The first novel of Sampurna Chattarji, a poet, fiction-writer and translator, has a layer beneath layer and still another without being confined to a specific character or backyard. There are as many characters and as many words coiled and changed – nine in all -Biswajit, Tennyson, Paulto, Neel, Nazrul, Aslam, Mehjuin (Nazrul’s mother) and Jonaki apart from the author herself.
The narrative takes the nine characters to over five cities in over 24 hours. We come across the film-crazy Partho who is exiled to Kanpur. Pablo is waiting, which is the worst “waiting for Rupert to discover David’s body in the chest. Waiting. Wanting him to find out…Waiting for Mrs Wilson to clear the table and open the chest. Waiting .”
She discovers the body that is twisted by the rope around – cruelly, wickedly, gloriously twisted around his neck. The clairvoyant Tennyson, diviner of lost things, is suddenly summoned to Mumbai. He had run away from home long years ago and he hasn’t stopped running so far. “Running is not his medium, his name is water; he lives among rocks; he loves the people. Things have broken including Tennyson, he will not fire them – he has in him an endless patience with what is flawed.” He says to himself, “an all present, no past, no future… Without home, without family, I am no one. Without memories, I cannot live. Someone is missing. The missing person is me!”
Biswajit lives with his daughter Doll and son-in-law Rana and goes out for walks in Mumbai. He stands regularly at the bus stop and sees an old widow praying to the sun. One day he notices a crowd and finds that the old widow has died. He says, “She cannot be for only yesterday he saw her sitting there, sipping tea out of a glass. He had missed her prayer, which had made him feel a little sad.” How could she be dead? The author describes death thus: “Death had squeezed the last embrace out of her, the heart-breaking rib-cracking embrace of one who has come too close, is too big, too strong to resist. It happened to everyone.”
This is a dark novel in which the characters live in the past and with some sorrow or other plaguing each of them. The book makes for very heavy reading with disjointed characters joined by sorrow and their past. The sentence construction and command over language of the author are the high points of this rather forgettable fiction.
-MG
(HarperCollins Publishers India, A-53 Sector 57, Noida-201301.)
