Pilgrimage of the Green Solace

The novel Dattapaharam starts with a newspaper clipping that reports about a mysterious man sighted by a team of researchers in the depths of a forest – Pullothikkadu, a place 20 kms from the valley – and who vanished again. This incident brings back five friends together on a quest to find their friend Freddie Robert, who might be the one seen by the researchers.

In this tale, witnessed, lived and told by different narrators, we come across six friends, who in their days spent as engineering students formed a close-knit group and called themselves Pandavas – the legendary five brothers from the epic Mahabharat who along with their wife Panchali (Draupadi) were sent on an exile, and who spent their long years hiding, mostly in forests (Vanabasa). Like Pandavas and Panchali, the group – Freddie Robert, Sudhakaran, Mahesh, Muhammad Rafi, Sahadev Iyer and Meera – would make nature visits, particularly led by Freddie Robert, to the forests, and who in his later days of engineering became elusive, wayward and obsessed with his inclination for nature and forest.

Freddie Robert, once a leader of hostel ragging, later the most revered and loved one among his group for his generosity and daring, and who would let his comrades experience the otherwise unthinkable, transforms to become more introverted and enigmatic in his later days before his mysterious disappearance in a forest. The other members of the group do not find it easy to understand Freddie and his purpose – to be close to nature and be in unison with it. As the friends make a journey once again to the forest where they lost their friend, the tale unfolds or rather unravels into threads connecting to more subtle but sensible thought-provoking forces driving Freddie to disappearance. The author successfully lets the story drive in a mysterious train, revealing secrets at every new station, told through multiple narrators – the mystery keeps you hooked, and the sensibility of connectedness to nature slowly turns from an idea to a necessity for the characters. This book has a special calling! Those not finding the roots of nature simply might be lost in the pages, which has also been suggested in the preface by the author.

The members of the group narrate their individual relation with and impression of Freddie during their college days, all of which contribute to characterize the Pandava gang but also illuminate the idiosyncrasies of the members, which transmits a certain mood to the whole story. We find sufficient humor, in all its naturalness of youthful days, but memories of a horrific experience, especially in the description of the hostel ragging, unsettle us.

The vision of life envisioned by the author, especially through Freddie Robert, Meera and Sudhakaran forms a dreamy ambience, which is earthy, raw, and palpable but one which is realized transforming from something ethereal to something urgent and close, only when transformation happens within oneself too.

The engineering background of the author makes him very attentive to technical details, and he puts them in sharp and accurate ways to his advantage, lifting science with natural spirit and joy, as metaphors and for swinging to the edge of the universe.

As the friends make the arduous journey into the deep forest, hoping to find their purpose, they rather are excited to find themselves ruminating over the cause of the disappearance. Enchanted by the beauty of the forest afresh, discovering new symbols and connections, as if a clue to the secrets of nature, their hope to find Freddie is bolstered. They try to understand the forest, its comfort, offerings and dangers, so that those experiences form a path to Freddie, wherever he is. They discover that the path to disappearance was not so simple, nor the life Freddie chose, glimpses of which were written in his diary.

As the urgency burdens the friends, to find Freddie or to escape, events unfold putting them into a dilemma, and delusions and placing them face to face with a secret they held for so long. Freddie turns from a man to an idea that is contagious. Who'll they find in the forest? Or, who will they lose? Will they return the same, or will they return at all?

The sensibility in the novel, which I wrote about earlier, has its fundamentals in the affinity for nature, not limited to being an observer, but to be part of it, without any superficiality. If we know about the spirituality, and the duo – body and soul, the force driving the characters adds in Nature, to become a trio of existence. The novel plays on the ideas like journey of instincts, going back to nature, merging with its core and essence, nature as mother, nature as a God, and spiritual awakening oriented to nature than to anything else. Imagine a mysterious bird taking you to the depths of the forest to show some secrets, and imagine a man entering a forest, and a forest entering into a man. The novel is a journey of awareness that takes us to the roots of our existence – which can find solace only in nature, unraveling our deep-seated desire to escape, to be free, to return to the origin, to return back to nature and to primeval human ways. Dattapaharam is gripping, natural, sharp, meditative, wildly imaginative and one of the thoughtful novels written in a mood of mystery. Perhaps, I can name it a "Nature Mystery" novel!

Author: V.J. James
Original Text: Malayalam
Translator: Ministhy S.
Publisher: Penguin Random House India https://penguin.co.in/book/dattapaharam/

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

The Deadly Playground

Vishwas Patil is one of the greatest novelists of India writing in Marathi, and his novels are well-researched and rich in their depth and breadth – in scope, characters and understanding. Dudiya is not so lengthy as Patil's other epic works like Panipat, Mahanayak and later works, but in a mere two hundred and few pages, in this political novel the author takes us to the depths of Dandakaranya and Abujmarh forests, among the tribals of Naxal-afflicted region, particularly of Chhattisgarh state, and well into the center of Naxalite–Maoist insurgency, and the armed struggle, tension, fear and death lurking in those lands. 

