HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD
By Kiran Desai
Atlantic Monthly Press, 209 pages, $22
THE PROUDEST DAY:
India’s Long Road to Independence
By Anthony Read and David Fisher
Norton, 565 pages, $35
I was prepared to categorize Kiran Desai’s splendid first book, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” as a fine example of magical realism. Set in a fictional village in India, it lies in literary proximity to locales described by writers like Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Sholom Aleichem: fantastic places inhabited by idiosyncratic characters, places where, without fail, remarkable events come to pass.
In Desai’s overheated Shahkot, awkward young Sampath Chawla can’t quite figure out how to conduct himself as a son, brother, scholar, employee or friend; the most basic principles of behavior are a mystery to him. He flees Shahkot, seeking peace and solitude. Unfortunately, his flight is quickly spoiled when his bus is invaded by “one of those old women who despise a silence. . . . (S)he used her voice like a needle to reach and poke.” As a result of his annoyance at her voice, he finds himself up a tree in an abandoned guava orchard a few miles away.
Soon his family and neighbors, who previously found him unpromising, discover that he is in fact a holy man/tourist attraction. And so for several highly eventful months, Sampath remains in the tree. This story makes perfect sense in its context, a “magical” literary world in which alcoholic monkeys become organized hooligans, a food-obsessed woman scours the land for an animal exotic enough to cook into a truly unique dish, and severed ears and hairpin stabbings are signals of love.
But possibly these events are less surreal than I understood them to be. I recently learned that in the real world of environmental activism, in Humboldt County, northern California, a seraphish young woman has been living in a giant redwood since December to save a forest from lumberjacks. Fellow activists are keeping a vigil at the foot of the tree.
Separated by continents and actuality, the bare circumstances of the two stories are remarkably alike. This is not in any way to suggest a connection between the book and the protest; the timing of each rules out even subliminal influencing. But juxtaposing the true story in California with the imagined tale in India raises questions about what might drive a person into a tree. A possibly more interesting question is what might keep that person from descending?
A quick check of the real tree-sitter’s website (she has a laptop computer and a cell phone in her tree) reveals a ponderously Zenlike account:
“When I entered the great majestic cathedral of the Redwood forest for the first time . . . my spirit knew it had found what it was searching for, I dropped to my knees and began to cry because I was so overwhelmed by the wisdom, energy, and spirituality housed in these holiest of temples.”
Sampath’s first encounter with the tree is described like this:
“Before him he saw a tree, an ancient tree, silence held between its branches like a prayer. He reached its base and feverishly, without pausing, he began to climb. He clawed his way from branch to branch. Hoisting himself up, he disturbed dead leaves and insect carcasses and all the bits of dried up debris that collect in a tree. It rained down about him as he clambered all the way to the top. When he settled among the leaves–the very moment he did so–the burgeoning of spirits that had carried him so far away and so high up fell from him like a gust of wind that comes out of nowhere, rustles through the trees and melts into nothing like a ghost.”
Clearly envisioned and opulently told, the magical realist narrative of “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” seems more convincing than the real events in Humboldt County. Through the perceptions of a talented writer, the most improbable events, motives and behavior become credible. A skilled author manages the material so a reader understands what to make of all this extraordinary stuff.
Desai is an acute observer of human imperfections, adept at revealing a character’s most exceptional idiosyncracies. Sampath’s father, “(d)etermined to start the day in a purposeful manner, according to schedule and habit . . . spat out the last remnants of sleep and inertia in a perfectly aimed rainbow spray of spittle.” A chief medical officer “lived in a constant state of panic that his ulcers would get worse, and everybody knew that nothing was worse for ulcers than worry and this worried him all the more. . . . Oh, he wouldn’t be able to bear all the onion juice he’d have to drink.”
Characters, activities, even objects are examined at this level of scrutiny, resulting in a steady surfeit of information to consider. Probably the best feature of this book is its rich language, packed with barbed observations, skewed images and an effortless humor that begs to be read aloud. It’s not necessary to know a thing about India to enjoy reading this book, either, although you may find yourself putting “-ji” at the end of someone’s name as an endearment, or yearning for some curried vegetables.
