Friday, April 29, 2011

BIBLIO: REVIEW OF THE FOLDED EARTH BY PADMINI MONGIA


The Folded Earth
Reviewed by Padmini Mongia, BIBLIO, April-May 2011


From its inspired title to its tactilely enticing cover, Anuradha Roy’s second novel demands the reader pause, slow down, savor this work.  Purple, ochre, and brown mountains or folds lie above and below a central image of fossils and other nebulous remnants on the front cover; these are gently ridged, and they, along with the raised type make one want to run one’s fingers over the front before opening the book.  Mountains are, of course, at the very least, folded earth.  What lies beneath their folds and between the folds of the ridges and mountains that surround Ranikhet, where the novel is set, is the chief motor of Roy’s story. 

Maya, the central character in the novel, and its narrator, seeks to understand, if she can, why and how she lost her husband to a remote lake called Roopkund.  The lake’s mystery lies not only in its remoteness but in the bodies, skulls, arms and bracelets of the six hundred people found centuries later, people who died leaving no explanation of why and how they died.  Why were there so many?  How did they die?  This mystery haunts Maya’s husband Michael and lures him to trek to this lake, only to lose his life there.  Maya is haunted not only by the deaths of the six hundred, but also how her husband died on this trek.  What happened?  Nobody can tell her, and so she follows a mental picture, a picture shared by her husband in happier times, of a house he had seen and where they would live from where they could see, every morning, the “Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit its three tips one by one.”  Leaving behind her home in Hyderabad, Maya moves to Ranikhet, initially to teach children in a convent school there and soon to run, in addition, the jam factory associated with the school. 

Six years have passed since Michael’s death, when the events shared in the novel unfold. Maya’s closest relations in Ranikhet are Diwan Sahib, on whose estate she rents a small cottage, and Charu, the peasant girl, who used to be Maya’s student at St. Hilda’s.  The quiet Maya cherishes—mornings at the school and factory, afternoons reading the newspaper to Diwan Sahib, and evenings nursing rum in her own little cottage—is shattered by the arrival of Veer, another mountaineer and Diwan Sahib’s relative.  Eventually, Veer and Maya are drawn to each other in a love which bears the promise of mature fruition.  But second love is rarely uncomplicated and Roy’s characters are too nuanced and textured for such a placid unfolding of life.

Mountains entice men in this novel, and Michael and Veer are drawn to them with a hopeless love that makes it necessary for them to leave Maya.  Maya realizes she cannot compete with this love and she waits patiently for her men to return to her.  Michael doesn’t, and her young life is thrown off its track when she is only twenty-five.  Her second love, Veer, offers much more difficult comfort from the start, so that her story in these pages is essentially her own and those of the secondary cast of characters in whose lives she is involved.  Charu is delightful and sketched vividly in her young love, her innocence, and her significant strength.  Her grandmother, Ama, a more prickly character, is nevertheless a very likeable one and the repository of a brisk, intelligent wisdom.  Each of the characters with the smaller parts such as Puran, Mr. Chauhan, Qureshi, the General, and Miss Wilson is drawn with quick, precise strokes so that each one is real in their particularities as they negotiate their lives in these hills.  Nor are human beings our only concern in this novel.  Quite deliberately, Roy is attentive to the animal life, quickly disappearing, that shares these hills with the human inhabitants.  The figure of Corbett rightly looms large in this novel; not only is Diwan Sahib working on a biography of the famed hunter but Corbett’s knowledge and respect for the hills and the lives they nurture is repeatedly brought to our attention. 

The British who recreated their Scotlands in Ranikhet left behind a set of structures and relations that continue a post-independence life in certain predictable ways.  Sahibs have their butlers and waiting staff, gardens bloom with particular flowers reminiscent of homes on other continents, and houses are tended and maintained in precise ways.  In urban India, the changes taking place are so rapid and so enormous that traces of life as it may have been lived a hundred years ago have to be specifically sought in particular places and contexts.  Not so in Ranikhet, although here too change is obvious.  Local elections are taking place in the course of the events that unfold in this novel, and the rightward trend that has marked Indian politics these last decades is obvious here to the pain of several characters involved with its crude assertion. 

While the novel is narrated in the first-person by Maya, she is curiously shielded as if she doesn’t want to share with the reader a deeper life she surely lives.  The central fact of Maya’s life speaks of great spunk: at nineteen she chooses marriage outside her community to a Christian which leads her to leave the father who adored her and who raised her to be the heiress to his six pickle factories.  After Michael’s death, we admire Maya’s strength that refuses to let her apologize to her father in an apology that would be false, but the fact of this choice remains a detail rather than leading to an exploration of an inner emotional state.  Because Maya seems to shield herself from herself, there is a compulsion in her actions the reader searches for and does not find.  Don’t get me wrong.  Maya will surprise you; the “stick-thin coffee-colored girl,” as she describes herself, packs quite a few punches for which nothing prepare you. 

Perhaps because the novel is as concerned with human plots as it is with a place, Maya’s story is pulled away from her.  As much as Roy details Maya’s widowhood and tenuous embrace of life in the present rather than the past, The Folded Earth is a novel about the mountains, about small towns, and about Ranikhet, in particular.  Like other Indian novels in English that are specific to a particular place (I am thinking of the very regionally concerned novels of Amitav Ghosh), this one is firmly a regional novel even as its characters are gathered from scattered geographies.  Steering away from the criticism often leveled against Indian writing in English, which critics claim is aspecific and unanchored, Roy’s novel is very much a novel of the mountains and of the Kumaon in particular.  From its hand-drawn map on the inside cover, reminiscent of Hardy’s Wessex, this novel is driven by the seemingly small things that compel life in a small town.  Although there is a predictable cast of “loony” characters such as Puran, the dhobi, and others, Roy manages to steer the novel away from being too driven by “local color” and the oddities of her characters. 

