Of Escaping/Inventing New Spaces: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 'The Last Gift'

Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian born novelist settled in Britain, has produced several novels, of which Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread Prizes, By The Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the RFI Temoin de Monde Prize and Desertion was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The Last Gift, published in 2011, follows his earlier work on the theme of immigration and the life in the place of his origin, Zanzibar, as well as his present homeland, Britain. It is a story that plays with memory and resistance, which are related to cultural roots. Zanzibar is a distant memory for the protagonist Abbas in the novel, who is sixty-three years old like the writer himself, and he tries his best to hold it to himself through his last days in Norwich, until the moment he realises that he owes his children at least a clue to their ancestry. The novel deals with the life of the family that consists of Abbas, his wife Maryam and their children Hanna/Anna and Jamal.

     The Last Gift evolves through third person and first person narratives, giving almost equal importance to the lives of all the four characters. However, the psychological tension among the characters and their approach to their immigrant status in Britain provide space for analyses of the clash between first and second generation expatriate responses to life situations in Britain. There could be a clear demarcation between the way the parents, Abbas and Maryam, live and reflect upon their lives and what their children, Hanna and Jamal, make of their unique, bewildering and sometimes opportune life experiences. It is clear from the beginning that their race and skin colour demarcate them all through the changing times and cultural shifts in Britain. And all of them learn to cope with it, even as they falter at times. Alev Adil, in a review of the novel, observes:

Gurnah is the master of the particularity of displacement: 

how, despite the fact that this is an increasingly common 

state, migration is always an individual experience. His novels show how memory evades history. Gurnah is engaged by the guilt of departure more than he is by the difficulty of belonging. His heroes are story-tellers, rewriting history, telling tall tales in order to remake and escape themselves. Their stories of flight map routes between loss and freedom, old betrayals and new loyalties.

(Adil)

This is an attempt to sketch the significance of immigration and race in the novel, with special reference to the gap in psychological responses between the first and second generation expatriates, signified in the novel as the parents and the children respectively.

     The novel opens with the description of the sudden illness of Abbas – the result of neglected diabetes. He has a fall, and then a few strokes follow it. While he is bedridden and is found unable to speak, something starts to trouble him. Even though he had been an affectionate father who blessed his children with several vivid storytelling sessions, he had evaded the most significant story – the one that involved him. He kept on dissuading his family members in his own ways, whenever they showed some interest in his past. He never even told them about the place where he came from – Zanzibar. They knew of him as a sailor who landed up in Britian, found Maryam in a Boots shop in Exeter, fell in love with her at first sight and said, “Yallah, let us get out of here” (Gurnah 16) before whisking her away to Birmigham and then to Norwich where they settled down. Maryam was an abandoned child, found outside the casualty doors at Exeter Hospital. She had been with several foster parents before she was finally taken by Ferooz, from Mauritius, and her husband Vijay, from India, when she was nine years old. They were kind to her in the beginning, but slowly she was reduced to the role of a skivvy, and more troubles followed when Dinesh, Vijay’s nephew, came to stay with them and started harassing her sexually. Dinesh turned Ferooz and Vijay against her and it was in fact an escape from all this when she decided to elope with Abbas.

     Hanna, their first child, likes to call herself Anna, and is always on the look out to find a place for herself in the world of opportunities that Britain provides. She has good university education and becomes a teacher. She has an affair with Nick, whose family turns out to be white upper middle class racists. He is some sort of a megalomaniac indulging in the academic work which he takes as an excuse to have a double life. He is indignant even when his extramarital affair is found out, and tries to boss Anna further. She gets out of the relationship when she is twenty eight years old, and decides to face the world on her own. Her liberation from Nick coincides with the death of Abbas, out of a stroke.

     Jamal, the younger child, does his PhD related to immigration issues. He dangles between his intellectual preoccupations and religious identity. He attends religious meetings, but is at a loss when it comes to the traditions and prayers. He resents the fact that Abbas never cared for them to have a religious or ethnic identity, but is more open to the final storytelling of his Ba and Ma than the seemingly disturbed Hanna/Anna. Though shy by nature, he finds his love in Lena/Magdalena, of Italian descent, in the apartment that he shares with his fellow students. He is able to connect better with Ma after the death of Ba, because she happens to work in a Refugee Centre and his research relates to immigrant issues.  

