His two step-children, Coomy and Jal, have grown up corsetted by bad memories, one in the grip of a stubborn selfishness, the other prey to an equally dangerous passivity. An accident, one of those commonplaces of old age, lands Nariman in plaster, bedridden, helpless and at the mercy of his children. All three of them, including Roxana, his own child, will react to their father’s changed position, from benign, sorrowing patriarch to unwanted burden, in different ways. Coomy’s relentless will prevails, forcing Nariman to move into Roxana’s cramped house, thereby changing the equations between her, her husband Yezad, and their two boys, Murad and Jehangir. Coomy will meet her appointed end later, as she brings her house down around her ears with perhaps a shade too much literalism than necessary.
As Nariman exorcises ghosts by night and builds an easy, touching friendship with his grandsons by day, the Bombay that all of them knew is changing. The commonplaces of corruption take their toll on Yezad’s world, while a more pernicious virus spreads through the city in the form of the Shiv Sena, the new ‘stormtroopers’ who battle for the soul of a Bombay transmuting uneasily into Mumbai. Meanwhile, Nariman’s stories about the legends behind Zoroastrianism and Yezad’s quiet visits to the fire-temple illumine another faith, with an antiquity and expansiveness akin to a kind of Hinduism that now seems to be slipping out of reach.
The indignities of old age are painstakingly delineated, with Mistry outlining the outrages of bedpan and incontinence, determined to spare no one, not Nariman, not Roxana and certainly not the reader, both the humiliations and the unexpected graces that this sort of helplessness confers. His touch is far less sure in the final and somewhat contrived section, where the continuing narrative of the family is told by Jehangir, and where Yezad has—improbably—succumbed to the same viral strain of fanaticism that caused the original tragedy in his father-in-law’s life.
*
This is also a continuation of Mistry’s exploration of the city he left so many years ago, to reside in a country from where he writes mingling the sharpened memory of the NRI with bouts of reacquaintance with the old place. And he is clear that he needs a different way of writing, a path that leads away from straight recording and magic realism alike.
For critics too dumb to get it, Mistry puts his thoughts in the mind of a key character. ‘Sometimes . . . Yezad felt [that] . . . Punjabi migrants of a certain age were like Indian novelists writing about that period, whether in realist novels of corpse-filled trains or in the magic-realist midnight muddles, all repeating the same catalogue of horrors about slaughter and burning, rape and mutilation, foetuses torn out of wombs, genitals stuffed in the mouths of the castrated.’ It is a familiar catalogue of horrors to us, reading Family Matters with its depiction of the Hindutva brigade at embryo stage, in the aftermath of the 2002 bloodbaths in Gujarat.
Mistry’s question will remain just as relevant to future generations of authors, who seek to tell the stories behind the headlines in ways that owe nothing either to a too-insistent realism or to a magic realism that might be equally stultifying. But his version of the Shiv Sena’s growing hold over a Bombay where even the Jai Hind Book Mart must change its name to the Jai Hind Mumbai Book Mart, where those who dissent will be silenced, perhaps permanently, is uneasily conceived and sketched.
These sections of the novel lean heavily on Mistry’s minor characters, and as was frequently the case with his two previous novels, they cannot always take the weight. Vilas, the letter writer whose function is to remind Yezad, and the reader, of the minor symphony of joys and sorrows that make up human lives, is one-dimensional, a pale shadow of the wall-painter in Such a Long Journey. Mr Kapur, with his eccentricities and his dreams of taking on the Shiv Sena as an independent candidate who stands for a Bombay where unity and brotherhood hold sway, is a weaker version of Avinash, the radical student leader who becomes a casualty of the Emergency in A Fine Balance. This is true of most of Mistry’s cast of walk-on players here—the Matka Queen, for instance, is a portrait in eccentricity that we saw before in the form of Miss Kutpitia, queen of black magic, in Such a Long Journey.