The narrator Dilip Pawar is a civil servant officer and recounts his days after being sent as an Election Observer to one of the Naxal-afflicted districts of Chhattisgarh (Previously part of Madhya Pradesh) State. From the outset, despite being deployed to a region known for its notoriety, his interest to inquire and understand about the Naxals keeps him motivated even after hearing and reading about the recent frightening killings. His seventy-six days stay in the region brings him face to face with the facts, the historical development of the Naxal crisis, the ongoing struggle, the atrocities committed by the state and Naxal forces upon the civilians, the people directly involved in handling the crisis and those who are victims of it in one or another way. The narrator has become a window for the author and readers to try to understand the Naxal problem, serving as a perfect vantage point, and so is the narrative development in the novel – we are surrounded by questions, we hear the witnesses and find ourselves as if in the middle of a burning land, just like the subtitle of the novel suggests.

There couldn't have been any other perfect character than Dudiya, a tribal girl, who would recount her journey and struggle, to the narrator and therefore to us, from an ordinary tribal village birth to being a Naxal insurgent and again back to being a civilian after the surrender. Her dissatisfaction, defiance, disgust and feeling of being in the wrong marks her sharp turns in life and the emotional hollow she felt throughout.

Once inside the Naxal world, there was no getting out of it. As a tribal girl, I would send this one fervent question above, 'God, is there any release for us hill people from the twin assault of the Naxals on the one side and the police on the other?'

We get an up-close glimpse into the life of Naxal-Maoist leaders and senior officials of the state, and their rituals too. It is nothing less than being on a battlefield. The author has positioned the narrator in the fine line as an observer between the state forces and the Naxal insurgents. He is looking at the crisis, at its roots and not merely at the individuals fighting from each end. Impartial to the view of the crisis, this story has given a humane as well as critical perspective on the problem. This is also an attempt to unmask all brave men, all ruthless men, and all terror-stricken men and to show the ordinary face of the people behind all those perceptions of the news coverage and terror of killing.

This novel had to be written – and it has been written. You cannot witness a state terror, an insurgency, and not know its reasons, and not write about it. Though it hasn't many plot twists, the references to the real-life events that happened and the facts that still hold true give the novel a complex and complete political shine – which is alarming, thought-provoking and dreadful. We feel a heat emanating out of the novel, a heat not of warmth but of disorder, panic, death, fear, struggle, harming those with arms and those without – the tribals. It transports the readers to the dense forests and makes them witness the tension, fear of death and violence hanging in the region – all behind the lush and beautiful hills and forests – and all seen through sad and panic-stricken eyes.

Ruthless killing and butchering of people, disintegration of the families, personal loss, migration of the tribal youths, the suppressed and compromised development of the region, real events of Naxal-State forces confrontation killing political leaders, IAS and IPS officers, Naxalites and armies – events dotted with bloodbath and scars lefts behind – this is the story, not of peace but of violence and disruption. Still, the character Dudiya makes us hopeful, that people will indeed return, will understand, and thus settle for peace, to come to an understanding. Dudiya is a symbol of peace and resilience.

The story weaves not only the timeline of Naxal-insurgency development but everyone who is at the frontline of the State Vs Naxal warfare. We start with the exploitation and abuse of the tribals and local resources by the government authorities, the birth of hate and anger amongst the tribals which was never appeased or addressed as a major disconcertion. Then we witness the poverty and provocation that made the tribals of the region vulnerable to the promises made by the Maoists/Naxals and who then saw them as saviors protecting their rights, defending them against the state laws and terrors. But, before anybody could understand the maelstrom brewing behind, it grew out of hand and tribals/Adivasi people found themselves amidst the center of two arms-wielding powers – Naxals and the government forces.

Against the background of political upheavals and transformations, Naxalism seems to have become a need for everybody in a number of states in the country. The Naxals needs jungles for performing their tasks; while state administrations need thousands of millions of rupees annually as Central grants under the head of combating Naxalism to pull themselves out of financial crises. If Naxals were suddenly to disappear, at whose door would these state government go with their empty begging bowls? This is the vicious circle that has formed everywhere.

Election happening in the backdrop of fear of gunfire, death traps of landmines and pressure bombs, violent confrontations in the depths of the forests and far-flung hills has also set a stage for a political drama, which the author has handled very well – without exaggeration and without losing the authenticity. But as said earlier, this is a humanist side of the story that is often lost in pure historical and political narratives, and the novel has fulfilled that gap.

