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!

I am not sure I shall be able to do justice to Khushwant Singh’s little novel (published in 1956). It seems both too simple, too factual, and so because of that, too deeply rooted in Indian history and drama (Oh, for those who need the plot, go here). Not being Indian, how do I talk about it adequately? Here and there people say that the present upcoming generation is forgetting (has forgotten?) the events it relates, and such oblivion too is a formidable fact. We intellectuals would tend to consider History as necessary to the identity of a nation, especially if this history tells of its “mistakes” (but what are a country’s mistakes? How do you hold it responsible?) So what happens if a generation finds its past too heavy for it to continue to live with it? Hasn’t it got the right to forget? How do you rationalize this need for departure from a searing past?  In general anyway, people forget, time erases. And so history deals with oblivion all the time, by fighting against it, that’s its principal mission. In order to deal with the past, and in this case, a horrible past, it should be” careful how to tell, how it says things, because otherwise this slow and powerful movement of forgetfulness might well be stronger (“I would urge every Indian and Pakistani to read this book. It is part of our painful heritage”, says Vivek Sharma).

Hence the interest of fiction: stories and novels might be the right way to mediatise events which otherwise would simply be too factually strong. I’ll leave to those better informed to say how much in Train to Pakistan is fiction, how much fact. It’s enough to know that the frame is all too historical. “Too historical”: can certain facts be too historical? Yes, they can! In the sense of sickeningly real, unforgivingly real. So real that you want to forget them. But you know that it’s a novel; there are characters, events and a narration, and all this conventional structure enables you perhaps to go beyond the reality in its bare power.

This function of the novel, for example, works in the sense that readers will tend to need heroes or goodies, and demand revenge against baddies. And in Train to Pakistan, we have such a character, Jugga. He’s a “budmash”, a young and hefty Sikh peasant who’s watched by the police because of some petty crimes and his loud mouth. His village (where all the action takes place), Mano Majra, a mixed Hindu-Muslim village, in which everybody lives together in a close-knit community, is steeped in the Partition turmoil in 1947, and trainloads of dead Hindus from Pakistan are sent to be buried nearby. Jugga is the one who prevents a similar trainload full of Muslims from being slaughtered in retaliation. And this what somebody has written concerning his bravery:

“It seems fitting that Juggut Singh is the hero in this novel. By allowing Jugga to save the train, Singh suggests that heroes need not always be figures in power. Because Jugga was basically an outcast, Singh places a different light on those in lower standings in society”(Link)

The problem is that Khushwant Singh didn’t turn Jugga into a hero at all. The novel focuses a little on his liaison with the local mullah’s daughter (Nooran), and later he’s imprisoned as a potential culprit for a village assassination (a“dacoity”), which in fact a thug called Malli is responsible for. The local magistrate, Inspector Hukum Chand (we’ll come back to him in a minute), keeps him in jail, even though he knows he’s innocent, because of some obscure political calculation  (his presence in jail could deflect the attention of the Muslims).

What makes Jugga act at the end of the story, what prompts him to save these people in the train, isn’t heroic disinterestedness. It’s clear from the succession of events that he’s revenging himself against that another badmash, Malli, who along with his team of no-good bloodthirsty bums has won from the authorities the dubious merit of looking after the Muslim possessions in the village, once the latter have been sent on a train on the other side of the border. In fact Malli and his men loot everything, and when some militiamen arrive from the war zone closer to Pakistan, and ask the Sikh community to band against the Muslims, suddenly considered as India’s arch enemies, Jugga sees his chance of taking revenge against Malli who not only should have been in prison instead of him, and had taunted him during a short stay there too, but by his attitude is an accomplice of those who sent the village Muslims on that death-train. On board was his girlfriend Nooran. Jugga is clearly much more an instrument of local rivalry and petty injustice than a brave defender of the Muslim community whom the Hindus (in spite of early protestations of defence) soon forget.

And that’s one of Khushwant Singh's great messages: the History of Violence and Hatred is a senseless Juggernaut that rolls over populations, crushing them and blinding them, and cannot be stopped once it’s started. Events happen, and the only strategy one can implement is, like Hukum Chand, to guess their predictable path, and shape whatever appearances you can manipulate, in order to seem in charge. Or like the Hindu militiamen, to slice through human complexity and declare that all Muslims are bloodthirsty devils,  that the sacred mission of all Hindus and Sikhs is to eliminate them one by one. Before the Partition, Mano Majra displayed a genuine hospitality and real religious openness. We see it described at the beginning of the book. But blind partisan suddenly pitted one against the other the two peaceful communities that (at least at this local level) didn’t know of   enmity.

One character was a better candidate for heroism: Iqbal Singh. He's a social worker (and probable communist reformer) who also happens to be a Sikh, and this quality will be considered much more than he himself would have liked.  In fact he will be obliged to accept an identity, which he had almost rejected, because this identity is the one that matters at the time of these events. But he comes to Mano Majra at the worst of times. He’s an intellectual, and in spite of a few oddities, he soon gets adopted by the community. He has an aura of authority about it that seems to designate him for greater action than submissiveness. Perhaps he might even have led a resistance against this absurd transformation of human relationships into live-or-die opposite camps. But immediately after the dacoity, and against all evidence, he is imprisoned, because authorities don’t know at first who was responsible and just needed suspects.  But then when Malli’s responsibility is recognised, he and Jugga remain in jail because the same authorities need them there for other purposes. Khushwant Singh thus makes it clear that once again the forces that are at work in human affairs have nothing to do with individual heroism or generous motives. And when a very angry and dignified Iqbal is finally released from prison, one might believe he could go back to Mano Majra to reason the villagers and stop them from siding with the butchers against their former brothers: as a social worker who has ideals and sees beyond simplistic explanations, he could have kept his eyes open to other realities than blood, and enlighten them. Instead, that very night when the train is saved by Jugga’s revengeful sacrifice, he gets drunk on whisky and falls asleep. Just before, we see him pathetically examining the value of moral action:

“The point of sacrifice, he thought, is the purpose. For the purpose, it is not enough that a thing is intrinsically good: it must be known to be good. It is not enough to know within one’s self that one is in the right; the satisfaction would be posthumous (…) If you look at things as they are, he told himself, there does not seem to be a code either of man or of God on which one can pattern one’s conduct. Wrong triumphs over right as much as right over wrong. Sometimes its triumphs are greater. What happens ultimately, you do not know. In such circumstances, what can you do but cultivate an utter indifference to all values?” (p. 195,197)