Just as Roy converses with nineteenth-century British forbears in her regional interests, she also converses with many women writers who have examined the trials of women’s lives unfolding without the comforts of husband and family.  I hear echoes of Anita Brookner and Edna O’Brien and other writers like them as Roy brings her Maya and her travails to life.  Roy does so without slipping into that dreaded category “women’s fiction.”  Roy writes beautifully, and because she does this is not a novel that can be read in a rush.  Wonderfully precise phrases such as “the narrow spiral staired road,” “the air is clear enough to drink,” “swallows knife through the air,” or the “chirring of cicadas” bring the sounds and sights of Ranikhet and its surrounding mountains to accurate life. 

Maya learns to love mountains, as her husband Michael told her she would, and the reader grows to respect if not love the qualities of small-town life Roy creates.  Protected by the mountains and the army, Ranikhet is almost a relic.  Almost.  Mr. Chauhan finds its methods infinitely frustrating and tries to jerk the town into his version of modernity through the emblazoning of rhyming slogans all over the hills.  Tiresome signs like “Keep Your Side, Don’t go Wide,” “Enjoy Thrills, of the Hills” are painted on rock faces and Puran, the town’s local idiot is singled out by Chauhan for cruel repackaging into the acceptable.  But Puran is Corbett’s purest descendant and he eludes the efforts of Chauhan and his men.  Dirty, unkempt, simple he emits sounds more animal than human.  His relationship to the mountains where he grazes his goats and cattle and from where he rescues the fawn of a barking deer or an orphaned owl emerges as the wisdom this novel mourns.  Puran’s knowledge—local and precise--is fast disappearing.  Corbett knew its value, Diwan Sahib did, and so does Maya.  But Ranikhet, remote and particular, is nevertheless buffeted by the forces of change, not least by the startling actions of our quiet widow who has become a “hill-person who was only at peace where the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea.” 

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

SOME POT BOILERS


I had my first oyster…I remember it like I remember losing my virginity—and in many ways, more fondly… [it was a] glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive…I tilted the shell back into my mouth…it tasted of seawater…of brine and flesh…and somehow…of the future.—Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential


The Chef’s Story

My name is Arvind Dangwal. I am 24 years old. I come from a small family: parents and a younger brother. In my childhood, my father was the only earning member of the family. He is a typesetter who works for many big presses; but typesetting is a hard, tiring, dull job. I have never wanted to follow his trade. When I was in school my cousin joined a hotel management institute in Sainik Farms, in Delhi, and, seeing him, I too wanted to join up. Eventually, I studied at the Pusa Institute.


I wanted to be a chef right from the beginning of my course at Pusa. The kitchen became my specialization. For my two-month-long course training I was sent to the Park Royale kitchens in Delhi. I’ll never forget my first day there. I was given two sacks of onions to peel, and each of those sacks weighed thirty-five kilos. In the end my eyes stopped watering and my nose didn’t smell them any more. When my fingers cramped and froze I took a break to stretch them, but then had to start on the onions again. The first few days, I was in this department—the vegetable preparation department, where all the vegetables required for the entire hotel are washed and cut in whatever way is required. I thought I knew from the management institute how to hold a knife, but I didn’t, and I could not cut things fast enough. I had to try chopping quicker, but on the third day, along with the vegetable, I chopped off half my nail. I’ve come a long way since then.


I chose to specialize in Continental cuisine. Everyone in this country wants to be a doctor and similarly all chefs want to specialize in Indian food. Why? Because Indian chefs cooking Indian food are in demand abroad. I chose the engineering stream of cooking, you might say--the less obvious. I saw everyone wanted to do one thing; so I thought, let me try and do the other--something different.


It wasn’t easy in the beginning. My family is from Garhwal and we ate ordinary food at home: daal, subzi, bhaat, roti, paneer. Last Diwali my mother bought an oven and has begun making pizzas, but these things were never made in our house before. We are Brahmins and I had been vegetarian until then. My father ate eggs, but that was about all. I had never tasted meat or fish before. It is only now, when I bring bones from the hotel for my dog, Lucky, that meat has entered the house.


But a chef must taste everything he serves. In the beginning I wasn’t prepared for this. A day came when I had to eat beef and pork. I had to come home and tell my parents I had eaten those things. When I went to Singapore for training I ate pork’s ears, shark’s fin and organ soup. I didn’t like the taste and felt nauseous, at times, at the thought of putting such things into my mouth. The smells, especially, made me feel sick. After a while I felt there was nothing in Chinese food that didn’t have some animal part and I was longing for the home-cooked food I was used to. But I had to eat everything; it was part of my job. I had to learn how to cut meat and fish in the butchery department. The first time I ate oysters I vomited; now I love oysters and prawns. In Singapore we found you could get live oysters to eat, and I ate those also. I have never eaten snails though, or served them: there is no demand for snails here.