Dudiya, in Nadeem Khan's excellent rendering, serves as an authentic contemporary account of the Naxal-Maoist Crisis in India not only for Indian readers but also for foreign readers who haven't yet heard about and have no clue about the existence of the State-Naxal struggle. I think the research put in this novel gives us a rare opportunity to listen, think and understand the inside and intrigues of both camps. And, just like the narrator who is unsettled after all his experience and asks questions, and doubts the intentions, we too are left with such questions. Dudiya is like looking at a bullet wound which provokes a movement in your thought – that lives can be saved.

Author: Vishwas Patil
Original Text: Marathi
Translator: Nadeem Khan
Publisher: Niyogi Books http://niyogibooksindia.com/

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

 

The Lines that...

Krisztina Tóth's stories are rich in their explosions of moments, bursting of silences, and an ambience drifting over fate, as if the author can notice even a flick of air. The interconnected lives, intersected flashes of memories, the difficulty of realizing a personal dilemma and individuality, and a transitioning sense of life and the boundaries that are not visible yet keep crossing over your life – the structure of this collection gathers storms and waves. The author mostly traverses back to the character's childhood memories and taps where there is heat, a discovery, a difficulty and therefore the transition, as if it was necessary to cross those rivers of crisis. Following the trajectories of the narrators, we find that, each time the author fabricates an end, we arrive not at similar points but at different zones of realization, trying to figure out the conundrum. The author has a fascination with breaking down the time and its elements, finding a rhythm in each of those.

As I watch the various shades of brown and grey, and the thick smoke swirling up from somewhere, I wonder where the boundary is, that borderline between life and non-life, between life and death, whether there is some kind of definite borderland at all. I wonder about the living and the dead, about how over the years I have learnt nothing, I've merely grown older,…

That's it, the story continues, because he knew that stories never end, they only break off and lie low, like latent diseases, and then resurface and continue to spread, resulting in stabs of pain elsewhere, only for that pain to be passed down from generation to generation.

The first story, Vacant People (Borderline) is composed in a personal grey zone. A woman in her thirties narrates a drifting experience and understanding of life and death, the living and the dead, the shiver and the warmth. In a seamless, almost plotless story, the impression is rather of an immersion into the foggy realities of life. You'll know when you read it. In The Pencil Case (Guidelines), there are two contrasting episodes from the narrator's school days, when the dissociation of the name and the self, of an observant and the participant, the futility of good and evil dawns upon the narrator as a revelation as if finding a clockwork of human expectations, humility and stillness. In Outline Map (Lifeline), as if a monologue of a sick boy, who might be perhaps on the verge of treatment (or dying?) and who has a short lifeline on his left palm, finds himself as if in a lost world, in almost a fever dream narrative. In The Fence (Blood Line), what begins as a recollection of an event when the pet dog got stuck and bloodied in a cat-flap, evolves as if the development of a negative of a scar left by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 on the narrator's father's body.

The scenic details bring the past to life, while the momentary stops of reflection radiate philosophical exploration as if experienced by a younger self of one's own – by one who's reflecting. It is as if characters are able to switch off the present and take their soul out of their bodies and place it elsewhere for a while. There are characters breaking sensible boundaries and finding their way into a maze in their minds and thoughts. These stories are at times comical as well, in the dramatic turn of events.

In stories where Hungarian political history finds its trail, the strength of the prose has come even sharper, as if we are in the middle of a developing novel. The transition from lightheartedness to dark horrors and realizations in these stories are exciting if read as a technique, but they are also subtleties that represent the complexity of characters and therefore of human lives. The absurd becoming the real, the solitude turning into a sad beauty, and chaotic life becoming a norm - we find the grey ambience turning into a heart of survival. The portrayals of old women are so authentic and vivid, we'll immediately recognize them as someone from around us, breathing in the text – the clear detailing are as such you want to embrace them.

In Ant Map (Line of Passage), the narrator, an unnamed and uncared-for young little girl is left with a scrap collector grandmother who'd draw the trajectory of ant's movement on a map. In The Castle (Frontline), the narrator recalls her summer camp to a castle as a teenager, her fondness and the changes that crisscrossed and marked through those times and who lived then. A hyper-imaginative narrator's routine and comfort are disrupted after an American relative comes to stay at her home, and her teacher crosses a boundary in the Tepid Milk (Barcode Lines). Black Snowman (Grid Lines) transports us to the hubbub of the social estate housing boom in Hungary and the societal drama revolving around it, as witnessed and lived by our narrator. Cold Floor (Baseline) is in fact like one of the Japanese classic stories. While one of the most dramatic and dynamic stories is Take Five (Fault Line). As we progress in the collection, we find ourselves blending the experience of characters and almost believe that these in fact all are living in the same generation (perhaps the fall of the communist era in Hungary), through the same personal crisis, experiencing similar individual victories and losses. And the way, the first and the last story resonate, we exhale a sigh of relief, that the circle has been completed, that the characters have reached their destination, and that all living and dead have finally found peace.