     Abbas, in his final days, yearns to speak out what he held within so far, but words don’t come easily to save him. As he improves with the constant care that Maryam bestows upon him, he starts speaking slowly. One day he makes her listen to what he wanted all of them to know ultimately. He describes his years of hardship in Mfenesini, where he went to school amidst the protest from his father with whom he had to lead a life of parsimony. His elder brother Kassim dares to take Abbas to the school against the will of their father, the stingy and parochial Othman. Kassim gets beaten up badly, but he persists on Abbas getting an education. Their sister Fawzia is married to a relatively rich family in the town, and when Abbas passes his school examinations at sixteen, she takes him away to the town and makes him stay with her relatives so that he could have his college education. He stays in a small storeroom with a slit on the wall for a window. He has the view of the sea from there and he focuses relentlessly on his studies. It is from here that he starts to peep on a young girl on the terrace of the adjacent building. She happens to be the foster daughter of a rich merchant. When he is caught staring at her with her knowledge, the aunt of the girl makes a fuss about her honour and gets in touch with Fawzia. They hurriedly arrange a marriage between Abbas and the girl, Sharifa. Abbas likes the life of rich food and habits in her house in the beginning, but slowly, he starts to feel that he is not being respected there. The two sons of the merchant are rich themselves, owning businesses and cars, and are notorious womanisers. They start bullying him, poking fun at his inexperience and innocence. When Sharifa gets pregnant, he has the strange doubt that he was trapped into the marriage and that she was already pregnant by someone else before the marriage was arranged. He slides away without a word from the life in Zanzibar when Sharifa is six months pregnant. He becomes a sailor and never comes back to Zanzibar. The news shocks Maryam, and then the kids. They couldn’t digest the fact that he was a bigamist.

     After the death of Abbas, Maryam gets more active in the Refugee Centre and invites her children for a play that she acts in. Later, the children accompany her, as willing decoys, to the place where Ferooz and Vijay stayed. It is their first meeting after Maryam had left them with Abbas. She had been trying to connect with them many times, with no success. The meeting goes well, though what Maryam needed – more information regarding her origins – turn out to be bare and almost useless. She could just conclude that perhaps her mother was Polish and her father a ‘darkie’. She concludes further that she is not Jewish by any chance, because her name could then have been Miriyam, instead of the Arab Muslim name Maryam.

     Gurnah lets the novel shape up through understatements regarding the place that the characters inhabit – Abbas says just ‘Boots’ (Gurnah 16) to refer to the place where he met Maryam first in Exeter. The places where the story takes place – Exeter, Norwich and Chichester (where Nick’s parents reside) are not described vividly. They are taken for granted, as places that are filled with people from various origins. Abbas and family inhabit their places as if they belong to them. What comes as a surprise, and of more significance, are the places Abbas and Maryam had come from, or even could have inhabited if they were not destined to be in Britain. Maryam grows up in Exeter only because she was found there and all her foster parents were from that area. She is left with no choice, until she meets Abbas. However, Abbas had seen many places, in his life as a sailor, and it was his own decision to desert his birth place and to never go back there. The younger generation, since they were born and brought up in Britain, don’t think beyond the places that they inhabit. Jamal is concerned about immigrant experiences from an academic perspective. But for Hanna/Anna, the fact that she is an immigrant turns out to be a burden. After listening to the story of Ba about his bigamy and the confession of Ma regarding Dinesh’s attempt to rape her, she is described as pouring out her frustrated thoughts:

‘I can’t bear this,’ she said angrily. ‘I can’t bear this shitty, vile immigrant tragedies of yours. I can’t bear the tyranny of your ugly lives. I’ve had enough, I’m leaving.’

‘Shut up, Hanna,’ Jamal said. ‘Let Ma speak.’

‘My name is Anna, you moron,’ Anna said, but she did not leave.

(Gurnah 194)

Anna also has an unpleasant conversation with Nick’s uncle Digby, a priest, who tries to patronise her for not being rooted to her culture and history. During a dinner with Nick’s family, he asks her where her father was from, and she just says that he is from East Africa. Uncle Digby proceeds to observe that Anna’s looks reveal that her father could be from the coast. He asks her where on the coast was her father from:

     She noticed that the tempo and the drift of the conversation was making everyone smile, anticipating a little biographical sketch of distant but not unfamiliar origins. ‘I don’t know,’ Anna said.

     After a puzzled silence, Uncle Digby said, ‘You don’t know where your father comes from! Well, I find this hard to believe.’

     ‘I don’t know,’ Anna repeated, unable to think of anything else to say.