The one person who has a responsibility and enough power to weigh on the course of events is the corrupt and decadent magistrate who is sent to the village to control the situation. But in fact he too is manipulated by the invisible politicians who have master-minded the Partition itself, at the expense of the genocide (around half a million people died in the population exchanges). What is tragic is that whatever power he has left is misused and paralysed by fear. The writer who wrote the good book review at Wikipedia cleverly reminds us of the moment when Hukum Chand is frightened by the two geckos (representing the two warring parties) fighting one another on his wall, and when they suddenly fall, he pathetically jumps out of their reach. This lecherous and frightened old man is simply paralysed by the fear of anything happening to his poor flesh. The trains full of corpses rumble in Mano Majra, and the river flows by with its haunting floating spectres, but all he can do is hide from the horror, and try to forget it with alcohol and nautch girls.

Still, there is one moment when he does have a plan; it’s when he decides to free the two prison inmates we have spoken about, and hope that whatever grudge they bear might help deflect the Hindu militiamen from attacking the train. So he does try to save those hundreds of innocent lives, but how does he do it? By counting on some other falsely condemned human beings to act according to their emotions. He fails with Iqbal, who gets drunk, but succeeds with Jugga. In effect, he sends them to their sacrifice. And the point of the climax isn’t that Jugga saves the train, but that he saves it by being manipulated by the magistrate. It is the magistrate who, godlike, decides for him his destiny: he arrests him, detains him long enough for him to become infuriated, and then like a caged bull, releases him at the right moment. If Jugga is a hero, he’s a tragic one, an expendable one, a victim to the higher interests of a inhuman and pitiless administration.

Train to Pakistan describes the passage from an order of things where peaceful cohabitation was possible to a state where things will never be the same. That blood can never be forgotten, says this little novel. Alas, it is so very human to refuse to commit in the present and to forget the past. So that’s why Khushwant Singh has written this column, or this  monument to the victims of such an arch-human attitude.

The 1998 film, shot by Pamela Rooks doesn’t seem, according to IMDb reviewers, to be an everlasting work of art…

One last thing to say: thanks Akshay for lending me this little book!!

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)

     The reluctant fundamentalist is a strange and powerful little book. It’s clearly got some autobiographical elements in it, and because of that has manage to net some darting fishes of life that jump and flash and look up from their prison wondering what will happen to them. But the fisherman, Mohsin Hamid, has a heart, and won’t kill them; on the opposite, he’s willing to let them go back to their immense liquid world after he’s used their magic. So the reader watches this magic operate, and marvels at the freshness of the scenes, the clarity of the feelings, the truth of the colours. So gentle is this fisherman – or perhaps one should say, this fish breeder, because the little wild fishes he has caught grow and develop as we read – that his creatures perform what he wants them to do: they recognize his respect, they let themselves be tamed by him.

     They even love their net! What is the net? Mohsin Hamid’s first person monologue, sustained continuously from first to last page, whereas he’s supposed to be in a conversation with his interlocutor. That’s it, he’s engaged in a 200 page-long conversation with an unknown American visitor, to whom he’s telling the story of his life, and never makes this other person intervene. It’s sometimes artificial, because he’s not always very good at reformulating the other person’s remarks or reactions, so as to make them originate from his own logorrhoea; instead they sometimes turn out to be clumsy repetitions, and one wonders why he hasn’t wanted us to hear the other person’s voice! Well, that’s the book’s main trick. Who is Changez’s interlocutor? The question gathers momentum during the conversation; we feel the urge to hear him, to know his identity, his name, his purpose: we will be denied this relief.  

    On the other hand we know lots about Changez, the young Pakistani Princeton graduate who, now back in Lahore, tells his guest about his time in America, how he has brilliantly succeeded in his studies, was singled out among smart rivals and gets hired by one of the most prestigious New York finance companies. Changez, says his all-powerful mentor Jim, is a shark, he never ceases to swim, he’s constantly on the alert, and possesses tremendous powers of concentration and dedication. At 22, after a stupendous University record, he’s landed in the fiercely competitive waters of corporate New York, and he’s beaten all the natives, all the WASPs. They look at him with a mixture of disdain and envy, but he’s such a winner that his difference is disregarded in cosmopolitan New York. He feels at home there, in fact.

    The café conversation with the unnamed American also rolls on about Changez’s girlfriend, a lovely young Princeton graduate (I’d almost like to write “Princess”), with whom he goes to Greece that summer after they’ve all got their diplomas. She’s called Erica, and she’s a stunner, always surrounded by a crowd of admirers. But our young hero manages somehow to attract her attention, because he’s quieter, and she’s got a secret tragedy in her life that needs an attention which ordinary boyish physical adulation doesn’t or can’t give her. But she feels drawn to our young exile; his shyness, his gentleness win her slowly over. Back in New York, he learns she’s grieving the loss of her childhood boyfriend, who died from cancer. This death has shaken her so much that she’s under medication, and cannot commit; she needs friendship, not love.

     When we open “The reluctant fundamentalist” we are told of the importance of the narrator’s beard. He tries to ward off his listener’s alarm – says he – at seeing his beard. It must be some beard! We are in Lahore, Pakistan: so he’s a Muslim. In short, he’s our fundamentalist. But why reluctant? Does this reassure us? He says he “loves America”: not very reassuring. Yet, little by little, we do feel reassured. We are reassured by his story, by his character. One as much as the other, because confessing such a lengthy story shows a trust and a natural generosity which cannot but make us trust him in return. Changez may be a chatterbox, but he’s a believer in the power of words as a promoter of peace and confidence among peoples. Is his interlocutor’s silence a sign that this belief isn’t shared? What is sure, at any rate, is that because of his confession, we understand better what it is to be a “fundamentalist”. Changez is anything but what we would normally call a fundamentalist: a bigoted, short-sighted, intolerant ranter who cannot understand that humanity is plural and should remain thus. Fundamentalists never change: but he’s called “Changez”.