Incidentally, Kiran Desai is the daughter of the prominent author Anita Desai, a pedigree that no doubt gave her an entree to the publishing world, but “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” is as memorable as its title. With it, Desai joins the ranks of Anglo-Indian writers who have energized English literature with their imaginative, complex storytelling. It would be convenient to lump them all together as, say, being informed by mysticism or by an East-West cultural divide. But to stress geographical or thematic connections ignores the literary diversity of these authors, each one distinct in subject matter, settings, style and form. Salman Rushdie’s voice sounds nothing like Bharati Mukherjee’s, or Vikram Chandra’s, or R.K. Narayan’s, or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s, or those of the dozens of other writers from India; Anglo-Indian literature is not a genre. New writers continue to enrich the field, most often portraying societal dilemmas that open windows, for Western readers, on aspects of Eastern culture, and ultimately make the world feel a little smaller.
For readers who prefer to broaden their world views through more earnest reading, historians Anthony Read and David Fisher describe India’s disentanglement from the British empire in their new book, “The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence.” It is of interest for anyone who has been unable to keep straight the distinctions among Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains and Buddhists, or anyone who wonders why someone named Gandhi is always running for election in India, or why a state called Punjab can’t be found on a map.
The best accounts are given in the first and last few chapters. In the early sections the events of several hundred years are compressed, by necessity, into a few pages, but they both fascinate and create a context for later events. Brief stories of Mughal conquerors such as Tamerlane of Samarkand and the first emperor Babur underscore the presence of Indian history and lore in Western consciousness and literature. One learns the source of the phrase “black hole of Calcutta” and the term “thug.” Other tidbits include the fact that the first of the aristocratic British governor-generals was Lord Cornwallis, who, “Having presided over the death of Britain’s empire in the west . . . was now to be the midwife of its new empire to the east.”
Eventually, though, some of the central sections of the book seem like an endless parade of viceroys and envoys, meetings held and congresses convened. The reading remains compelling, partly because the authors continue to provide such nuggets as the fact that “Nehru had decided . . . to change the date of the annual Congress session from December, because poorer members could not afford to buy the extra clothing needed to keep warm in northern cities during the cold weather.” Still, the conferences, convocations and resolutions begin to meld together. But the final events leading to India’s partition and independence restore a sense of drama.
The central figures, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi, are present through most of the book, their movements closely followed from their early British educations to their divergent paths to leadership in the early 20th Century. The authors take great pains with the ideological shifts each underwent in reaction to inconsistent British policies and the increasingly splintered nationalist groups they represented. Particularly interesting are the machinations that led to India’s partition and the creation of Pakistan.
One of the great concerns of this history is at what point the division of the country, and its resultant slaughter and misery, became inevitable. The actual partitioning was done secretly, with changes made and effected up to the last minutes before British rule ended. People found themselves in the “wrong” country, “5 million Muslims . . . trekking from east to west, and 5 million Hindus and Sikhs trekking in the opposite direction. Many of them never made it to their destinations.” The authors fault almost every 20th Century leader involved in the process, citing bigoted or ill-informed English officials and Indian leaders driven by greed, pride or ineffectiveness to put sectarian issues ahead of national unity.
In particular, Gandhi, who is popularly portrayed as a saintly visionary, here comes across as a shrewd but often misguided instigator; his arrival would bring significant changes. He would replace the constitutional methods favored by Jinnah, Motilal Nehru and their moderate associates with his own anarchistic agenda, relying on intuition more than intellect and appealing directly to the emotions of the masses. He would also turn what had been a resolutely secular political campaign into a religious crusade that sowed the seeds of destruction for a united India.
A more positive depiction is generally accorded Jinnah, the Muslim leader, who is often called “brilliant” and is shown to act mostly out of principles of unification and fairness, except when pushed. “Populism,” the authors note, “had never been his style–he had always avoided anything that smacked of demagoguery.” Jawaharlal Nehru, too, is seen most often acting as a statesman, reconciling quarreling political parties, putting aside the separation campaign to steadfastly support the British military effort in World War II, a giant in a family of great political figures.
Those seeking a social history will need to read elsewhere. About halfway through the book, the well-born Nehru comes “face to face with the real India, peasant India, Gandhi’s India. . . . (H)e was touched to discover that thousands of men and women had turned out to make roads overnight by hand, so that he and his companions could drive through in his car. What he saw during that visit came as a profound shock. . . . `A new picture of India seemed to rise before me,’ ” he wrote, ” `naked, starving, crushed, and utterly miserable.’ ” The passage comes as something of a surprise to the reader, too, as that picture of India doesn’t occur much in this book. But it is a valuable and fascinating political record of the turbulent birth of modern India and Pakistan.