The resonances between the three novels are not always negative, though. What makes the case for seeing them as a trilogy stronger is the sense of a continuous sweep of history. The Bombay of Such a Long Journey is in the twin grip of war and the new, cynical corruption epitomized by the Nagarwala case, which was the real-life inspiration for the fictional trials of Gustad Noble’s friend, Major Bilimoria. It retains an aura of hope and cautious optimism, though, that has darkened by the time Emergency settles over the city in which A Fine Balance is set. A Fine Balance, indeed, was Mistry’s impassioned if occasionally over-the-top riposte to those who said of Emergency that the trains ran on time.
When it was nominated for the Booker shortlist, Germaine Greer launched an astonishing, and off-target, attack on A Fine Balance. ‘I hate this book,’ she said, speaking on a BBC radio show, ‘I absolutely hate it. I just don’t recognize this dismal, dreary city. It’s a Canadian novel about India. What could be more terrible?’ Greer’s remarks betrayed her own relatively shallow understanding of the city—she based her impressions of Bombay on the few months she’d spent teaching at a local college. By citing Mistry’s shift to Canada, Greer was in effect erasing the childhood and adolescence he’d spent in Bombay. A Fine Balance was not unproblematic, but the worst of Mistry’s struggles in that novel came from a predicament familiar to Indian writers: the risk of caricature involved when you translate from a language such as Bhojpuri into English.
And the film version of the book went through a peculiarly Indian rite of passage in 1999, when the censor board asked for sixteen cuts, including the sentence: ‘1971—Indira Gandhi is the prime minister of India.’ The Guardian reported that Mistry wrote a long, typically blunt letter to the censor board: ‘What is the point of censorship in India? We live in a country where life can be seen in the raw in the streets itself.’
It is a pity that the passage in which Mistry simultaneously attacks Greer and reviews A Fine Balance as it should, in his mind, have been reviewed is not one of his best. ‘Let me give you an example,’ said Vilas. ‘A while back, I read a novel about the Emergency. A big book, full of horrors, real as life. But also full of life, and the laughter and dignity of ordinary people. One hundred per cent honest—made me laugh and cry as I read it. But some reviewers said no, no, things were not that bad. Especially foreign critics . . . One poor woman whose name I can’t remember made such a hash of it, she had to be a bit pagal, defending Indira, defending the Sanjay sterilization scheme, defending the entire Emergency—you felt sorry for her even though she was a big professor at some university in England . . .’ The words are given to a minor character, but the sense that even Vilas in his cameo role finds it hard to get his mouth around them is hard to shake off.
The Bombay in which Family Matters is set is demonstrably more discouraging, fuller of menace. Throwaway references to the Shiv Sena and their swaggering, cocky assumption of power allow Mistry to build up gradually but inexorably to the brutal murder of Mr Kapur. But the sense that he desperately tries to convey, of a way of living now under a threat as external as the threat of extinction of the Parsis is internal, comes across more as polemic than as plausible. The anecdotes appear to be culled at secondhand, from newspaper reports or TV segments, and then recast awkwardly in fictional form.
What Mistry is trying to do is difficult, but not impossible. N.S. Madhavan did it, in a chilling and seminal 1997 short story called ‘Mumbai’. At the start of the story, the protagonist, Aziz, lives in a Bombay where his reference points are the Air India maharaja, Chowpatty beach and the dabbawalas. By the end, Aziz’s middle-class respectability and every other assumption of security on which his life was built has been torn apart by the simple procedure of applying for a ration card. His name, like the name of his interlocutor, Pramila Gokhale (‘Maharashtrian. Hindu. Chitpawan Brahmin.’) is his ‘history and geography’; he cannot pr
ove that his birthplace exists, that he is no infiltrator from across the border, that he has a right to live in the land of his birth. By the end of ‘Mumbai’, Aziz has been irrevocably changed. ‘As he was about to . . . open the window, he felt that the other side would be stacked with innumerable human faces with loveless eyes, as on a peacock’s tail. Gripped by an uncontrollable fear, Aziz crept under the bed, and, with his face pressed to the floor, lay motionless, like a stillborn child.’
