truth in us humans comes when the future pours through the present and mixes with the past, when the clear waters of unexplainably new youth flood the salty tears of age, to recreate our beings.

(I don’t think the book would lend itself to any filmed version: there is no love story, no deep-set revenge, no family interest; only the windswept crags, the curious observing langur monkeys, and the night storms that magically cover the mountain slopes with a pink crêpe of morning lilies…)