My favourite restaurant food is vegetarian, a baked dish—cannelloni au gratin. Italian food is what I cook best. Of course in the beginning I hadn’t eaten any Italian food; I didn’t know what any of it was meant to taste like. It’s a process of gradually overcoming unfamiliarity, aversions and prejudices--this training yourself to taste and even like different kinds of food as part of your job. Unlike some graduates from hotel management institutes, I have never had the opportunity to learn French or Italian. So even the names of the dishes were unfamiliar and meant nothing to me. On one of my early days as a trainee chef I had trouble understanding the order my chef was giving me. He’d said, ‘Spaghetti marinara’! I looked back at him and said, ‘Sir?’ He repeated it, but I still couldn’t understand what it was I had to cook. The kitchen was busy—it was one of those peak times when orders are flowing in from five or ten tables and each order needs many items—side dishes, salads, accompaniments—it’s madness at those times. And the chef was furious because I couldn’t understand the spaghetti order when there was no time to waste. He picked up a red-hot tandoor seekh in the grill and hit me on my leg with it. I still have the scar—but I understand why he did it. Twice, in similar moments of frenzied work, I’ve put my hand in the flame by mistake, or right on a scalding hot frying pan, and burnt away flesh from my fingers. You have to carry on with your work, though; you only get time out for very bad injuries.


I’ve seen many famous and important people at the hotel where I work, the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi, but rarely met them. These people don’t call the chefs to thank them. They’re too important to think of the kitchen. But we’re less concerned about people complimenting us than about people sending food back. If it happens a couple of times a week, it’s put down to chance or to the customer having different tastes—even in the Bukhara, food gets sent back because many foreigners simply haven’t acquired the taste for its kind of food. But if it happens repeatedly, the chef’s professional appraisals are in trouble.


When important politicians visit, there is scarcely time to breathe, or in Delhi in the winter, when so many people—embassies especially—throw parties at hotels. On such days we often do double shifts, and I leave very early and come home very late after work. At times, after cooking the whole day there is such a rush and the kitchen so hot, we have no time to eat. People say you’re a chef so you must be eating good food all the time. But there are nights when I go home hungry, when all day I’ve had nothing to eat at all.


I live in Dwarka, from where it’s a long way to the Maurya. On double-shift days, I try to sleep as soon as I get home, then I wake up at five in the morning, when it’s still dark, and step barefoot around my house getting ready, because I know my father works at his typesetting till late in the night, sometimes till two or three. The dog always wakes up, however quiet I am, and then my mother wakes up, gives me tea and something to eat. It’s very cold, these winter mornings, and when I start out at about five-thirty, I pass only some people wrapped head to foot in shawls or labourers going to work on bicycles or people setting off with water bottles to the edges of roads to shit. I go to work on my motorbike and when the wind in my face feels very cold, or when I’m exhausted from work the night before, I distract myself…I dream of going abroad…to Australia. I will find work abroad and then I will leave.


By the time I reach the hotel, I’m happier to be there than at home—except that the hotel has no dog. I sometimes think of Lucky in my hotel’s kitchen: he’d have loved the scraps I could have fed him.


It’s a different world, the hotel kitchen. It’s become my world. When I walk through its doors, I try to forget even my dog. I become a different person.

*


In transformations of food, inorganic becomes organic, one form is metamorphosed into another; the eater is eaten, big fish eat little fish, and if you wait long enough, little fish eat big fish.

A.K. Ramanujan


The Brahmins’ Story

Pre-independence, Tamil Brahmin nationalists faced certain unique problems. When they went for meetings of the Indian National Congress, sometimes far away from home, what were they to eat, and where? The very gaze or touch of other people would pollute. When a steamer went from Madras to Calcutta for one such meeting, there were special Brahmin cooks on board, cooking food in Brahminical ways at Brahminical times, and serving them in rooms closed to all but Brahmins. However, this was not reassuring enough for Raghunatha Rao, an interpreter of the Shastras, who went through the five-day journey eating nothing but dried fruit, milk, and a tin or two of peas. Far-sightedly, he had brought his own coffee essence with him. Another Brahmin delegate had brought cold rice with him and would eat that rice in a room from which he shut out even other Brahmins as he thought any gaze could pollute his food.


In a poetic reversal of sorts, when Mani Shankar Aiyar, a Brahmin, fought the elections against the DMK, he had to reassure the electorate that he could challenge his opponent ‘to an open competition in the village square to see who could eat more chicken biryani….he or Brahmin me’ (see M.S.S.Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, Delhi, 2006).

*

The Neo-Brahmin’s Story


‘Well, thanks for all the compliments you guys are showering me with, keeps me going…or else it’s not that easy you know, running a place of this kind here…this is almost a village, although it’s supposed to be a b****y hill station! It’s very small, there wasn’t even a three-star hotel here before…and it’s tough training these hill chaps—they’re basically villagers—so how do you tell them the fish knife’s a different one…keep saying it and saying it but (chuckles)…some of these boys I’ve hired have worked at the hotels here… I’ve eaten in those hotels. I’ve been coming here for years, since my childhood, man. And I know those hotels don’t know a tagliatelle from a noodle and their service is pretty rotten and their upkeep is bad and their kitchens only function somewhat during the Season… I learnt my cooking on the Continent, you know, when I was mooching around Italy and France for some years, I know what the standards are….now look what we got here today for lunch: the dried mushrooms for the tagliatelle are Italian, the chocolate in the mousse is eighty per cent cocoa, from Belgium, the asparagus is from Himachal, we source our meat and fish from Delhi because the quality here is poor…we did try getting the baker in town to bake good bread, but he’s just not up to the mark. So now we get our bread from Delhi too—basically all our supplies come from Delhi in a refrigerated truck and then we put it in our deep freeze…yeah, I know, the power keeps going but we have a generator and a deep tubewell…we’re trying to grow some stuff here: look, that bed has rocket, the other one’s lettuce…and of course we’ve got our basil and our sage…and those hens there…we keep them for free range eggs for mayonnaise ….­have some more wine—do!—and do you mind if I smoke?…that area you can see beyond the gate, where the labourers are digging, that’ll be the health club…oh yeah, we’ll have the works, from yoga to rappelling…meditation centre, health food…yeah, we expect foreign clientele or from big cities in India…nobody from here, don’t be crazy…come for a drink on Christmas, we’re getting a DJ from Delhi, it’ll be fun, everyone’s coming!