Mistry has nearly 487 pages in which to do what Madhavan did in about seven. But none of his painstaking attempts to capture the sense of entire communities being held to ransom and the world-view of so many being held under siege manage to communicate the same sense of menace, of irrevocable erasure.
Instead, Family Matters succeeds at the level of its title, as a reflection on the incalculable hearts of those whom we thought we knew best, and their ability to surprise us, for good or otherwise. As to the rest, Mistry must content himself with the knowledge that he hasn’t shirked the first duty of a writer, which is to hold up to the light all that disturbs him and challenges what he knows to be his verities.
Mistry has named names, as he did controversially with Indira Gandhi twice over (the film version of Such a Long Journey was held up by the Indian Censor Board for more than a year, because of its unflattering references to Mrs G); he has registered his protest. It would have been an occasion for celebration if he had also managed to transmute his protest into great literature, but Family Matters, satisfying in its humanity and its wise tenderness, remains a big book more by virtue of length than anything else.
(Then in 2010, Mumbai University controversially dropped Such a Long Journey from its syllabus after complaints from the Shiv Sena that the book had used ‘very bad, very insulting words’ in connection with Sena leader Bal Thackeray. Mohan Rawale, a Shiv Sena member, said: ‘It is our culture that anything with insulting language should be deleted. Writers can’t just write anything.’ Copies of the book were burnt at the gates of the university, and Mistry wrote a powerful letter of protest. He had the widespread support of writers and citizens across India. This is from a column I wrote at the time.)
*
‘That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by—’
—Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life
In the city of Mumbai, once upon a time, there lived many storytellers. Some came from the slums, and wrote angry, anguished, beautiful poetry about their lives. Some collected memories of Mumbai with loving care, and set down tales that featured the stories of the real Marathi Manoos, the ones who were Hindu but also Anglo-Indian or had names like Sinai and Pereira.
Some wrote of Firozsha Baag, chronicling the dying world of the Parsis, of ordinary men like Gustad Noble, stumbling from the tribulations of his quiet life into a larger conspiracy involving the corruption of the state, the venality and violence of its political parties. It must be remembered that at this time, Mumbai was also known as Bombay, and Bombay was a city that welcomed kahanis, opening its arms to stories and to storytellers. Some of the best found an ocean of seas of stories here: a young man who worked in advertising called Salman Rushdie, two men who knew the slums intimately, Kiran Nagarkar and Namdeo Dhasal, a banker, Rohinton Mistry, who returned to literature in Toronto, remembering and etching the Bombay he had loved so much.
Salman Rushdie spent years in darkness, at the hands of a villain much like the Khattam-Shud he wrote about in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There were many other Khattam-Shuds in India, men who preferred ‘chup’ to ‘gup’, and since Rushdie had been unwise enough to write about religion, Islam and the Quran in a book called Satanic Verses, they placed his book under a seal of the blackest silence for twenty-three years.
Many argued that religion should not be beyond question, and that the point of a novel was that it was made up, and that perhaps those who didn’t want to read Rushdie’s ideas might want to stop buying and burning copies of the book and just tell all their friends not to read it. But a ban hung like a shroud over Satanic Verses, and in a very strange coincidence, few great novels about controversial religious matters have come out of India in the last twenty-three years. This is, of course, just a coincidence, brought about by the P2C2E described in Haroun and the Sea of Stories—a Process Too Complicated To Explain.
Meanwhile, Mumbai was changing too, and becoming a city of Rats, fearsome creatures with whiskers that sniffed out the merest hint of offence, and great sharp teeth called censorship laws, and the thing about Rats is that they were very good about calling up bands of agreeably violent fellow Rats at need. The Rats felt strongly about the Marathi Manoos, a mythical and apparently endangered species that was threatened in Mumbai by anything that was neither pure Maharashtrian nor a Rat. The Rats felt strongly about anything that was against the spirit of their ancient culture, which is to say anything that criticized Rattery in general and Ratty politics in particular. The Rats felt very, very strongly about books that were freely available, in bookshops or in local universities, that caused offence to Rattishness.