     But in fact this “fundamentalist” has learnt fundamentalism in America, where his company’s creed was to “concentrate on the pursuit of fundamentals”. These fundamentals are the firm’s overriding demand for efficiency and professionalism. So Mohsin Hamid makes it quite clear that we aren’t necessarily looking in the right direction when we turn our minds East, thinking of fundamentalism. A certain form of blind belief is involved in devoting all your energy in making sure American firms are the best and the most profitable of the planet. These white bright things are utterly convinced they are the best, they’re convinced they’re on a mission, that of intelligence and superiority, and that nothing less than total dedication is necessary if they want to justify their top-level recruitment. And all that is done in the name of a hidden God, the God of profitability and sound Finance.

     September 11, 2001 is the turning point in Changez’s narrative. Everything changes for him as from that date. First it makes his envied position as a shark in the high-flying NYC firm look more like a dartboard: being a Pakistani in post 9-11 New York wasn’t exactly a way to promote open multiculturalism. He starts getting bad looks, then threats and even if he’s protected by his bosses, it’s hard to fight against those “fundamentals”. Then things deteriorate with Erica. For her, the national disaster reactivates her own drama: death is again very close, and her depression worsens. They try to protect their budding love, but the forces within her are too strong, she drifts away from him, and is placed in an institution. Changez’s family at home in Pakistan tell him about the risks of war against the old arch-enemy, India, and he’s shocked to realize that the US are pulling the strings in the back. This is too much for him: here he is, working his ass off for a country that’s planning to bomb his country’s neighbours, and perhaps his very family! He slowly understands some fundamentals are wrongly positioned.

     But it isn’t that simple. Because everything he’d fought for so far had become his pride, his happiness, and his sense of achievement. He’d been living that goddamn American dream, that’s what. And when America gives, it isn’t with half a heart. He’s become an American, almost. America has been made thanks to guys like him. That’s where its strength comes from. That’s why it’s the world most powerful nation. He has believed in the Dream that all men… etc. America’s life-secret is that the river of kindness and hope has continued to mix its waters to the gigantic materialistic and individualistic estuary. One sign of this: while they’re talking at the café table, a beggar comes up, and our narrator approves the stranger’s principles not to give money to paupers in the street:

“Very wise: one ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty than to him, a creature who is merely a symptom. What am I doing? I am handing him a few rupees – misguidedly, of course, and out of habit. There, he offers us his prayers for our well-being; now he is on his way.” (p. 45)

     Changez is “reluctantly” doing two opposite things at the same time: rationally encouraging the detachment from visible misery in order to keep his eyes on the wider picture which is that of the long-term solution, and emotionally pitying the real person who needs food, now, so he and his family can eat. This contradictory attitude symbolises his “fundamental” humanity. Because the contradiction is only apparent. The real contradiction is when one gives to be rid of the problem, or when one doesn’t give in order to escape the burn of poverty in a fellow human being, and when one justifies this by building rational excuses. Guys like Changez are the real Americans, those who believe in doing what’s right, those who have pledged their lives for freedom and who have died on the Normandy beaches. But not the rifle-toting, whiter than white, frightened isolationists who vote with their Chevrolet 4WD.

     In the fight against America inc., Changez wins the battle: he quits his golden job and returns to the nation where he really belongs, and thus regains a purpose which he had lost somewhere on the line when leaving for the States. He loses (Am)Erica, true, but then she was lost anyway. For me, Erica represents the weak spot in Changez’s strength of character. Not that he’s responsible for that weakness. But she’s the one thing he hasn’t been able to succeed in: she has eluded him, whereas he has succeeded everywhere else, including his indictment of neoliberal USA. Perhaps this failure helps picturing Changez as a less formidable figure; and his suffering and sacrifice brings him closer to us?

Mohsin Hamid

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!

The white tiger is a rare genetic variation of the normally ochre-skinned feline that is both feared and respected as the king of animals in Asia. But it’s also a 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga which the press has acclaimed and which I’ve just finished reading. Somebody (The publishers weekly) said about it that it was “the perfect antidote to lyrical India”. Other books and films could claim that title, but it’s true that there is, especially in the West, a tendency to lyricize India, matlab, to romanticize it by raving about the colourful and exotic surface, and ignoring the harsher reality below. I’m sure I myself have been a blind victim to this illusion.

Well thanks to guys like Adiga (I would also like to mention writers like Rohinton Misty or Khaled Hosseini, who even if he’s an Afghani, depicts a society shown from the ground roots, which has much in common with Adiga’s. And let’s not forget earlier film-makers like Shyam Benegal), my eyes have opened, and it isn’t that I’ve forgotten about the more colourful iced top, but the cake has definitely acquired a richer and sourer taste. Quite normal, obviously. What Arvind Adiga has done is create a style, a voice and an urgency which all together compel to read and please the reader. And he has something to say. But first the style, the voice.

Balram Halwai, the main protagonist, is writing to Mr. Jiabao, China’s Prime Minister, but in reality, I am Mr. Jiabao, you are, we all are. Balram is telling us how India is now ready for companies from China to come and invest there, because newly set up entrepreneurs have cleared the way for them. People like himself, in fact! And we’re going to to see what it takes for India to become a land of opportunity and success stories to unfold. For those who know what violence is simmering under the silk chunnis and colourful saris, his portrayal of contemporary India will not come as a surprise, but others will shudder.

For Balram the underdog barks very well, and that’s his first asset. It’s very hard not to listen to him. Only masters can do that, by the way. Only masters can make sure that people listen to what they say without being interrupted. Balram is a sly guy too: he is really a master, and at the same time he makes you pity him, he takes the pitiful mien of the pauper, the village peasant boy. Well, in fact it’s sometimes that voice we hear, sometimes the other one, the entrepreneur’s voice. But he does that because he has a secret to share.

He’s clever, because he tells us that secret from the start: he’s killed his master, and he’s become a master himself, says he. But we don’t believe him, because he’s shut up in a room somewhere, and he’s busy dissecting a “wanted” poster where his name and particulars appear. It sounds like bravado, and somehow we fear that all this is going to end up badly, that he’s in a mess and they’ll catch him. Well, they don’t. Not only that, but he’s caught them for once. Incredible, but he’s made it. He’s actually gotten away with it, and the whole book tells Mr. Jiabao how he did it, starting from his childhood in the village and ending in that office full of chandeliers in Bengalore. Whew.