One way or another, even if it sometimes come apart at the seams, the world is a web of often opaque laws, or of interconnections glistening like gossamer in the pale light of dawn, with the ends of each strand tied to a  different corner of time.

We tend to believe that these stories are particularly life and times of a young Hungarian girl, now remembered from a distant future. Dreams, hopes, musings and revelations of a young girl (there are male narrators too) – these stories give a sense of a journey of self-discovery through experience and observations, from close and far, from associations and dissociations with one's self. Stories also carry political, societal and pop-cultural aspirations of the time, and the evolution of our narrator's experience to live through those. In one of the stories, as if it is the final act in the catharsis of love – a woman burying love notes in Japan – we find elements of love, tragedy and renunciation. At times, we find the reclusive cover of simple imaginations that gives an escape to the narrators when in fact they are surrounded by clouds of existential crisis and happiness – losing self in the memories, and in the stillness. Transitioning identity and memory has been one of the leitmotifs of these thematic stories. The fleeting details of the surroundings, heat and even air and smell are crisp and passionately created as if they too are accomplices of the tipping points/lines that alienate you from being and the surroundings.

The borderline between life and death, guidelines between presence and absence, scar separating the trauma and the terror, line marking the coming of age, gridlines mapping the history and subtle horror, mirror lines of personal crisis, the line of betrayal and loss, line throbbing with memories, line separating sad reality and comforting fantasy, line between now and then – the commonalities of these stories lie in the separation that defines us in unique ways, at unique ages. Barcode is a visionary exploration of personal and universal experience. Taken together, these stories represent a grand realization and a sensitive candor to the lines that make, break, define and seek and soar redemption for life. These are fresh and bright prose, in line with the glory of Hungarian literature!

Author: Krisztina Tóth
Original Text: Hungarian
Translator: Peter Sherwood
Publisher: Jantar Publishing https://www.jantarpublishing.com/

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

Churning Current of Colors

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin is a much needed story of our time when people are still struggling for LGBTQ+ rights and freedom from family, society and state. Our understanding, acceptance, disregard, denial, disconcertion, disruption, emotions, resistance and all elements of our life concerning sexual orientation and personal freedom, like in everything else, are in a dynamic state – it is changing, evolving, and not so easily. 

    The novel centers on a caretaker mother who works in a nursing home for the elderly, and a lesbian daughter who has put up a fight/protest against a university for unfair treatment to homosexual professors. The daughter, who had left home to live on her own, have once again come back to live with her mother and this time with her partner. Mother, who doesn't want to accept, believe and welcome the sexuality of her daughter, has a world of her own in her thoughts – there is fear, hatred, sadness, love and desolation. Told from the perspective of the mother, this story takes a benefit of portraying universal mother-daughter relation, the trouble of living, aging and dying, sharp take on hard truths of our generation, an animation of thoughts, beliefs and difficulties. A daughter who cannot support herself a shelter, a mother who is finding hard to challenge her expectations, hopes and fear, an elderly woman at nursing home with dementia towards the edge of her life, and the unwavering commitment of the daughter's partner – these four women show us all colors of life.

In moments like this, I’m brought face to face with the ruthlessness of life. One hill after another after another. Climbing at first with hope and then gradually in resignation. But life never goes easy. A foe without mercy or magnanimity. A losing battle. A fight that ends only with defeat.

We find a mother who is not contented how her daughter is getting by and has different expectations from her. She cannot believe the private life and personal choices of her daughter but fears losing her – her only family left. Finding herself at the center of collapsing age, emotions and love, she is unsure how she should act, feels a social shame and thinks that her daughter has derailed from the regular course of life. Mother, who is also our narrator, is aware of her vulnerability and crisis of being left alone, aging and unhappy. She is mostly keeping to herself – her realizations, her hesitations, and her dissatisfactions, but cannot stop herself bursting at times, when it becomes unbearable – the burden of her inner thoughts. She is in a constant fear of death, aging and loneliness – always reminding herself that her death is imminent.

Why do I need a husband and children to have family? Ma, Lane is my family. She’s not a friend. We have been family to each other for the last seven years. What is a family? Family is people who support you and are always there for you. Why is that family and not this? That’s all those people asked. That’s all they said in class. And the school showed them the door. They shooed them off like flies without a word of explanation!

Ma, look at this. Look. These words here – that’s me. Sexual minority. Homosexual. Lesbian. This is what I am. That’s just how it is. That’s what people call me, and stop me from having a family, career, everything. Is that my fault? Tell me, is that my fault?

Caring Jen, the elderly at the nursing home, her dwelling on death, its suddenness, sullenness, sadness and horror surrounding it, have left her sensitive as if living in a life of peril. The futility of what and how Jen lived for, living her alone in the old age, the mother cannot stop seeing herself and her daughter turning into someone with a fate like Jen. Therefore, her passionate care for Jen, is a projection of her own hopes from her life and her daughter – someone to remember, someone to love, and someone to get love from towards the twilight of life. She feels guilty for her daughter's way of life and cannot express herself enough. She tries to comfort herself, be protected from emotional pain afflicted by her daughter but she cannot ignore her motherly love. We find ourselves in the shoes of our narrator, and feel her discomfort, displeasure and difficulties. At the heart, it is her love and fear for her life and her daughter's but she tries to feign ignorance, as her inner world is unruly and unsettled. She is lonely and desperate with a world of judgments and beliefs and she cannot express it enough; she cannot escape it.

The daughter and her partner living together in her mother's home, bring their world close to her mother's isolated world. We immediately find the conflict brewing up, the compromise of necessities and disjunction of private worlds. The mother cannot accept their relation as it is, cannot believe they can be happy – she can't believe families can be made in such ways; a happy life can be spent in such means. She tries to interact as little as possible, ignore them, and at times ask them to get out of her life, so that she can shield her feelings, aspirations and expectations from her daughter. We see two different world seen from the eyes of the mother and the daughter. The story reflects a stark picture of Korean society – aging population and struggle for homosexual rights from the state (there have been good progresses). As I was reading the novel, I couldn't help myself from getting the updates on LGBTQ+ rights in my own country (Nepal) as well, and was happy to know the recent Supreme Court's interim order to recognize and register same sex marriage. The novel is at the same time universal and contemporary, and can represent as a stand-alone novel in the bibliography of LGBTQ+ study in literature.

Maybe I am a frightened person. A person who doesn’t want to hear anything. Doesn’t want to get involved. Doesn’t want to get entangled. Doesn’t want to get dirt on my clothes and my body. I stand on the sideline. I say pleasant things, make pleasant faces, and slowly back away when no one’s looking. Do I still want to be a good person? But what can I do to be a good person to my daughter at this point?

Told as if a monologue with elements of stream of consciousness, this novel takes no shortcuts, has no hidden messages, and doesn't indulge in the rituals of sentimental treatment – it'll hit you with a bright light, and yet not dazzle you but clear your thoughts. There is a meeting of two worlds, new and old; meeting of two generations, two thoughts, two extremes of age, and the dilemma, drama, power of will, reservations and conflict between two women keep the flame alive until the end of the story. If I could suggest the author, perhaps little more detailing of the physical world would have made the narrative more engaging, and the Tipat's part of the story could have been presented in some other forms. Obviously there are no misalignments, but only a need of a tickle.

Sitting across from me, the girls eat with their heads bowed. So close I could reach out and touch them. I didn’t know just how far away they were, how they were, or even where they stood with their feet planted in the ground. Everything is becoming clear now. They stand right in the middle of life. They are standing with their feet planted on firm ground, not in fantasies or daydreams. Like me. Like everyone else. They exist in the thick of life, terrifying, relentless. What they see from where they stand, what they are trying to see, what they will see, I cannot even imagine.

Coming towards the end of the novel, we find that the mother's reservations, her conflicting thoughts are showing some signs of rest. As she sees the life of her daughter from close - trying to perfect it, solve it even before understanding it – she finds herself challenged by the truth of her daughter's commitment, will and way of life and happiness – a daughter who can go to all extremes to ask for rights, to fight for it. This is a revelatory story of motherhood, mother-daughter relation, aging, identity, fear of devoid of memory and love. The story doesn't end in the novel, it again starts at the end and begins with you to understand the world around you with patience, sympathy and love, and understand your own complexity and question your beliefs, resistance and inheritance of thoughts.

Author: Kim Hye-jin
Original Text: Korean
Translator: Jamie Chang
English Publisher: Restless Books https://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/concerning-my-daughter
Korean Publisher: Minumsa Publishing Group http://minumsa.minumsa.com/book/11755/

Source: Personal Copy

A Poem of Death

One of the greatest Russian poets Osip Mandelstam died at the age of 47, cold and emaciated. Mandelstam is one of the poets who died because of his poetry; a defiance turning into death. The Last days of Mandelstam is a harrowing account of Mandelstam's final days, filled with horror of suppression and destitution, hallucination and hunger. Vénus Khoury-Ghata's terse and acute prose profile a poet living by the death-clock hanging over his head, and a fall of a man, a husband and a poet, designed by the dictator.