The second thing about Rats is that they are very slow readers. Someone needs to bring a King Rat, or a Crown Prince Rat, a book worthy of burning before he will turn its pages, and the vision of Rats is such that they can only see what offends them. And so, twenty years after Mistry first set down the tale of Gustad Noble, and after it had been not just acclaimed by critics, but loved by non-Rats everywhere, a young Rat read the book. And he was shocked to discover that it offended his sensibilities, by casting aspersions on Rattish behaviour (such as corruption and mob violence and other forms of Rattery), and that it offended particular political parties. It happened to be his political party, but he explained that all Political Parties, like Rats, needed to stand together against anything that might be Offensive, such as books that made people question the conduct of Political Parties known for their tendency to rule by thuggery. (Or Thuggeries, since there were three of them, a big Thuggery, a medium Thug and a little Thuggerish.)
It caused the Rats the greatest offence of all to discover that Such a Long Journey was being taught in Mumbai University—which, however, had a fellow Rat at its helm. It was the easiest thing in the world to organize a book-burning session followed by a book-banning session, and the niceties observed, the Rats went back to their holes.
They left us with a question, as Rohinton Mistry becomes the latest in a long line of authors to experience Rat censure and censorship. As Bombay becomes Mumbai—and therefore morphs more and more into Rattistan—will the Rats chase all of its storytellers out of the city? Perhaps they’ll be allowed to stay, if they promise to write only blank-paged books in Rattish, a language that has just three words: ‘Don’t cause offence.’
*
But these events had a happier conclusion; in 2014, Rohinton Mistry came to India to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Times of India’s literary festival. ‘A lifetime achievement award is a funny sort of thing, like a death or a funeral,’ said Mistry, opening his acceptance speech. ‘When an author gets one, it reminds me of his or her books. It is also the beginning of the end.’ Then he spoke of growing up in Bombay, shared his memories of the city’s jazz singers and crooners, and to the audience’s delight, sang ‘Don’t fence me in’, old Bing Crosby numbers and from Mother India, the song ‘Na main bhagwan hoon, na main shaitan hoon’.
(Based on reviews and columns written in 2002 and 2010. In 2008, Rohinton Mistry published The Scream, a forty-eight-page story, in a limited edition, with illustrations by Tony Urquhar.)
FOUR
Booklove
1
Physical
The Wrecking Ball
It was when we heard about Argha, who was the caretaker and gardener at my grandmother’s house, selling the books that we finally accepted the house in Kolkata was dying. The hou
se was of a type once common in Kolkata, now increasingly rare, the few specimens left either already crumbling, already neglected, or looking strangely out of place—forlorn bungalows dwarfed and flanked by multistoried buildings.
But when we grew up, it was the apartment buildings that were rare, especially in South Kolkata. The bhadralok lived in houses like the one on Rowland Road: gracious, sprawling, one-or-two-storeyed bungalows in red or white or cream brick, the louvred window shutters painted in green or blue.
No one in our tiny corner of Kolkata was crass enough to discuss family money (and this sneering at substance was part of the reason why Bengalis ran through family money so easily), but it was easy to see who had it and who didn’t. The ones who still had trust funds and deposits and prosperous folders of share certificates had their houses painted every year, the silver polished every week, the red or black stone floors swept and swabbed to a high gloss, the Irish linen or Bengal Home tablecloths washed, starched and returned in pristine condition by the family dhobi. For burra khanas, the plate and china would come out from pantries, the chandeliers or the candelabra would be dusted, the old portraits would receive another coat of varnish, the latticeworked iron door and window grills repainted—even the gravel on the driveway would be shampooed.
The ones who had long since lost their trust funds still kept up appearances: it was considered polite to carefully not notice or comment on the peeling paint on the walls, the widening cracks from roof to floor, the dust on those impractical, beautiful shutters, the dirt darkening the brocade curtains that fell from ceiling, the frayed uniform of Abdul Bearer who was also now khansama and cook and masalchi and mali rolled into one, the diminishing of the silver plate in the grim old mahogany cabinets as creamers and gravy boats and salvers were sold off one by one.
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 23