The first trick was that his father, a consumptive rickshaw-puller, wanted him to go to school and learn how to read and write. Detail? No, it’s the heart of the matter. He didn’t lack pluck and good fortune after that, but that was the essential move. The book makes it clear that education sets you apart in a way we have no idea in the West, where every youngster is crammed full of knowledge he doesn’t even know he’s knowledgeable about. Over there, if you can read, you can become a driver, you can be sent to the big city, and be noticed by the right people, be hired, and then move on little by little by edging those who can’t read or write.

And so Balram ends up replacing the older driver he’s ousted and driving the master and mistress in Delhi. He doesn’t quite understand what shady business they’re up to at first, but it certainly isn’t fair dealing, given the amounts of money in transaction that he sees while driving their carriers between banks and posh hotels. He gets to know the drivers’ gang, who slowly initiate him to ways by which he might be able to trick his master, and we of course start seeing the connection. What’s he going to do? Where does the murder fit in?

The hitch is that his master, M. Ashok, is a kind guy. Yes, incredible, he’s even his defender. For all the other rich, mobile touting passengers, that driver is barely a human being, he’s a slave at best, and sometimes hardly more than an animal. But M. Ashok is always there to vindicate him, and underline his basic loyalty, his honesty, his serviceability. When Balram is tempted to tell him his grievances, he suspects he wants a raise, and hands him money without hesitation. How on earth do you get rid of such a considerate master? And most of all, why would you want to get rid of him? Having been brought out of your village, into the capital, being paid handsomely (true, he normally has to send the money to his family, but well…), and being looked after by a humane master, what more on earth would you need? Wouldn’t any underdog believe he’s won his life’s worth of satisfaction?

Now you would only believe that (suggests Adiga) if you don’t know you’re a slave, if your father hasn’t sent you to school, where poetry has opened your mind to beauty, because, as the great Iqbal said “the moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave” (p. 236). You might have been brought out of the “Darkness” of your innocent village, out of the darkness of poverty (1) that of ageless ignorance and repetitiveness, into the “Light” of the city, where modernity rages with all its splendour and violence, you are still a slave, a nobody. As long as your master has a right of life and death on you, what are you?  Because that is the case for Balram, no matter how kind Mr. Ashok is. He belongs to a caste of thugs and profiteers who will forever be crushing people like drivers and servants. These are sub-humans who down deep, are expendable. Just like that cyclist whom Balram’s mistress hits and kills while driving the car, completely drunk, one night. Because of his considerate ways, Mr. Ashok is a sort of exception, but only a sort. He would never think of Balram as a potential equal in terms of humanity. Balram for him is not much more than a good dog.

At this point we have to introduce a particular theme which is half-bakedness. That’s what Balram calls himself, half-baked. The schooling he’s got is unfinished. He’s only half-baked, but also already half-baked, mind you. Some are completely raw. He has something missing, but something the others lack. He’s an intermediate product, and that accounts for his need to constantly feed on sources of information in order to become more complete and understand life better. This half-bakedness has probably protected him as much it has “buggered” him. It is as much a matter of luck as of progress; and if he’s regretting it in part, he’s made the most of it. He’s not formatted as some Indians have been, through history, to the point that they have adapted too much to the role-models they were aspiring to, and as a result, have changed nothing in the society. They fitted, so why should they? Balram, still half-raw from his village and the pain of his ancestors, and having been given some means of escaping, escapes. But he’s not been shaped into climbing the ladder the civilised way!

Another fantastic image Balram comes up with is that of the Rooster coop:

“The great Indian Rooster coop. Do you have something like it in China too? I doubt it, Mr Jiabao. Or you wouldn’t need the communist party to shoot people and a secret police to raid their houses at night and put them in jail like I’ve heard you have over there. Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police.

That’s because we have the coop.

Never before in history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.” (p. 149)

He then gives the answers to the two questions: “Why does the rooster coop work? How does it trap so many millions of men and women so effectively?” and “can a man break out from the coop?” Here are the answers:

“the Indian family is the reason why we are trapped and tied to the coop, and if a man wants to break free, it means he is prepared to have every single member of his (always very large) family “destroyed, hunted down, and burned alive by the masters. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.

It would, in fact, take a white tiger. You are listening to the story of a social entrepreneur, sir.” (p.150)

Ooo… This is big stuff. If any political party, any intellectual, any social reformer starts touching to the sanctity of the Indian family, he’s in for big and lasting trouble. Balram doesn’t want any harm to his family, of course. He’s as trapped as all the others. He’s just a chicken in the coop, and he knows very well that his neck can be wrung any day, for any reason. But, he also knows that everybody has a neck, masters included. He’s away from the immediate contact and pressure of his family, and afraid to fall into its trap (they want him to marry, to become even more tied up in the coop). Balram cannot forget the freedom he’s already tasted, that’s the rub. He’s been allowed to savour that taste, and it cannot be shaken off. He watches everyone playing a role in and around the coop, but he knows that there must be a way out of it for him.

Balram’s story is that of a man who has become immune to the strange mimetic dream that locks up his fellow sufferers inside the coop. He’s in it too, but to him, it feels like a prison, whereas for them it is the normal state of affairs, and if they become chief rooster in the coop, they have succeeded in life. They are under a spell. That spell makes them believe it is their master alone who could free them from slavery: if they recognize their slavish condition, they have no other hope than look to him for their well-being. So they treat their masters well, and this way they will be well treated. The same sense of total loyalty inhabited those who believed in the meaning of the king before the French Revolution. The idea that the king was bad was normal: that was part of the frame. The king was the top peg that held society together. But some blasphemers spoke about getting rid of him, worse, beheading him! For those conservatives, the very fabric of reality was based on a hierarchy, not on equality. Thus the revolutionaries were seen as nihilists, because their opponents couldn’t imagine what reality would be like in a situation for which there was no reference any more, and which would force people to live on their own private resources (the sacred font of power having disappeared), and their conscience full of a heinous crime.

That is exactly what Balram will face up to. OK, you know he does kill his master, and I won’t tell you how it happens to preserve some suspense, but the sense of freedom that he feels after that is also a sense of transgression, that almost nobody before him has expressed so clearly, because of the age long submission of the slave to the master, of the poor to the rich. On his own, he has guillotined the king! He knows he has unleashed the Terror of reprisals too, and he doesn’t want to realize that too much (he avoids any source of information), but he probably tells himself that all revolutions have a bloody path, it can’t be helped. And he does run the risk of saving little Dharam, the boy his family had sent to him in Delhi to learn the ways of getting money, like Uncle Balram.