     ‘I am shocked. Do you mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to know? It makes me sad to hear you speak with such little interest about your home, Anna,’ Uncle Digby said, his eyes lowered and his mouth turned down wretchedly.

     ‘I am British,’ Anna said, and heard the strain in her own voice as she spoke.

(Gurnah 117)

But this reluctance to enhance her origins seems to have come from the fact that their parents never brought them up in confirmation to any particular ethnicity. When Anna was in school, some of the Muslim parents had a campaign to exclude their children from the Christian practices there. Abbas joined with them, though he did not adhere to the religious fanaticism of most of those campaigners. This resulted in Anna and Jamal growing up with no religion:

It was her father who was the Muslim, although there was nothing Muslim about what he did or the way they lived. Sometimes he told them what it meant to be a Muslim, the Pillars of Islam, as he called them, praying, fasting, giving alms, going on the pilgrimage to Mecca, although he never did any of those things himself. He told them the story of Muhammad, and the Muslim conquests of most of the unknown world, from China to the gates of Vienna, and of its scholarship and learning. The stories were like great adventures, that was how he told them, tales of when men were giants and it was still possible to stumble on a treasure chest of emeralds and diamonds when searching for firewood in the forest. What their mother Maryam knew about religion was what she had picked up along the way, and it was the lightest of burdens.

(Gurnah 113-14)

Anna tries to adapt herself to the British society as much as she could, despite the fact people like the ones in Nick’s family see her as different from them. Though they try to hide it, they are curious about the ethnic origins and immigrant status of Anna. She couldn’t help but being blunt and at times rude, because she never had a real knowledge about her true origins, as long as Abbas kept them in the dark about his life prior to his meeting with Maryam. Anna grows up in England and doesn’t go to a church once, till her visit to a church with Nick’s family. But she also grows up with Abbas and Maryam and never gets to know much about her own religion:

If their Dad was a proper Muslim, he would have committed a great sin by keeping them in ignorance about their religion, instead of which he kept them in ignorance about everything, or tried to anyway. There was so much more he should have told them, a great deal more about a great many things.

(Gurnah 114)

Jamal is not as much disturbed about his immigrant status, perhaps because he engages with the issue academically as well. This perhaps gives him the required distance to it in order to approach it in a less sensitive manner. Anna had been very close to her Ba until she started her university education, while Jamal was not so expressive and affectionate from a young age. No matter how different Anna and Jamal happen to be, they have to deal with the same kind of issues related to their race and immigrant status.

     Jamal turns out to be a lot more concerned about Harun Sharif, a black man who is constantly disturbed by the white children of the neighbourhood. Once Lena and Jamal find Harun falling down on the way and they help him out. Later they visit him in his house which was next door to them. Jamal could see a lot of Ba in Harun. Jamal asks him about the youngsters who trouble him by rattling his gate all the time and shouting abuse at him, and Harun’s response makes him think about his Ba, and he was genuinely concerned about the harm the children could do to Harun:

     ‘... They are probably more frightened about what they are doing than I am. I have seen enough in my life not to be frightened by children shouting abuse.’

     Jamal could imagine his Ba saying the same thing. Me, I’m not afraid of these children. I’m more afraid of the police. But Jamal had no faith in children and did not think they could be disarmed by being ignored. They were as evil as everyone else. Just think for a moment of the tortures child soldiers were committing in African wars.

(Gurnah 211)

Anna, on the other hand, when faced with similar situations, is repulsed. She narrates an incident to Nick about spotting two female asylum seekers standing helplessly in the train station, and she does not extend any help to them:

     ‘... I saw these two women in Liverpool Street, a mother and a daughter, I think. They were so hopelessly fat, and so much at a loss, so confused in that huge station. It was depressing to see them. Black women. They spoke to each other in a language I did not understand, and were looking around in a terrified way. I don’t think they could read English.”

     ‘Then?’ Nick asked when she said no more for a while.

     ‘Then nothing. I went to catch my train,’ she said. ‘Asylum seekers, I suppose. May be I should have offered to help, but the sight of them depressed me. They were so helpless and so ugly. Is it really so bad where they come from?’

     ‘Probably,’ he said quietly.

     She smiled. ‘You sound like my saintly brother.’

(Gurnah 201-2)

Anna’s life and attitudes change when her relationship with Nick breaks, and he pours out a tirade of abuse against her and her family. In an argument after it was found out that he was having an extramarital relationship, he tries to cover up his infirmity by abusing Anna. He says that he feels sorry for “people like you” (Gurnah 235), and when Anna insists on an explanation of what he meant by that because she thinks that he meant something about race, he bursts out:

‘I mean I feel sorry for people like you because you don’t know how to look after yourselves. Your father was a whingeing tyrant, bullying everyone with one misery or another, in the grip of a psychic crisis, so it seemed. But he only had diabetes, a thoroughly treatable disease, that’s all. Your mother was an abandoned baby and doesn’t know she is. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to find out that kind of information. Why couldn’t she just pay an agency to check it out for her? Or why couldn’t you, or your brother, do it for her? She, and all of you, would have known within days. But no, it had to be another festering drama. And then it turns out that your father is an absconder and a bigamist but he couldn’t just talk about this, the whole crowd of you in the grip of a hopeless melodrama, acting like immigrants.’

     Anna was almost drawn into offering a defence but she managed to suppress her words. She had thought all this herself. What he added to what she had thought herself about her family was scorn. It jolted her the way he said that word, immigrants, exactly as she would have said it, with the same degree of disdain.

 (Gurnah 235)

According to Zenga Longmore , “[T]here are minutely observed descriptions of the English attitude towards immigrants which, although caustic at times, reveal the warmth of the author’s heart” (Longmore). Giles Foden observes that “the book is in no way reducible to one or other position; indeed, it makes a virtue of its provisonality” (Foden). The generation of Anna and Jamal learn it better to claim a homeland where they are destined to struggle for an existence. For Abbas and Maryam, England is a place of final destination.  They are concerned about the challenges their children face in life, but are also content with the fact that they are much better off when compared to their own struggle for existence in the initial days.

     It seems apt in this context to reflect on what Bill Ashcroft observes in his lecture titled “Home and Horizon” on how the concept of ‘home’ is taken beyond the boundaries, the horizon, by the diaspora writers:

When will the traveller reach home? When will the exile reach the Promised Land? Unanswerable questions that reach into the heart of our sense of self, because the self must, above all, be located. But like that sense of self, ‘home’ brings with it the inescapable tyranny of limits, of borders. Whether home is a place, a location, a feeling, a tradition, an ethnicity, it carries with it the sometimes imperceptible, but ever present reality of boundaries ... it is into the horizon beyond the boundaries of home that the diasporic writer takes us. 

(Ashcroft)

Gurnah’s novel takes us beyond the horizons of lived experiences. It makes us worried about the existence of young and old people in a world charged with invented categories. In some cases, one’s racial identity turns out to be advantageous while in some others it brings in possibilities of endless conflict. Gurnah reflects a lot on how the new generation of 'immigrants' have to 'learn to live with it'. That makes us wonder whether there could be a phase where it should not be the highest priority presenting a combat zone, so that one could focus on other things that matter more in life.The best a novel like The Last Gift does may be to disturb us a bit, and force us to look for an easy or tough way out.

Bibliography

Adil, Alev. “The Last Gift, By Abdulrazak Gurnah”, The Independent, 27 May 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-   entertainment/books/reviews/the-last-gift-by-abdulrazak-gurnah-2289421.html.

Ashcroft, Bill. “Home and Horizon” International Conference of the Association for the Study of Australasia in India(ASAA), Mar Ivanios College, Trivandrum, July 9, 2004.

Foden, Giles. “The Last Gift, By Abdulrazak Gurnah – Review”, The Guardian, 21 May 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/22/last-gift-abdulrazak-gurnah-review.

Gurnah, Abdulrazak. The Last Gift. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Longmore, Zenga. “The Last Gift, By Abdulrazak Gurnah: Review”, The Telegraph, 19 May 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8498339/The-Last-Gift-by-Abdulrazak-Gurnah-  review.html.

Ernest Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants'

Ernest Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is perhaps best known for its unique narrative structure. The scant descriptions are in third person and throw light only on details regarding the place and setting where a small, deceptively simple incident takes place. The entire theme of the story is unraveled through the passionate dialogues between “the American” and “the girl”. However, these dialogues are a bit demanding since they could make sense only if the readers put together the bits and pieces that refer to something about which the girl is apprehensive and her partner is clandestinely forcing her to undergo. Hemingway does not use the crucial word in any part of the story, but the context, dialogues, and the behavior of the two main characters would make it clear that they are planning to travel by train to Madrid to abort their child.