Manager of a new four-star hotel at a hill station


*

‘It was noted with envy and admiration that the breakfast in these households consisted of eggs, toast and jam instead of vegetable bhujia with paratha, and that even the women had begun to use spoons, though only little ones, to eat. Guests to tea were served cake and sandwiches instead of samosas and barfi. In the evening there was Scotch whisky and soda….instead of keora sharbat’—Sheila Dhar of her family’s move from Old Delhi to Civil Lines


The Cook’s Story

My name is Manju Arya. I think I am 64 years old. My mother died when I was one and then my father married again and went away. My grandmother, my father’s aunt, brought me up in her house in a village near Kathmandu. She gave me too much laad-pyaar (affection), did not make me go to school because I didn’t want to go, and by the time I was older I was too shy to go. I played in the rice fields near the house all day and when the dhaan (paddy) came from the fields I took it to the chakki (flour mill) to get it threshed. That was my work. The rice was enough for us for the year. We ate rice for all our meals. When my grandmother died, those days ended and I had to live with my father and his second wife.


I eloped at sixteen. My husband is from Garhwal and the marriage was frowned upon by my father and stepmother. They didn’t speak to me again for many years. At first when I came here to Ranikhet with my husband—I think it was early in the ’60s—I was quite scared of the jungles around this house and the people whose servant he was. But one day I was doing something and I heard Memsahib shout for me loudly. From the garden of the main house, she was waving towards me with hands glued up with wet flour. I ran up to help her. She had been trying to show the khansama (cook) how to make something out of a book and because he was slow, she got impatient and put her hands into the dough but it was so sticky she couldn’t clean herself. Memsahib could get very agitated very quickly. I cleaned her hands and then kneaded the dough.


No, of course Memsahib didn’t know how to cook and she never cooked. But she had a cookbook in a foreign language and after that day she called me more and more. She would sit on a stool and read from the cookbook to herself and then tell me in Hindi what it meant, what the processes were. In this way I learnt to make tarts, cutluss (cutlets), chicken rosht (roast) and puteen (pudding). Some things I learnt I didn’t like to do: for example putting sharaab (alcohol) into puteen. I can make thin pancakes and also bread. I make soups out of khatta ghaas (wild sorrel) that grows all over the hills and in the monsoon I hunt for junglee tulsi (wild oregano) to put into food. Chicken I cook with rosemary—rosemary bushes work as short hedges around our house. In her salad sometimes I added the leaves of nasturtium, the orange climber-and-creeper which flowers even through cold December. We had no oven and no special pans so I made the tarts on a dekchi (cooking pan) lid and baked them on a chulha (wood stove). For breakfast, when it was in season, I would give Memsahib strawberry—there was a small patch in the flowerbeds in those days—and malai (cream) from the milk. Sometimes we bought cream from the Military Dairy. There were always more strawberries than she could eat, so we also tasted them. Now the patch is dead.


In our own home we eat daal bhaat (dal-rice) in the morning every day. Memsahib, all her life, gave us two kilos of chana daal to cook every month. In those days it was the cheapest daal. In winter we might have rotis made of madua (millet) which is very warming and bhatt ki daal (black soya broth), which is also warming. When it’s cold, the children pluck big lemons from the tree and get maltas (oranges) from the market and then make the pulp into chutney with dahi and chilli and then they eat it all in the sun. It’s too sour for me these days. When it snows my grandchildren run about playing in the cold and pick up lumps of clean snow to mix with gur and eat as ice cream.


If I ever brought leftovers home from Memsahib, nobody would eat them but my husband and me. My children think all that English food is tasteless. They don’t like anything that is not chatpata (tangy). I’ve slowly started to like soups. I also like tuna, and omelettes with cheese, and coffee. My children don’t like any of these things. My youngest grandchild begs his mother each time she goes to the market to get her just one aloo tikki (potato cutlet), on the sly. But her mother says she can’t do that. There are too many children in the house and we can’t afford aloo tikkis for all of them, except occasionally. I tell them I’ll make you tikki at home, but they say it’s not the same thing.


We’ve never eaten out in a restaurant to fill our stomachs—but if we are stuck in the bazaar long past mealtime then we might eat a samosa or a tikki. One day my granddaughter, who has a new job, took me to eat at Rajdeep Hotel in the bazaar. We shared a plate of chowmein. It was expensive, twelve rupees for that plate. But youngsters want these things, like noodles. They always want Maggi noodles in their tiffin. Look at the tea shops in Ranikhet now: they all cook Maggi noodles and sell it as a snack! The children want ice cream, they want cakes with cream. All these things are too expensive for us. But for their birthdays we buy a small cake and I make chhole (chick peas). For some special days we cook mutton or chicken curry. Earlier when we bought mutton the butcher would know from the small amount that it was for our own use and would always give us pieces of scrap and gristle although we were paying the full price. If we bought bread we would always find we had been given a stale loaf, sometimes with fungus. My daughters, who are very smart, began to tell the shopkeepers they were buying for Memsahib and then they got better quality.