We are now in Bangalore. Having escaped the police, Balram uses the money he’s stolen to start a rental company. What sort of man has he become? How does he live with his crime? What sort of retribution will be his? One day, something happens. An accident. One of his drivers runs over a boy on a bicycle. What will he do? He’s now in the master position. This time he clears his driver, and shoulders the responsibility. We are still in India, mind you, and corruption being what it is, he doesn’t risk much. He has bought the town police, and is acting in certain respects exactly like his former masters. But a half-baked moral perspective is now present. He goes to see the dead boy’s family, and pays them a hefty sum as compensation. He therefore recognizes the humanity of the dead cyclist, and the ties which linked him to his family. Even if Balram is still the former villager he used to be, and his consideration might be put down to underdog solidarity, or even payback, this is something that the preying headless masters would never have done, on principle, for fear of beginning to lose their status of “protectors” of the poor and the weak.

The exciting perspective that we have at the end of The white tiger is therefore one where good comes out of a necessary evil, and where this evil can and perhaps must be seen as necessary. Freedom from an existing evil sometimes (often?) needs to take the path of evil, so that freedom can win. Sacrifice isn’t always the best way, says Adiga. Sometimes (often?) sacrifice is just slavery. The coherent response to violence is sometimes another violence, because the greater institutionalised violence cannot be changed by non-violent means any more. Now of course this will shock and pain many ahimsa proponents.  Yet, now that the codes of non-violence have entered the brains of violent dealers, now that Gandhi belongs to the institution, it is possible in India to pretend to be a Gandhian and benefit from the institutionalised violence (see Parshuramer Kuthar).

The trouble with Adiga’s initiative is that it advocates an individual, anarchic response in a society where the normal way towards reform is democracy. But he makes the clear point that India isn’t a working democracy. Nevertheless, it is hard to legitimate violent crime, and against a defenceless person, who is certainly guilty of certain crimes, but who hasn’t been tried legally. The book does it, and we must forget some of our western principles if we want to do justice to its purpose. Or rather, Balram’s story forces us to alter our standard understanding of justice? On the other hand, it would be tempting, perhaps, to condemn him for abusive individualism: he decides to take the money and run, knowing full well what will happen to all his family. He chooses a freedom which means also comfort and affluence; and he sacrifices his family, whereas he already knew a better fate than them. One could only endorse this if one has cut away from a certain humanity, no? Well, perhaps like all revolutionaries, that is Adiga’s message, you sometimes have to cut yourself off from a certain type of humanity in order to reach out to a better one.

Only problem, the rarity of white tigers.

“You young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots (said the inspector coming to Balram’s school for a surprise inspection. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals, one that comes along only once in a generation?

I thought about it a little and said:

“The white tiger”

“That’s what you are, in this jungle.” (p. 30)

A very thoughtful parallel is made by Jabberwock between Adiga's novel and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist: go check it out!

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)

Memories of rain, by Sunetra Gupta (1993) is a dark jewel of a book, a sombre and dense memorial stone made of darkness and yearning, frustration and anger. We are inside a sort of cenotaph: a young Bengali woman’s stream of consciousness and we never get a chance to hear anything else than her voice and the poetry which often resounds in the vault. It’s gloomy in a sense, but the prose is so dense and palpable that – as an unborn child waiting for birth - one is lulled and fed by its rhythm and texture. Sometimes you gasp for breath, but then, as opposed to the narrator, you can lay down the book and return to it later! I have to say that I have had trouble finishing the 200p novel: it isn’t long, but so little happens that one is at first unsettled and has to adapt. In fact everything has already happened, and what we read is the tremendous impact of what has happened.

She’s called Moni, and one day, during the Calcutta monsoon, Anthony, a drenched young Englishman, her brother’s friend, enters her house and life, and gets caught by her heavy aura of darkness. Like a satellite he is held prisoner by the gravitational pull of a dark star he hadn’t seen as he was cruising by. They marry, and she’s flown away to Bristol, England, where a short-lived period of agonized lust takes place, an Moni, keeping company to her dull mother-in-law, waits every day for Anthony to return from London. She bears a child, but soon their relationship deteriorates, and Anthony meets with Anna, a poet’s daughter and physically Moni’s contrary. The passion which starts between Anthony and Anna is the story’s main event. Moni now revolves around the two bright stars in a desperate orb of darkness and frustration. What she feels and thinks about while suffering because of them is the substance of the book.

Moni’s tragedy is that she’s a doomed woman, engulfed in a destiny of resignation and self-abasement; she cannot shout out, she cannot rebel and plead; she’s made to accept from the start, to resign herself to whatever happens to her, and we as readers watch as disconsolately what she is unable to change as much in front of her as within her, in the sediments of feminine behaviour that she’s made of. Here’s an extract from the book:

She will steal away like a sorry child, without dignity, she cannot confront him, the language of their love was silence, but now the space between them is dull with forgotten emotion, she cannot use silence to convey her pain, they stand upon Parliament Hill, the child unravelling her kite, Anna’s hair shimmering like a net upon the morning wind, the smoky profile of the city stretches out in the distance, she is still a stranger to this land, she watches the dark lust upon his eyes as they twist about in the sea of pale gold that blows upon his face, her hair, she reaches out for his trembling hand, he looks round in surprise, she has not reached for him in many years, she takes his quivering hand in hers, she will know the depth of his desire, she will feel the keenness of his lust, she will intercept the waves of passion that roll towards the emerald eyes, she must remember how much he once loved her to enjoy the prospect of leaving him, for she will not have the pleasure of his despair, she must steal away, when he would least suspect, in the few holy hours before a birthday party… (p.98-99)

This is in fact what Moni will do, this is the only action she will be capable of: slide back to her old place in her parents’ home, get back to her world, to her ring of safety and balance, where the forces that have played upon her and jolted her numb are no longer felt, where poetic oblivion can once again engulf her and soothe her like a child. Moni is as much a woman as a child; her femininity is omnipresent, her body and desires are heavy and rapturous, yet her will is childlike, strangely she can accomplish and impose nothing. In front of her husband’s desire, she submits; in front of his mistress, she submits, and all she needs is to remember, to live her feelings in the past and in song. If she had fought against her rival, God knows what would have happened. But all she can summon is that silent retreat away from him, because she knows he’s involved in an absolute of reality that she can’t even name for herself. He at least knows this absolute, even if she hates him for it. And yet, no, she doesn’t hate him. Not any more. What she feels is that numb distance, that frigid friendliness with darkness, whom she says has been her friend ever since she was little. We see her at times making strange love to this darkness, opening her body to it…

