A Mantra to the Past and the Core

Imagine an old, dusty, murky and decaying library which nobody visits anymore. If you step inside you'll find an old man in his late 70s, lost in his own memories, keeping watch of the library as if keeping a vigil. Who is this old man? A yellow window of a house opposite is seen from the library's window, and it floods back memories of the old man's lost love. One day, a boy visits the library, and forms an inexplicable bond with the old man, but the two men cannot understand each other, nor do they care. The yellow window charms both of them, and with different reasons. But, we are outsiders in their life. We'll soon know their world, which has lights and shadows, tragedies and hopes, tensions and a glimmer of love to cling to.

Boy is at the cusp of difficult relationship with his father, an imaginary love affair, and a mystic attraction for an impervious love. He is searching for love, a highly paid job and wants to prove to his father, that he was right and his father was wrong the whole time. A tension between two generations – an expectant father and a self-assured son – intersperse the story. Boy is living the present. In contrast, the old man, Basar Mal is at the crossover of memory of long lost love, threat of land mafias, old age and weakening strength to keep going. Still, he is searching for some hope, taking pleasure in rekindling the memories – that which gives him both pain and pleasure. Basar Mal is virtually living in the past. We find a perfect characterization of the old man and the boy. Intensity and the voice are just right. We know what they stand for – the contrast between two people at the two ends of life.

The story takes us to Larkana, Pakistan where Basar promises Jaam that they would run away together. But then the India-Pakistan partition not only divides the land and people, but also these two loving souls. After a long struggle as a refugee to get an identity, Basar Mal settles in Mumbai, gets a job and opens a library where he finds his solace and a resting place for his overwhelming memories of Sindh – his land and people, and his love. But, it is also as if trying to hide a wound for your life, because it is there.

Here, the Sindhu Library is a place of melancholic escape, a dignity, for a slumber to the comfort of dreams, a ruin of life that doesn't know how to dissipate and why to fail, a poetic gesture of unbridled love for the land, language, people and heritage. You'll never forget the old man for the rest of your life. You'll search for him in the hidden corners of the library.

This is a story of aftermath of partition, story of a man from the Sindh, in part a story of refugees and people displaced, but more than all of this, it is a love story, a tragedy – of people left alone and the forgotten histories just like the old neglected library. There is an underlying philosophy around memory and how it shapes our present, and what we are, and what we become at every moment. Sad end of old realities haunting the present, as if a man cast away in the past, has come as a revenant; has come to the present to die. As we read the novel, we see a mirror building at the back of our consciousness and things appear there – a gigantic revelation, a discomfort, and a weight of the past. In non-existent guava smell, the unheard laughter, the yellow frame of the window, and loose fading pages and disintegrating covers of the library books, we find the scattered sensibilities, and without a single reality to hold onto, yet they are the only consolation.

There is nothing more personal than memory. Nothing more manipulated than it. The struggle of memory with memory, struggle of memory with oblivion, struggle of memory with imagination, struggle of memory with truth, and struggle of memory with beliefs and suppositions – at how many levels this goes on, and in how many worlds simultaneously – that someone said, the human is a memorial to the multiple worlds of the human in oblivion.

The story alternates between the stories of Basar Mal, the boy, books, and few characters surrounding them in the past and the present. Each time, we progress to something more subtle than before, and if we take a moment to reflect, they project to something universal and ethereal of this land and of the susceptibilities left alone, ridden on the voice of soul. Detailing has been kept to a minimum, but things happen elsewhere, on other realms, where you'll immediately find your other self. We will find poetic pieces, as if they are stations or branches where authors wants to stay a while, but then he moves on.

The silences in the novel are moments of brewing up agonies, or of dreams what can keep you awake. The passing of time and wait seems like an eternal futility but is also a core of love that drives us, that makes us blind and shows us the other way inside. Memories are treacherous, invincible – they can come back in smells, in laughter, in resonating images – but what should we make of them, where should we keep them, how long can we ignore them, where will it take us? We see a mild vertigo, and a restlessness in the story, which perfectly capture the moods of the characters. But who has the mantra to open the portal to a quantum of solace, to a peace of mind, and to a happy endings to our love? Perhaps none has, but... After finishing the novel, when I reflected in peace, suddenly everything became universal! It was moment of delight.

When you are just beginning to make sense of the world other than love, you cannot understand the war, the purpose of hatred, and the entitlements after killing. The background set at the verge of partition has given the story a chance to revisit the tragedy of the pasts and the following parting, struggle, blood and death. When the cover of the book speaks, we find the reverence for the books, as if a hymn by the author, as if he is finding place to speak with us more personally and share his love for the literature and books and at places, he purposefully animates the books. The emoticons : - ) do their job, and at other times, the left end, the incompleteness completes with sentimental richness.

I am a book. Touch me. Kiss me. Read me. From start to finish. I am the beginning. I am the end. You don't need to try very hard. If you've felt me with your fingers, then you've kissed me with your eyes. And, if you've pressed your lips against my skin, then you've reposed me in your heart. A sincere touch or a heartfelt kiss is enough to open me up.

Simsim is a humane story! We know what forms the characters and their fate, their world, their recluse and their solitude, their will and their passion to continue. The story is of all those and that is left after a storm, and you cling to them for dear life.

Thank you Geet for the story, and Anita for this wonderful translation sticking to the originality of the language, which feels as fresh as the memories of guava smell. : - )

 

Author: Geet Chaturvedi
Original Text: Hindi
Translator: Anita Gopalan
Publisher: Penguin India https://penguin.co.in

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

A Roof of Dissent

Do you want me to tell you what's the story? I might have to read you from front to the end, from end to the front, read the lines, read between the lines, become the narrators themselves – lost in the world of the past and that which is present and not present. If I have to, I'll have to quote the whole book. The narrators will reel you into a daze and haze of memories. They will identify themselves, become unidentifiable, and become one and another.