 

At the height of his power and ascension, Stalin was skimming the country, purging his enemies, scheming even against his old comrades: fated for the show trial and execution. At such times of state terror, Mandelstam voiced the forbidden and recited Stalin Epigram (part of which has become a leitmotif throughout the book) – the poetry that opened an abyss of downfall and death for him – among his few friends. He was betrayed by someone he thought was his closest, gave away his poetry, and it led to animosity of the regime. His poetry became the spark that made him a personal enemy of Stalin, who didn't kill Mandelstam in the first hand, thanks to the appeal of poets and littérateur, but poisoned his life with deprivation, hunger and exile.

All we hear is the kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer

Exiled from Moscow, Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda settled in Voronezh. The couple did not have work permit and M. was not allowed to publish poetry. At the mercy of few fellow close poets, penury and hunger made the couple's life miserable. M. wrote his poetry in his mind, recited them to his wife at night, who mostly remembered them by heart in her memory-vault – the only way to make sure it is not confiscated – and would then transcribe them, and entrust them to few trustable. M. was already weak by this time, and had an ailing heart.

In this biographical, almost poetic, prose we see Mandelstam and his wife – who happily shared the fate of the poet – were the victims of state made impoverishment, and of Stalinism and its persecution. Imaginary dialogues and confrontation with Stalin throbs with terror Mandelstam felt throughout the rest of his years. As a dissident turned into an outlaw, Mandelstam attempted suicide, rejected his hunger, though he was aware of life and death, and even aware of the limbo. At the last days in a transit camp - where people only spoke the language of hunger – near Vladivostok, Mandelstam lived in paranoia, was decimated due to hunger and bad health. Fated for 5 years forced labor camp in Siberia, the poet couldn't last that long and return once again to his wife. This time, the poet had no strength left to survive.

The people in the street look like ghosts. They sleep to forget their hunger… Grass scorched by a horrible hot summer, there was a lack of hay. Starving cows gave scant milk. Mules had trouble pulling carts. A common sight, horses collapsed on the road, their masters whipping them to make them stand up.

A different sound made by the body dragged on the wet ground after a rain and for the one tossed into a grave. They learned to differentiate them, learnt to distinguish the sick man who still had one or two days of life in him from the one who has only a few hours.

In The Last Days of Mandelstam, we find ourselves in the ruminations of the poet on his past, poetry and exile. Poetry pieces used in the text show the distinctiveness of M., his realization, his dissatisfaction, his quips, his voice and his death. We have read so many stories about Gulag, but this is a tapestry of death, a montage of the poet's sad end, a gnawing existence where poetry confronts the power. Throughout the book, we find a restlessness but also an urgency to live, a life interspersed with poetry, and also a life intercepted due to poetry. The complex drama sprouted during the reign of terror grips Mandelstam. His life becomes a loop, a vortex and churning – life going out of him, hope coming back to him. Every sentence is like an episode of the sad end, a snippet of struggle for existence, a poetic flame fighting with a storm. In a typhus infested camp, where dead left the place for the dying, Mandelstam died as if in a hallucinatory pit of extinction and like a cold demise of a flame. This short book has played the strings of a dying poet's thoughts and soul, rendering a painful account of the poet's final days.

To eat: the final thought of the Soviet citizen tied to the execution pole, thinks the poet under his blanket who refuses to eat, and without hesitation allows himself to perish.

A strange era, spoken words rarely connected to thoughts. Denunciations were common currency in cities, the countryside, even in Voronezh where everyone knew everyone else. People of good faith spoke of misunderstandings.

The book feels like as if reading a great Russian novel from the canon, only that here the major characters are real, cannot choose for their life any longer, and that is how everything is set and ends. Hunger-stricken harsh individual realities of Mandelstam and his wife are like the final act of a tragedy. Resistance, denunciation, animosity, antipathy, persecution, destitution, hunger, hope, love, rejection, exile, death – Mandelstam's life thread unfurls in these. The poet was attacked on the most vulnerable spots – basic needs of human survival and well-being. Nadezhda, poet's wife had at least made sure that the poet lived – otherwise killing the art would have killed an artist, killing the poems would have killed the poet. Separated from his wife by a trickery and fated for a labor camp, regime hit the one final blow, put the poet in a death track, and this time the poet reached his end. 27 December 1938 – this date will never be forgotten. Mandelstam couldn't live longer then. But, Nadezhda survived it. We now know Mandelstam was never dead, Mandelstam can never die!

 Author: Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Original Text: French
Translator: Teresa Lavender Fagan
Publisher: Seagull Books https://www.seagullbooks.org

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

 

A Slithering World

Who says you need a boundary? Damn the structures and comfort realities! Rajkamal's narrative branch out wonderfully to surprises and reels you in so gently, you want to chuckle at his wit or might even hold your head in discomfort from the brightness. The subtext, luminescence, bleakness and naked truths of individuals of Rajkamal's world was way ahead of his time. Upon finishing this collection, or every story, you feel like coming out of a long tunnel and be light-stricken.

In just mere age of 37, he had written hundreds of stories and poems, ten novels, essays, criticism, etc. and they are collected in Rachnawali by Rajkamal Chaudhary (Set of 8 Volumes). His eclectic view of the world are seen in the stories of the collection. And it surely must have created a displeasure among his contemporaries and critics. He was experimenting with wild ideas, stigmas, narrative and structure, disrupting understanding in its wake. The portrayal of sexuality and the reaction to it have never been easy in South Asia, even if they are used in literature. You'll know, Rajkamal's portrayal of it is not vulgar, but rather an artful disclosure and meaningful. Reading the collection, we gather that, above all, Rajkamal must have been a great thinker misunderstood by his time or not revered enough.

In the 12 stories of the collection, we find wild and bizarre imagination breaking the waves of cultural stigma, composition of discomforting veracities, oddities of characters and persona of modernity.

In the first story, Still Life, realities blur and transcend into one another. Mirrors and still images are emulsified in the dreamy awakening of a sick man and there is his girlfriend trying to help him. We find ourselves in the midst of a hallucinatory living. Like suggested in the intro by the translator, the narrator's contemplation on life, death, suicide yields to nothingness. It is like being inside a surreal mind of an artist, who is ready to damn the world. In Some People in a Burning House, the narrator, a salesman is sent to a brothel by his friend to spend the night. Police raid happens and brothel women and their clients end up hiding in a damp, dark and dingy basement. The scenes and the setting is vivid and palpable and yet the author do not attempt to overdo the details. The dark makes the instincts and senses sharp, and the result is, you'll sense the story. You'll find as if you are there among the characters too, living their life; being them. An old man bleeds in the middle of the dark room and another saves matchsticks for his cigarettes. The momentary details: blood, scream, fear of death, stench of dead rats, sex, and nakedness, all of this explode, or even can be said, implode into a giant realization of emptiness, futility, damnation of morality and love for life even if it is disfigured or in disarray.

Elementary Knowledge of Geography is a story of sexual encounters of a teenage boy and his inner world of confusions and personal ways of getting out of the disquiet and fear. The narrator, a teenage boy, shows us his world around and his experience and witness of sexuality, homosexuality and the complex world and people abutting them. Rajkamal is not afraid to drop taboos in his text, or establish some dramatic comedy with dialogues and scenes. The playful narrative style and shifts in the story at once makes it lively, brings contrast and also breaks the monotony, though we rarely find one. In A Champa Bud: A Venomous Snake, a husband and wife plot to marry off their daughter to a 62 year old man.

In An Angry Man, three friends meet at a port restaurant, their usual rendezvous, near Ganges River and wait for a woman coming on a steamer. Who is this woman? Among the three friends, Kamlesh is irritable and now his thoughts are troubled, angered and perplexed by his possessive maid; Ramnath still hasn't been able to come out of his unsuccessful love affair and episodes that met an unexpected end, and Mehtab companies his two friends. This story has a cinematic appeal to it and the narrative expositions makes it more intense. The world of these characters is surrounded with the influences of contemporary world – movies, celebrities, news. and is therefore also sets a transporting experience for the readers of our generation. Sometimes, Rajkamal's stories represent his zeitgeist while at other times, he even beats today's contemporaries in style and dissension. In An Angry Man too, Rajkamal's ploy lies in his strength to make personal dilemmas as the commonality of the age, while also being able to give a comic or witty charm to it – if these were turned into plays, they would come out as tragedy of the century versus the comedy of the existence. We also feel, the learnedness of the author who could encompass everything global to his use – visual arts or literature. We may also be tempted to believe that the banal are the most exciting things of the world; at least I did. An Angry Man can be read for many things – psychological drama of the individuals, the urgency of coming out of horror of loneliness – but what grasps us the most is the style, especially the shuffling of episode from the past, the personal realms of the characters and present burning with crisis as if in a coal. How inner world exhibits itself in the external relationship has been one of the themes of Rajkamal's stories.