So the paradox and strange attraction at the centre of this story is  a mixture of powerlessness and intensity: she's transfixed, like the toad her brother wanted to anaesthetize and dissect, but on the other hand, it is Moni who creates, she’s the one who magnifies, who churns love into beauty, light into night, song into silence. What Anthony (and everybody else around her) has done is merely at the surface. She inhabits the immense caves of emptiness. The sombre, black-blue beauty we are washed into comes out of her only. It’s sometimes hard to see its colour, but when you do see it, Anna’s golden hair and green fairy eyes are just speckles of day which the huge Monsoon is about to swallow. Moni the dark witch, the drowned queen, the Mermaid of memory, has a power which can hurt no one, but which makes her utterly ill-adapted to the grassy playfulness of human frivolities. No wonder her prince left her to her depths. Having been caught by the spell of her moist black hair, he has quickly let go, and surfacing, has dabbled in the shiny beauty of Anna’s sunniness. She was his truth.

Not everybody will like Memories of rain. Critics say it is indebted to Virginia Woolf’s famous style of writing, but it also probably has the idiosyncrasies of the first novel that it is. Wading through it, I was wondering whether it could possibly become a movie, and I found myself answering yes, surprisingly enough, provided the director could transpose some of its thickness, some of its “glueyness”. I’m sure they are ways to recreate the feeling of hopeless imprisonment that pervades the story, along with its magnificent exploration of the realms of dark femininity. Moni could be interpreted by warm and stubborn Tabu, who has the sombre quality needed, as well as the voluptuousness; then Anthony might be any light-skinned actor, but who would have to have the intelligence and perceptiveness of a sophisticated Englishman!

Khaled Hosseini

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.

Well! I’m pleased to announce that I too have escalated the Everest… Er, I mean I finally read Vikram Seth’s 1472 page novel “A suitable boy”, and that it has been a fascinating experience: thanks M. Seth! Such a length is said to be unparalleled in English literature, and indeed the length in itself is amazing. Fancy actually writing that incredibly long story, and controlling it from beginning to end. It took him seven years to complete, he said (and three to recover). Some people actually complained it strained their wrists, LOL. But there you are, if you are a lover of classic writing (some have said Austenian), if you love reading beautifully well developed prose, you’re the one for A suitable boy.

Now if you haven’t read the book and you are planning on reading it, come back when you’re through, because what I want to discuss needs looking at the plot and the narrative choices which Vikram Seth has made (so unavoidable spoilers!). But before I do that, I’ll quote what Steven Wu has written about the style, and which I find myself unable to express better:

A suitable boy is a superbly well-written book. Although I thought at first that Seth's tone was far too flippant, [our one disagreement here, I found no flippancy at all] I soon came to appreciate the simple, unpresuming, but eminently readable style that Seth adopts from the first page to the last. It's really remarkable that in over 1,300 pages of densely spaced text, Seth at no point wrote a single sentence that I found awkward, melodramatic, or out of place. Nor does Seth sacrifice content to maintain such a high quality of writing--the book includes everything from straight-up action to long brooding descriptions, from fast-paced dialogue to moody soliloquies, from lovely portrayals of India and its landmarks to involving emotional moments.

Do you know (I am now assuming my readers have now read the book. And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? What are you doing here? Aren’t you a lover of literature?) that some readers actually thought the novel was too long??? Yes, look at this:

“And it's so long. I love long books as I read fast - I generally finish a book in a few days or less, so having a substantial tome to work through is pleasant. But seriously, A suitable boy is just a beast, I have been slogging through for about 6 months now with no sign of the end.” I'm about halfway through at the moment, and am undecided whether to carry on. Who here has read it? Is it worth continuing? Does it progress beyond endlessly recounting of the minutia of the lives of its characters?” (link)

(Because on the contrary some people have “read the book for the fourth time early this year”!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Interestingly, I’m busy doing the same thing as this remarkable person: he’s also involved proving wrong another bored reader of the book! – the one with the weak wrists!)

SO: here’s the answer to the question “is the book too long for its own good?”

ANSWER: NO. The book is just amazingly readable, so it’s not too long, it’s too short, one is hankering for a sequel (1)! (This is exactly what Mystic wanderer says:

“However, patience is richly rewarded as the people and locales grow on you and upon completion, there is a longing to surmise what could possibly happen next. In other words, a wish (no, I’m not kidding) for it to be even longer.”

(OK the truth is that it is a little long. If the novel was a straightforward escapist succession of social and romantic events, yes, it would rather be filled with unnecessary material.)

But let me explain: the long bits were delicious moments of patient rapture as one the most elegant prose unfolds, and the bonus at the end of the effort (if one doesn’t skip these long passages) is that you discover they were in fact fascinating! For instance at one stage we follow Haresh the shoe-maker and the detailed procedure necessary to make a certain type of shoe: certain people might not like reading about that, but I think that this is what literature is all about: the reinvention of reality. A suitable boy is long because the reality which Vikram Seth is awake to is so full! (one might say: and India is after a [sub]continent) The book opens your eyes to the miracle of reality, which is in fact a creation. Reality is a creation, and the writer of such novels (Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy) sees that SO MUCH is happening before his very eyes. There is an incessant creation going on every second, and they have seen it. Others haven’t, they are blind to this continued creation happening before them. How, why, I don’t know, but these writers have the gift of open eyes, and they make us see it, hurray!