I have lived in Bombay with Memsahib also. All along the wall in front of our house there were a line of stalls selling dosa and paav bhaji (bread and vegetables). Early each morning the stall owners would start chopping kilos of onions and coriander and peeling potatoes and then cooking. Then, at lunchtime all the office-goers would crowd the stalls. I had never eaten a dosa before. They had great big tavas (griddles) on which they would spread the batter really fast and bake them golden and crisp. I could smell their sambar (spicy lentil curry) from the balcony: it used to make my mouth water then and even now, I love eating sambar. My middle daughter has learned to make it. We pluck curry patta (leaf) that grow wild near Ranibagh, on the way up from Kathgodam, and dry it and store it. We can now buy sambar powder in the market if we want to. I always say, if you have money, you can buy anything in Ranikhet these days!


In those days, in Bombay, I would stand at the balcony and watch them stirring the sambar and turning out heaps of white idlis. Then after the lunch-time rush was over the vendors would clean up, and in late afternoon, go nearby to buy a piece of fish each for themselves. They’d cook it with a lot of masala and in the evening they would have their one meal of the day with great relish--fish curry and rice. The owners of the bungalows near these vendors would be very annoyed by the crowds and cooking smells, and would try to chase them away, but I could not stop watching them from the upstairs balcony everyday.


I have never returned to Nepal. I was not welcome in my father’s house. I don’t even know what happened to my stepmother, but I know my father is dead. One day a Memsahib from Nepal brought bhogta (grapefruit). I had never seen it since I left the country. When I cut it and saw the pink flesh inside and smelt it, my home came back to me--the fields in the village near Kathmandu. I have kept the seeds and planted some of them. They’ll fruit one day.


Author’s note: I’m very grateful for the patience and candour with which Manju Arya and Arvind Dangwal dealt with my questions. I’ve deliberately not provided the name of the manager who showed me around his new hotel but none of his words are made up.

Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind: The History of a Fascination


Review essay in Biblio, A Review of Books, September 2003


Death at high altitudes is easy:

‘I remember hearing of one man... he went blind in one eye. Click! Just like that—blackness. Like turning off a light. His retina had gone. A couple more paces and click! The other one went too. Both retinas ripped off by the pressure. They led him for a while, but he could never get down with no eyes. Finally, he just sat down on the snow to die...he’s still up there. That’s how it is at height.’


Apart from dying blind, you could die by falling. You could die of heart attacks, brain haemorrhage dysentry, frostbite, pneumonia or just plain exhaustion. You could be buried in an avalanche or lost in a blizzard. You could, like Somervell in 1923, almost choke to death on a piece of your own frozen larynx. When British climber Chris Bonington added up what he called his ‘catalogue of deaths’ he realised that 15 of his 29 climbing companions had died because of just plain climbing.

Death apart, physical discomfort at high altitudes is acute. At Everest Base Camp, says Jon Krakauer, in Into Thin Air, ‘Walking to the mess tent left me wheezing...If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. [My] deep, rasping cough... worsened. Sleep became elusive...Cuts and scrapes refused to heal...my appetite vanished...and my body began to consume itself for sustenance.’


Why do mountains continue to call out, siren-like, often luring climbers to their doom when the dangers of climbing are common knowledge? Robert Macfarlane’s book attempts an answer in an eloquent blend of cultural history, travelogue, memoir and old-fashioned nature writing. Even as he takes care to enumerate the sensible reasons for staying safe on the flatlands, Macfarlane writes with an infectious passion which seduces us towards glaciers and snows.


Mountains were not always so seductive: Macfarlane suggests that when we view piles of rock and see spectacular landscapes, we are viewing the rock through spectacles coloured by centuries of tradition. In the West, in the seventeenth century, mountains were thought of as ‘ “warts”... “excrescences” ... “Nature’s pudenda”.’ The tops of mountains were thought to be infested with dragons. In 1702 Jacob Scheuchzer, a professor of Physics and Mathematics at Zurich University, classified ‘sighted’ dragons into ‘cat-faced dragons, serpentine dragons, inflamable dragons and non-combustible dragons...fliers and slitherers; malodorous dragons and cacophonic dragons, scaled and feathered, bat-like and bird-like, crested and bald, fork-tailed and fork-tongued’. In the historian Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, we find that while medieval monks sought out the fastness of mountains for solitary meditation, mountain tops were mostly given a wide berth. Descriptions of paradisal lakes and ambrosial gardens on mountain tops tended to be fiction—allegorical depictions of good pilgrims triumphing over evil dragons and finding hilly Edens. Travellers and pilgrims preferred the safety of passes to the uncertain pleasures of the summit. It was only around the sixteenth century that detailed, factual description of mountains began to replace myth and conjecture.


Tradition, Schama comments, ‘made landscape out of mere geology and vegetation.’ Macfarlane, it might be said, takes off from Schama’s magisterial history of landscape to wander the mountains in particular. Where Schama traces the invention of tradition mainly via works of art, Macfarlane relies on textual clues from a range of sources—starting with geology, which had a great deal to do with the altered way in which the West began to view mountains.


In 1681, the cleric Thomas Burnet published The Sacred Theory of the Earth which accounted for the Biblical flood by proposing that the Earth, at the time of Creation, was as smooth as an egg, filled with a yolk of fiery matter and a white substance which was water; the egg cracked open at the Flood, inundating the Earth and Noah. When the waters receded, Burnet said, the Earth was left ‘lying in its Rubbish’—gorges, oceans and mountains. Burnet’s book took England by storm. His prose was so stirring that Coleridge planned to turn Sacred Theory into blank verse.