When the roof is beneath your feet, there’s the whole sky above.

Chachcho, Chachcho… Memories rustling like dry leaves. Memories like a magic lantern, moving from here to there in a flash, turning upside down, inside out, playing tricks.

Even the happy moments from this world of memories give the old man more grief. Dreams that go backwards, not forward, can do nothing else.

Lalna, Chachcho, Bitwa and Uncle are central to this story. So is the roof of the Laburnum houses which flourished a friendship between two women – Lalna and Chachcho. Bitwa is a son of one them, don't ask me of whom. Chachcho and uncle are now dead. Lalna has returned to the Laburnum house after getting news of Chachcho's passing. But, she has brought once again the same storm to the house which engulfed Bitwa when she lived there. Or, has she come here finally to settle down? I am afraid I might give you the why, or if I can.

The two part narrative – one of Bitwa and another of Lalna – will take you to their inner world, which is way scattered, and bigger than the outside. You might not want to believe all of their secrets and the way they tell it, but you'll believe it all – it doesn't matter even if you don't! The richness of The Roof Beneath Their Feet is in how it has crafted its structure and voices. The voices are like portals into the inner rituals and complexities of the relationships. You start from an individual and reach a place of distorted realms and inner turmoil, of sadness and longing, of memories and hatred, of love and unspoken truths. Again, you want me to give you the story; I'll give you the book instead.

Bitwa is torn with memories of Chachcho, and it is dragging him to the past – a past where there is a shadow of two women hovering over his identity. It is as if Bitwa dips in and out of the memory pond, and is confronted by Lalna wherever he goes. A common roof shared by hundreds of Laburnum houses has its own story. Here a personal history or tragedy, whatever you call it, takes form of people, courtyard, window, stairs and the roof. You start from the earth, and there's no end where you can go. Here a mohalla comes alive, but what interests us are Lalna and Bitwa, tied together with an unfathomable union. Hidden behind the obscurity of the voices is a story of people neglected, hidden, longing for freedom, like the Hindi title Tirohit suggests.

The roof where Chachcho and Lalna made their escapades is a symbol of freedom, a dissent, a revolt and a longing. Behind and beneath the personal tumultuous history of the roof and relationships, lies a sexual misinterpretations and stigmas, sullied by rumors and the patriarch. Two women turned into a man and a woman, a joyful meeting turned into an ecstatic and sensual love affair. Lalna is a symbol of rebel! The story fits all harmony of a double base and all the notes of a piano – this is not an exaggeration, you have freedom of sensitivity while reading this story. You can give it different moods, and it fits all – you'll believe me when you read it.

When the women and children and servants would crawl out like an army of ants from their holes below and gather on the roof, they would never want to stop. Snacks, titbits, more snacks, more titbits, and riding on these, the women’s gossip, the clinking of their bangles, the lifting of their veils. The servants would have their own business, hanging wet clothes out to dry, lighting a beedi, chewing tobacco. On one side, the children’s playfulness, the teenagers’ wilfulness on the other.

I read somewhere that religion was born from sin, and philosophy from grief.

This is what a house in mourning looks like. Faces like pumpkins and flowers in full bloom, side by side. This is what a house in mourning looks like. The dead live on, the living keep dying!  This is what a house in mourning looks like. The dead become real, the living become unreal.

Some sentences, and images are like a meteor coming straight to your dark and elusive senses. However, the author is concerned, we are not lost in the realm of her narration. Some descriptions are like a poetic dream, imagination of a longing. What does one want – to get rid of memories, be haunted by it, to recreate it, to hide it, discolor it? Bitwa's remembrance finds himself in the cozy comfort between the two women's friendship, but also in a gust of its perplexities. At times the author takes such sharp turn in point of view, you're awed.

Some people, even if they lie quietly in a corner, can spread everywhere like grief.

If you’ve been a part of someone’s life, you’ll be a part of their death too.

Is it so, that we see those who were there only when they are no longer there? Is it so, that we only live what’s not there, and the things that are there remain mere mechanical habits until they recede into dreams?

It is like recreating a world out of memory and finding yourself a place in it. You'll find puzzle pieces, a thread and finally a peace or mild pain of discomfort you compromise with. This a story of a friendship, a motherhood, freedom and love. You'll realize, the complexity of human relation is such an art, a drama and a restlessness.

You'll find here rivalry, unspoken love and hatred, and at the same time a flame of a memory keeping two spirits bound. When memories get their dreamed appendages, they become animated and drag you along. To sum up – It is a perfect complexity like an art, has subtlety like its habit and it is like a hand caressing your soul, and speaking to you in a language you absorb. If you start constructing the images, you'll be addicted. You feel the ambience, you become narrator's memory; you are there. The stream of consciousness, moving between narratives and times is like a poetic dream of a rebel, friendship and motherhood. If this were to turn into a movie, it would be another art. Flash of light like memories, sometimes like rain rivulets following a rugged path of solaces. The discomfort will please you, with earth like sentences. Sometimes, you become hungry for the objective realities, and the narrators touch you with a feather of dream. Try reading it with some music, it becomes the music. Here realities grow wings and fly higher to the realm of subtleties.

Do you still want me to give you the story, plot?

 

Author: Geetanjali Shree
Original Text: Hindi
Translator: Rahul Soni
Publisher: Penguin India https://penguin.co.in

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher