Wednesday, April 6, 2011

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.”

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