What Burnet’s book did, according to Macfarlane, was turn mountains from ‘ terra firma into terra mobilis’ ‘..where rocks liquefy and seas petrify, where granite slops about like porridge, basalt bubbles like stew...’ Geologists came to be known as ‘knights of the hammer’ and the earth a ‘great stone book’ that was beginning to reveal its secrets. By the nineteenth century, geo-tourism was a ‘growth industry’ and fossil-collecting was as competitive as growing prize chrysanthemums. A succession of natural historians proposed different theories of the formation of the earth until, in 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German scientist, told the world about plate tectonics—that the continents moved around and gave rise to mountains. This is currently accepted scientific ‘fact’.


Even as mountains were being transmuted from magical, dragon-infested landscapes to living monuments of ‘deep time’, Edmund Burke was exploring a theory of the Sublime: why certain sights and experiences, like standing on a precipice watching a thundering waterfall, produced that frisson, the delicious pleasure of a terror that ‘does not press too close’. Soon, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats were all on the quickest routes to the Alps, seeking out their Romantic highs from altitude. Even the bulky Dr Johnson had, some years earlier, bullied a reluctant Boswell across Buller of Buchan Rock in Scotland, claiming that ‘terrour without danger is only one of the sports of fancy, a voluntary agitation of the mind that is permitted no longer than it pleases.’ This ‘pleasure to be had from vertigo’, says Macfarlane, ‘ would over the course of 300 years, blossom and amplify into our era’s headlong pursuit of danger—people flinging thelmselves off cranes attached to rubber bands,off mountainsides attached to ropes, and out of planes attached to nothing at all.’


The anthropologist Sherry Ortner, in a fascinating work called Life and Death on Mt Everest, points out how perfectly climbing captures ‘the Romantic ideal of transcending the limits of the self’, glorifying nature while testing the human spirit against it. Mountains provided a pastoral retreat from the evil of the smoky city—mountain landscapes and people being considered ‘unspoilt’ and Edenic. Returning from the mountains to the plains, travellers describe feeling unable to relate for a while to familiar people and routines. In proximity with peaks, people became more truly themselves. Courage, comradeship, sacrifice: everything could be tested in the mountains. Victorian ideas of self-improvement could be perfectly deployed on precipices: danger, said Ruskin, made you come out ‘a stronger and better man.’ Soon enough, climbing personified Brit Grit.

Naturally, the Empire found its potent symbol in mountaineering—as well as more mundane uses for it, like claiming territory. Maps had to be drawn, altitudes fixed, summits claimed. Tellingly, it was Francis Younghusband, misguided General of Britain’s bloody incursion into Tibet, who recruited the doomed George Mallory for the first of his Everest expeditions.

Macfarlane’s account is too focused on mountaineers’ motivation and costs to count the ‘collateral damage’, but it is worth pausing with Kenneth Mason of the Survey of India as he revisits a Survey observation post in the Karakoram to find, alongside the intact post, a ruined stone shelter with a skeleton—of a Survey khalasi—seated in it. Ortner reminds us that it is still not known how many peaks poorly paid labourers such as the unknown khalasi climbed to map the Empire, and how many perished on them.


Younghusband thought Sherpas had neither the ‘desire’ nor the ‘spirit’ for climbing. Later anthropologists, and repeatedly the Dalai Lama, have pointed out that mountain tops are thought in Eastern religions to be the abode of gods. Easterners thus did not need to prove themselves by conquering nature, for they respected it, and the idea of conquest was at odds with veneration. Of course mind and body, East and West, cannot be polarised quite so easily. Milarepa meditating on the slopes of Everest surely conquered his body, as much as Ed Hillary his mind, to get to the summit. Even so, deep cultural and economic differences—mountaineering is expensive, there are few workingclass mountaineers—have ensured a Western dominance of mountaineering as well as a certain Western arrogance in attitudes to nature. At Mount Rushmore in the USA, the architect-sculptor who thought nothing of carving up a mountain into presidential faces received public funding and support. In much the same spirit, a commercial ‘tour’ climber reassured Jon Krakauer before his Everest attempt: ‘We’ve got the big E figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days...we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.’ (Ironically, this 1996 expedition had among the highest fatalities ever. The Dalai Lama may have uttered a gentle told you so.)


This is precisely the kind of statement that embitters Macfarlane, who mourns the Everest of today as a ‘tawdry, frozen Taj Mahal’. He is unashamed in his idealisation of mythic, ‘real’ climbers of the past: Maurice Herzog and George Mallory, whose climbs were grounded in a deep aesthetic appreciation of peaks, and respect for them. His own narrative is punctuated by codas in which he breaks off to describe landscape, including frozen forests of icicles in glaciers, and the effects of light on snow, in precise, lyrical detail. He pauses often to savour the exactitude and flair with which a writer has described a feature of landscape, drawing from a vast range of writers to illustrate his points. It seems natural therefore for this cultural descendant of Mallory to close his book with a reconstruction of Mallory’s Everest climbs — though his language here sometimes shades dangerously close to purple.


British mountaineers in the 1920s and 1930s were usually middle class and highly educated. Leisure activities in Tilman’s 1938 attempt were playing chess and reading seventeenth century verse, Montaigne’s essays and Don Quixote. Perched on the precarious, icy shoulder of Everest, buffeted by blizzards, Mallory’s party cheered themselves up reciting ‘Kubla Khan’ and Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’. Describing the approach to the Straits of Gibraltar, Mallory says, ‘We had only to pop through the hole like Alice through the garden door to reach a new kingdom or kingdom of adventures.’ The summit of Everest is to him ‘like Keat’s’ lone star’. When he was not climbing, Mallory was an idolised schoolteacher at Charterhouse, where Robert Graves was part of his student fan club. Muscular and strikingly handsome, he made Lytton Strachey exclaim, ‘My hand trembles, my heart palpitates...the body of an athelete by Praxiteles and a face—oh incredible.’