I think that this comes from the fact the Vikram Seth is a poet. People just don’t know what a poet is nowadays. Or let us say that so painfully few people do! Can you imagine that I’ve read people actually criticizing him for having rhymed his table of contents (Seth is also known for his rhymed novel, The Golden Gate)! Yes, that delightful bonus, that free gift to the reader, they just thought it was to show off! When I first saw this in the book, I was stunned, I was so grateful! I showed it to the people around me, and beamed at the gratuitous bonanza of bathing in that type of crazy luxury! And then you have the sheer constant virtuosity, all that poetry, eg the witty, ludicrous Kakoli couplets that some readers find so bad – ha, they’ve never tried to write poetry! Let them have a go, let them just write “silly” couplets. It takes a good poet to forge idiotic-sounding stanzas! Well, anyway, I just want to say that I was filled with the gratifying readability of the text. And it isn’t impersonal – you feel the presence of the author, in a very satisfying way, because he’s on your side, he tells you the things he knows and which characters do not know, he’s another, slightly better informed, you!
A poet Vikram Seth really is: the more I realize it, the more it explains things. It explains why so much happens in the book that doesn’t directly make the plot move forward, because he’s so preoccupied by the recreation (poihsis) of the world, in its delicate and fragrant nostalgia-feel, as well as in its fascinating technical minuteness. The inflamed speech of an angry politician, for example, offers the poet a terrain of unparalleled exploration of the language he loves, it turns him into a director of a symphonic orchestra! He can summon all the rhetoric, all the oratorical powers that exist, all the effects he likes, and recreate the rise and fall of empires through the unique power of the Word. Compared to that intoxicating experience, that of feeding the reader’s expectation with a few tidbits of romance is poor play.

Okay, so now, the story…

But, I don’t know whether I should tell you the story. You’ll find it on Mystic wanderer’s page, for example. But in fact there isn’t ONE story in A suitable boy. I’d say there are at least four: Lata’s story, Maan’s story, Haresh’s story, and Mahesh Kapoor’s story. Naturally the four are interconnected, but they are also sufficiently independent to have an interest which is completely their own, and owes little to the other three. One might add also Dipankar’s story, and that of the Nawab sahib of Baithar. Then there are some sub-plots, of course related to each of the main strands. For example Pran’s section, revolving around Brahmpur University; the events here are connected to the Lata main strand through her sister, Savita, married to Pran (the book starts by their wedding and ends with Lata’s).

In Haresh’s story, there are many sub-stories, which we follow as he goes from job to job, revealing for us the surprising realities of shoe-making in India during the post-war period. Mahesh Kapoor’s plot revolves around politics, and thanks to that strand, we discover the life of ministers and their aides, the subtle intricacies of law-making, the strategies of elections, etc. A complete historical perspective is laid out before us, Northern India in 1952. Dipankar is our guide to the religious dimension which is explored in the book (the Kumbh Mela notably), and connected to him is the Chatterji family from Calcutta, an eccentric upper middle-class of flashy beauties and idle young males, completely opposite to Haresh’s practical and matter of fact world of entrepreneurship, for example, and of course an easy target to criticize anglo-Indianness.

Maan’s strand, together with Haresh’s, was perhaps the one I most appreciated: it tells the story of this rich politician’s son, made idle by Papa’s fortune and power, and it serves as an introduction to the world of tawaifs, those courtesan-singers we’ve already spoken about several times, as well as music and singing (ghazals), urdu poetry (Mast), urdu spelling (Saaeda Bai, his enchantress, makes him learn the language), myths and legends connected to the heroes mentioned in the songs, the rise and fall of singing masters and disciples… Maan also takes us in the country (he’s banned there by reasons too long to describe), where we get to know the village people, and this spoilt brat becomes a keen observer of the folk he thought he despised. All these passages are packed with insights on country customs and stories, crowded with unforgettable characters (amazing Moazzam, spellbinding Mr. Biscuit, for instance), and, among so many other impressions, the feel of the night breeze blowing freely as the voices and noises of the village are heard to rise and fall.

Lata’s strand is naturally presented as the core of the book, probably because of its title, but also because it connects most of the actors and events. But not all! (a few examples: Meenakshi’s infidelity, Maan’s love affair, Tapan’s schooling…) Nevertheless, she’s at the center, together with her inimitable mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, an extraordinary character that you and I will from now on remember all our lives. That’s really one of the book’s particular strengths, the vividness of the characterization. I just have to open the book any page, and see a name, and immediately a complete picture springs up, not only a physical portrait, but a social background, a story with its various causes and consequences… So in fact the book is less striking for its story than for its gallery of characters (and of course its remarkable style): of course we follow what happens to them, but that’s because they’re so close to us.

A suitable boy does not have a reformist ambition; it is a social book, but there are no revolutionary ideas, no ideological denunciation. It has ironical and satirical aspects, but its main intention is descriptive and evocative. So the issue that we have at hand, the question which makes the book flower and bear fruit, is a psychological one, which borders on the aesthetic: why does Lata choose Haresh? We have of course the book’s own answers: Kabir is too passionate, indeed she herself is too passionate, and she decides that she doesn’t want passion: she wants the other type of love, the “calmer, less frantic love, which helps to grow where you were already growing…” (p.1420 – end of section 18.21). That’s what she explains to Malati, her confidente and fellow-student. She doesn’t want a love that will lift her off her feet and dispossess her of herself. “Haresh’s feet touch the ground; and he has dust, and sweat and a shadow. The other two ethereal are a bit too God-like and to be any good for me”, she says.

Now that’s an important question, believe it or not. Today passion, or romantic love, is almost always considered as a transforming force which contains its own justification. One rushes headlong into it, trusting it to contain its own value and meaning. One yearns for and relishes the head-over-heels feeling it brings. Its craziness is considered rational and its childishness a maturing process. Cool-headedness sounds strange when speaking about love. When you are “in” love, goes the popular notion, you cannot do wrong, because somehow love contains its own morality, it is oriented towards the good and it humanizes its beneficiaries. The common belief is that one becomes a better person when one loves or has loved. I realize that there is a distinction to be made between love and passion, and that only passion might be considered dangerous: but who can really distinguish love and passion? Isn’t true love a passion, a dispossession, a loss of the drop of water which is your identity into an ocean of bliss?

The 1400 pages of Vikram Seth’s book are telling us that this overriding experience at the core of human values, this love at all cost, this pot of gold, this life-fulfilling passion can and must be resisted. If the book has one message, that’s it. A writer of  Escapist literature (and the same works for a movie director) would have enabled, through some trick or other, the reunion of Kabir and Lata, which every reader needed so much to happen. But with A suitable boy we have a different outlook on passion and love. Look at this (link):   

“Upon reaching the last page, I tried carefully to analyse my own feelings, but my disappointment was inseparable from my admiration. On one hand, I detested the girl - I was seething with fury - because she had chosen a nice boy over a gorgeous boy. Why do writers do this to their characters (and to their readers, for that matter)? Why must literature echo the cold brutality of life? Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, in Pygmalion; Laurie and Jo, in Little Women; Edmund and Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo.