In Warriors Don't Worry About the Right Time, the narrator visits his maternal home where his widowed uncle has delusions of apparition of his deceased wife appearing at night. There is also narrator's widowed aunt who haven't left her village after becoming a child widow. Snakes of Silent Valleys – This story will give you a deep pain and leave a furrow. The intricacy of the relationship between the narrator and his aunt's daughter, and the narrative voice is so piercing, that I personally consider it the best story of the collection. The story bulges like a surface of water; everywhere there is a tension; everything is sensitive to touch. And the mindfulness of the story is simply brilliant! Sometimes it becomes like a raw skin; you will be afraid to touch it. As if told in a stream of consciousness, you have no escape other than to hear Khagen's voice word by word. There is existentialism, lurking sexuality, reclusive and hindered love and pervasive crisis of relationship. Here, I am going to leave this as a mystery for you. I want you to find the sensibilities of the story, enjoy it, become its victim, become its witness and come out alive from the grip of snakes of the valleys. In Sisters-in-Law, we find two widowed sister-in-laws making their living by selling their bodies. And one day a strange incident afflicts one of them with horror.

Like Tennessee Williams' Mrs Stone, you donot know what to think and what to forget. You just want to escape. You are afflicted by the fear of the conclusions of your thoughts. You are unable to ask who is with me if I am not alone. It is raining outside and I don't want to get wet.

No, I do not want to die. I only want to kill the flame burning in my stomach. A wrong Jesus Christ is growing in my womb, I do not want to raise the child. And now the world doesn't even need Jesus Christ, it needs atom and hydrogen bombs! – You want to say it but you don't have the courage.

Set in a tribal land, the story of Veni Sanhar starts with hallucinatory images of a sickly woman who sees her surrounding engulfed in flames. She is a mother of an infant and is not in her right mind. Her husband has given up on her treatment. A black cat, considered a bad omen in Hindu culture, appears from the wild. The encounter between the sickly woman and the cat turns into a violent episode and leads to even more disturbing consequences. Like a Wall of Glass is a story of an artist who dreams of painting a woman, and ends in a disappointment and disgust. In Pyramid, a married man brings a woman into his house, particularly to show the charm of his drawing room, a self-comforting upper class display among the ruins, while his maid and wife remain restless until the woman leaves the house. In the title story, Traces of Boots on Tongue, a man goes out to a hotel to freshen up his mood and encounters mysterious women who are sticking out their tongue to him for bizarre reasons. And one thing to note is that, snakes are the repeated symbols used in these stories. As if people have mimicked the presence of venom, fangs, the threat display, its slither, and constriction, and are lurking behind others, waiting for the bite. I think Rajkamal was fascinated with snakes as symbols, and I am curious whether his other stories have snakes in them too.

A person's life is divided into pieces. There is no one person. There are people inside one person. Many contradictory situations. Nymphs from Kalidasa's heaven. Constantly warring gods and demons. Times future, past, present. Life is not at one place, which can be presented by tethering it to a mirror, a painting or a poem. Life is everywhere. In every moment, in every piece, in everything there is life. And it solely depends on the one who lives the life whether a moment is accepted under a certain circumstance and accepted until when.

She doesn't possess a maddening beauty or hypnotic gestures, because she is a wife, an Indian wife, who can cook, fan and massage tired feet but cannot say that she loves me a lot, with an amorous expression on her face, with warm breadth, flared nostrils, widened shoulders and ruffled saree.

Rajkamal has used different techniques in his stories like repeating the sentences, images and names creating a vertigo, and also to remind us what possess the characters' eternal doom. He carefully places his characters as if in a painting or play and decides their movement, sorrows of characters and therefore of being. Poetic pieces too have entered the stories in one or other way to leverage the intensity of narrative. He knows every fiber of his characters and how easily they can break. It is a restless world filled with doubts, disbelieves and compromise. You'll find terse dialogues and their interplay in the text: their entry and exit is sublimely done. We see man made from the past thrown into the world for personal struggle and face his/her fate, and dilemma of the artists which Rajkamal himself might have felt at his time. The realization of his era is vibrant, and so are his references built upon the religious texts, modern science, contemporary art and literature. We find ourselves in a profound feeling of empathy, as if at the bottom of deep well looking for the heart and sorrow of the characters' gloom, confusion and existence with a torch in the murky water. And at several instances it seems as if he is speaking with us, asking us questions and involving us in the narrative. Rajkamal's stories are not in the easy world despite being rooted inside it – it is composed of the feigning, the bearing and the reverberations, the bleakness of personal world and horror, the desolation of absence and unspoken personal experiences and tragedies.

We would like to express our deepest thanks to Saudamini Deo for this translation work. You have lit the candle!

Author: Rajkamal Chaudhary
Original Text: Hindi
Translator: Saudamini Deo
Publisher: Seagull Books https://www.seagullbooks.org

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

 

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