To Macfarlane the almost ‘mythic simplicity’ of Mallory, the obsession that thrice takes him away from family and finally kills him, embodies the argument in this book. ‘He was the inheritor,’ Macfarlane says, ‘of a complex of emotions and attitudes towards mountainous landscape, devised long before his birth, which largely predetermined his responses to it...’ In this tradition, mountains challenge the human sense of power by their far greater force; they reshape our ‘interior landscapes’ making us aware of our capabilities and our smallness. To the author, mountains are not for dominating, they ‘return to us the priceless capacity for wonder which can be...leached away by modern existence.’


In High Adventure, his account of climbing Everest, Edmund Hillary despairs during one long, dangerous night: ‘The harsh reality of our situation flooded my mind...I felt a terrible sense of fear and loneliness. What was the sense in it all?’ Faced by a furious bereaved woman whose cousin has died in a climbing accident, Macfarlane acknowledges that ‘there is nothing inherently noble...[and]something atrociously wasteful’ about climbing deaths. Yet one gets the feeling that this sense of waste, is for this author, largely academic. Deep down, he is as obsessed as any mountaineer seduced by the siren. Reading Annapurna, a book which Herzog had to dictate—he had lost all his fingers to frostbite—Macfarlane remarks: ‘For what...were fingers and toes compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it...the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain top—from death in valleys preserve me, O Lord.’


Communicating this inexplicable desire while searching out its cultural roots is what Mountains of the Mind brilliantly achieves. This is not an account of modern mountaineering. Here you will find Shelley but not Shipton, and Bronte is present while Bonington is not. Macfarlane’s interest is in the prehistory of a modern obsession with altitude, which he narrates with the erudition of a scholar and the ease of a natural story-teller. The romantic intensity of his passion will make even the die-hard plainsperson yearn for the peaks ‘gleaming through the cloud, beneath a cavernous sky...’


Affinity: First City, April 2011

That night a cool, moist breeze began ruffling the trees, making a sound like the sea. Pine cones clattered onto the roof. The stars disappeared and thunder boomed. Sword-blades of brilliant white light sliced open the glowing red sky. The breeze grew into a wind that howled and banged. My little house on the edge of its spur became a tilting boat. The wind blew in sprays of rain through the open windows and we closed our eyes to the mist of water as if we were not in the mountains but on a wave-thudded beach. Far below, the still-smouldering, smoking forest began to calm at last.


The emotion of a place, is perhaps the single banyan-like character that pervades Anuradha Roy’s novels; as mood, as harbour, as nourishment for all the other characters and the story they unfold. In her first novel, The Atlas of Impossible Longing, a drowned riverside house seeped into each moment of the story, while in her new novel, The Folded Earth, nature itself pervades the story; nature not as mere landscape beauty, but as a moment of encounter with human emotion, as experience, as the seed of characters and their stories. The novel came to her as a soaked image, Anuradha tells us, of “Roopkund, the ice-bound lake famous as a kind of graveyard of pilgrims - strange that the first book began with a drowned house and this one with drowned people! Then as now, a passage got written out of nowhere, with no story in mind, in which a voice was speaking of this lake. Over a year or so I had to let that passage grow and resolve itself : Who is this person speaking? What has happened to her? And this is how the novel came about.”


The frozen lake of Roopkund watches over the warm and beautiful setting of Ranikhet, where The Folded Earth unfolds, unravelling through the emotions of Maya, a young widow who has moved here to distance herself from a deeply troubling past. However, as the seasons pass, and the landscape changes mood, she finds that the loping solitude of nature makes her relationships with the small family of hill town’s people even deeper than the one she had left behind. Among them, her landlord Diwan Sahib, who reigns over a passion for Corbett, a crumbling hill estate (and a fabled secret cache of letters exchanged between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten) with grace deserving of royalty. Her neighbours, Ama, of raisined skin’ and riddled charm, and her young granddaughter Charu, and her story of young love, absence, and undying hope. And Veer, Diwan Sahib’s frequent visitor, that man with an enigmatic, troubling aura of unknowability’. What connects Maya to the intricacies of their lives, is the experience of nature they all share; as if behind the peculiarities of their lives, they share a single space of solitude. Anuradha agrees, that this is common to both her novels, “In this book, nature, or more specifically the closeness of the forest, is the scaffolding - and it is also the centre. The people in the book are defined by their relationship with the world of forests, mountains and animals. The connection between the first book and the second is also a sense of lost landscapes, or landscapes in the process of being lost. Thematically, I think the earlier novel and this one share an emotional centre - in both novels an old world of affections and rootedness is edged out by a harder, harsher world centred in commerce. One of the most treasured things about Ranikhet is its relatively untouched forests and its wildlife. The tragic fatality in the book comes from the knowledge that the destruction of this world is more or less inevitable, just as old-world sprawling houses with their gardened inhabitants are doomed in the earlier book. This ambience of the everyday-tragic, which many writers have evoked by setting their work around times of transition from an old world to a new, is something I’ve really loved and found deeply moving in Bibhutibhushan and Ray, and equally in Kawabata, Lampedusa, and Chekhov. The idea of place as a character with roots and connections is almost a motif in one kind of fiction, and that’s my kind of fiction.”