But here’s what this reader says next :

On the other hand, I admired Lata for being so well-grounded in reality. She was able to understand that her love for Khabir would not necessarily translate into a successful marriage, and she was also able to distinguish the man who could bring her happiness. In short, Lata chose to follow her head over her heart, and it was a decision that displayed maturity. Far too many novels romanticize reckless relationships without depicting the consequences (i.e. life after the happy - and, in many cases, abrupt - ending).

There, the lesson is learnt ! What is strange is that Vikram Seth himself says he is not completely ready to support Lata’s decision:

Miss Lata Mehra: Why did Lata marry Haresh and not Kabir... why why why...

Mr Vikram Seth: Now, now, you know better than to give the plot away for those who haven't read it yet. As for why, do you think I decided the matter? Lata decided for herself, and I'm not sure I approve of her decision. (Rediff On The NeT: Transcript of the Vikram Seth Chat)

Perhaps he didn’t want to elaborate, or appear, as a person, to be distinguished from the choices of himself as an author… But yes, so many Bollywood films (and other forms of art choosing to tell Love’s story) opt for the happy jump into the trap that nature has laid for us: charm and beauty, intoxication and wonder… But what about what comes after? Well, our civilization behaves as if it doesn’t really care, and it has equipped itself with the means to do just that, enable people to go from one love to another, and hope for the drug to work its magic each time. Lata’s frustrating choice flies in the face of romantic presuppositions, such as: “passion is the only thing worth living for”. And Vikram Seth achieves a far more original result with this choice than if he had somehow made the two predestined lovers help create the foundation for a better understanding of cross-cultural relationships. For his point about the choice of a reasonable love over a more dispossessing passion, but which is normally thought to be more fulfilling, goes aesthetically, psychologically, and anthropologically further. Even if this means upholding the traditional views of arranged marriages!

Because that is of course the risk he has run. Lata does what her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, wanted her to do, and has always thought best for her. It isn’t just a coincidence. Lata’s choice is a conscious decision that includes her mother, her family and the type of society which upholds that model. She doesn’t see herself in any future severed from her family, something the romantic orthodoxy would relish, the lovers shutting out the rest of the world, or at least finding it impossible to sacrifice their new worldview on the altar of family ties and any other interests. On the contrary, the common assumption is that traditional ties based on outdated ideas such as social and religious suitability need the groundswell renewal of experience and feelings which will bring it closer to the essence of life. And it’s up to the new generations to regenerate society in such a way. Such ideas can be read in the message of a number of Bollywood movies, which perhaps also use them to bolster their romantic choices. In short, in Desire lies Truth.

Well, Lata’s choice disproves this. Because she knows what it is to feel the burning of passion, to bask in its pleasure and its magic. She has felt the intoxication of dispossession. Lata knows how deeply this love fits who she is, what she likes, what she needs. Such a love is for her like blood in her veins. It fits her body and it fits her brain. As her friend Malati so forcefully says, Kabir and Lata are made for each other, like the two halves of the complete being they would be if she had chosen him. But she renounces him, and this really recalls the hero’s choice in Corneille’s plays. For Corneille, the hero is never more glorious than when he lifts love so high because he renounces it. But Lata (and Vikram Seth) have perhaps beaten Corneille: Lata actually chooses love, she doesn’t renounce it! She sacrifices love because it is too passionate, but embraces another more reasonable version: what a marvelous compromise to the old aesthetic dilemma! Romantic heroes in Corneille’s tragedies have to cut the strings of their heart because of their duty, and the beauty of their gesture is that they magnify tenfold the love which they renounce. Lata sacrifices Kabir and the corresponding fulfillment of her youth. But she bets on the fulfillment of her maturity, and the bonus is – who knows – that she might this way regain a love which she thought she had sacrificed. For such is love that it springs out of realities one had no idea contained it. So finally, this betting of hers (she isn’t happy with it, there is an element of uncertainty) makes her go beyond the tragedy of love seen as passion, into the reality and humanity of love understood as a gift. The love she chooses is indeed more given than received: there is more love, in a way, in her type of love.

One last word concerning what V.S. suggests as the modus operandi of Lata’s choice: she starts to give in at the moment when her sister’s baby is born. This birth acts as a confirmation of marriages or settlements which have been agreed upon by the community one belongs to. The baby is the proof that life and joy are at the heart of traditional customs which are the foundations of a given community. This comes to weigh as much, if not more, in Lata’s mind, as her love of Kabir. Then there is also Haresh’s sacrifice. The suitable boy she chooses has, like her, been forced to sacrifice a love for a girl from another religion (Simran, a sikh). This theme is shown as bringing them closer together. And then finally there’s Lata’s rejection of dispossession, which on the surface only might appear selfish and worldly. Lata doesn’t own much, but she possesses a self which is the core of her strong-willed being. She would perhaps have accepted to lose part of it if Kabir’s gate had been open for her. But it is shut, shut by the widowed mother she loves and won’t disappoint. So she now knows she will be able to keep a self she feels eminently comfortable with. She’ll be Haresh’s equal, in a rather satisfyingly feminist way, whereas as Kabir’s lover and wife she would have had to settle down for a relationship with him as a Lata she couldn’t control completely. She would have owed him a part of herself which she can now decide either to give or to keep. As it is, her choice makes a natural leader, an independent decider of her fate, and this autonomy corresponds to her personality down deep.

The movie which could be made with A suitable boy would have to be split up between several episodes, so long and dense is the story. In fact the BBC had been thinking of such a serialization, but so far it hasn’t seen the light. It wouldn’t be very difficult to pick good actors for this or that character. So let’s have a bit of fun! Could Tabu be Lata? Preity Zinta (or Vidya Balan?) and Raima Sen could be Kakoli and Meenakshi; perhaps Mann could be played by Vivek Oberoi and Kabir by Atul Kulkarni? Mahesh Kapoor could, I’m sure, be Anil Kapoor. Perhaps Haresh could be taken by Shiney Ahuja?! I think Rani Mukherji would be a good Savita, and I still need a Mrs Rupa Mehra… Let’s think… well, after all, you tell me!

(1) Perhaps you knew - but the sequel ("A suitable girl") will come, eventually! Read here!