This vast motif of The Folded Earth unravels as a saturation of delicately-shaped detail: the brimfulness with which it attends to individual emotions, to the enormity and expandability of inner lives, the magnitude of so-called small things, “Both books focus on small events in ordinary lives that open up aspects/ feelings - like those tiny hill roads that can lead to enormous, expansive valleys where you feel you can see the whole world,” Anuradha ponders, “I think the very small things - the way people look at each other, their private obsessions, like Mrs Wilson’s for her gold watch - these have the seed of the world in them. I love books like Kawabata’s very Chekhovian novel The Sound of the Mountain, that reveal the extraordinary through a series of daily events and perceptions - nothing earth-shattering has happened, yet by the end of the book after layer upon layer of events, memories, talk, friendship - everything is altered.”


In the world of The Folded Earth, under the lacework of deodar’, the rhythm of the animate and inanimate are inextricably bound; gossip has a habit of eddying’ around the ankles, choices are winnowed’, and the mountains are a place where the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea’. Cadence is the hidden undercurrent that makes the world of this novel so intimate. The rhythm of its sentences rolls without self-consciousness, as if the words on the page owe nothing to the language, only a fidelity to their speakers. The untouched appearance of the words though, is simply an appearance, Anuradha confesses, “Almost every sentence in that book has been through many rewrites to get it right - sound, sense, rhythm. The central thing is to make the artificial seem natural. I want every sentence to have the clarity and translucence of glass - and its complexity - so that you see other colours when you turn it in the light. I heard the sculptor Anish Kapoor say in a film about his work that he wants to leave things simple so that there is space for people to make of it what they will. That’s essential, and when people tell me I write simply, I feel very good. I want the books to work as the page-turning, the what-happens-next kind as well as something more complex. I loved it when indignant readers asked of the last book, ‘How could you leave those two old people on a bus? And what on earth happened to the parrot?’ This is for me the best kind of reader, someone who gets emotionally taken over by things in the book. Beyond that, if the book conveys a sense of larger, deeper things, things not easy to explain through logic, words, and action, that’s a bonus. That’s something towards which I think books and movies can take you if they really engage your emotions very deeply, art as religious experience or whatever it’s called nowadays.”


The allure of the untranslatable permeates the book, in a way that its English has a beautiful, translated quality, as if it retains the memory of its source of translation, the experience of a place and time. Its various characters are readable to us in one language, but in various performative renditions, “The voices - the things characters say and write - are indivisible from them,” Anuradha says, “Who they are is defined by how they write and speak. I have the same problem all writers in India do - and this has to do not only with those who write in English. Even if I were writing this book in Bengali, I would have to work out: how does the Pahari peasant woman speak? And does an elderly Pahari woman speak differently from a young one? How best to have them speak so that they don’t sound like an English/ Bengali villager? Class, age, education, region: all these things inflect how people communicate, so each character has to be distinguished through their words. I can hear their voices in my head, but they speak different languages. So the translated quality you observe is inescapable for every writer.”


The mode of the reader is Anuradha’s repose after her work is published, the state she is currently in - her feet up and head bent into books, “Right now, I’m reading Paraja, an Oriya novel by Gopinath Mohanty. It’s a deeply tragic story, very tender and loverlike about the defencelessness of the tribal people: their knowledge of the forest and farming the hills is absolute, but they are not equipped to cope with urban cunning. You know they are going to lose home, land, everything. I don’t suppose this book was on the syllabus for the golden boys of India Inc.” Reading gives her nourishment, and great reason to weep with envy, “My latest cause of envy was Chekhov’s Three Years and a particular image in it of a woman’s toes curling like a shrinking bird’s when she is kissed by someone she finds revolting and the way a man’s teeth grip the edge of a water jug he’s drinking from when he begins to cry. Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi also made me deeply envious for the way the downfall of one family seemed to contain within it the death of a whole culture and city - and that city is so brilliantly evoked in the book. A few things of this calibre, and I feel I should do something less foolhardy than write fiction. But that doesn’t work because writing isn’t a rational, thought-out life plan. It’s something I do because I have to. So I’ll do it as well as I can and be grateful to all the others who write much better, so I always have good books to read.”

Review of The Folded Earth, First City, April 2011

There are novels that spill beyond merely the sum of their parts: stories, characters, narrative strategies. The Folded Earth is one such novel, its evocative title so wonderfully suggestive of the way its story seems to have emerged from the atmosphere of a place - the core of its emotion not merely in characters or situations, but derived from the pervasive moods of nature.


Set in the small hill town of Ranikhet overlooking the spectacular iciness of the Himalayas, where eagles pare the sky in unbroken circular lines, as if it’s an orange, the novel unravels through Maya, a young woman who comes here to seek refuge from her memories. She seeks cold abstracted distance, but here in the spectacular proximity to nature, and in the constant experience of its vividness, her life is lush with feeling: memories swell and fade, incidents are quietly drenched in feeling, lives meld and tie her inexplicably to the web connecting the small population of this nook of the mountains: her landlord Diwan Sahib who hides a secret stash of letters from Nehru to Edwina Mountbatten, his colourful tenant Ama, and her son Puran who is infinitely tender with animals but perplexed by human relationships; Ama’s teenage granddaughter Charu, who finds a beautiful bond with the shy waiter Kundan Singh, kept alive in the letters that he writes to her - letters she cannot read, which make her battle with alphabet and absence. They all talk to each other in a language where the unsaid lines are dispersed into the space of nature they inhabit together, understood by being, not saying.


Written in a tenor that touches fleshy finitude as well as sparse notes, and overheard more than read amidst its pages, The Folded Earth is a book you will hold close to your chest long after the last page is turned.


Rating: ****