     The most intriguing aspect of the story is its terse narrative structure that leads readers slowly to the core of the issue dealt with. The third person narrative serves the functional purpose of describing the mise en scene and filling in the unavoidable details of action. Each word has its weight and significance in the story for the same reason. Moreover, the story makes use of symbolic representations through every image that appears in it. The protagonists have a few drinks in the train station in the Ebro River valley of Spain and speak about the hills in the background, the drinks, their shared life, the abortion and their future. The varying viewpoints of the man and woman regarding the abortion are cleverly revealed through their conversation and action.

 

     Hemingway presents a fragment from the life of the protagonists, but this throws light on the effects of time and space on the quality of their life. They are presumably the representatives of the ‘roaring twenties’, who led a hedonistic life after the First World War. The crumbling social values and family structure have led to a freewheeling life where men and women lived for the moment, and tried to get rid of commitments and responsibilities. The tension felt through the curt dialogue shows how the attitudes to such a life differ drastically between the man and the girl. The man is obviously distracted by the prospect of getting rid of their child because he is forcing the girl to do it. He forcefully brings the subject during the conversation and says, “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy”.  He neglects the attempt by the girl to bring to his notice that the hills in the background look like white elephants. He says that he can’t think about the imagery then because “you know how I get when I worry”.  

     The dialogue structure is powerful in depicting the power relation between the couple as well. It is made clear from the beginning that the man is the decision maker, and the girl is relevant to him only to the extent of providing him pleasure through companionship. When she looks at the hills and says “they look like white elephants”, he dismisses the thought by saying “I’ve never seen one”. They even get into an argument at this point when she says “No, you wouldn’t have”.  He claims that “[J]ust because you wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything”. This could be linked to the different levels at which they perceive the issue of a baby growing in her womb. The figure of an elephant could also suggest the image of a pregnant woman’s swollen abdomen and breast. The man fails to experience the significance of the very physical presence and essence of having a child, as much as the girl does. Even though they could be leading a hedonistic life on mutual consent, the element of doubt at the moment of a major decision like this reveals the girl’s longing for permanence and stability in life. If she decides to discard the child, it could only mean that she does not care for herself anymore. 

     The lifestyle of the couple is hinted at only through passing references to trying out everything that could lead to pleasure, including drinks, and ‘absinthe’, which is an aphrodisiac. But the girl’s disappointment is evident when she says that everything ends up “tasting like liquorice”. Such brief references are a powerful means in the structural pattern of the story to reveal one by one the differing outlooks to life that the man and the girl have. The symbolic references to the train track that cuts through differing landscapes and the bead curtain that separates the place where the couple sits and the interior of the bar adds to the conflicts and collisions in their relationship. It is also evident from the topics they choose to talk about that they inhabit entirely different worlds. The girl focuses on the landscape and perhaps avoids eye contact with the American, who is fully preoccupied with the task of persuading her to agree for an abortion and to make it feel normal. 

   Hemingway leaves the story open ended, allowing the readers to fill in the gaps with their subjective viewpoints. The authorial voice is very strong indeed, but it does not impose a specific ideology through interpretations. He just describes the scene and presents the story through the dialogue between the protagonists.    

Negotiating Cultural Collisions: 'Squatter' by Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry is a Parsi writer who has written extensively about India and the Parsi community in almost all his literary works. He is the author of Tales From Firozsha Baag, a collection of short stories, and three novels – Such A Long Journey, A Fine Balance and Family Matters. Apart from A Fine Balance (in which Mistry deals with Indian characters from all walks of life), all his works have Parsis as main characters. The way in which the Parsis lead their life in India and abroad takes precedence over the pan-Indian experience that many contemporary Indian writers aim to depict. In Tales From Firozsha Baag, a metafictional reference to the role of creativity in relation to the Parsi existence in India is used in order to make clear the author’s views on the process of writing about an ethnic minority in combat zones. Firozsha Baag, the modest Parsi apartment building in Mumbai, maintains its central position in the narrative since all the stories are in some way or the other connected to it.

‘Squatter’ is a story from the collection that deals with cultural collisions in a humorous way. Its scatological references are intricately related to the plight of a Parsi immigrant in Canada, for whom the frequent necessity to invent imaginary homelands becomes a ‘pain in the posterior’. It is an immensely engaging story in which issues related to immigration are presented in a very humorous but matter-of-fact manner.

The narrator is Nariman Hansotia, who engages the kids of Firozsha Baag with his interesting stories. His story uses the oral narrative pattern that has been adopted by writers like Salman Rushdie – both as an Indian storytelling device and also as a postmodernist narrative technique. Hansotia’s narrative starts with the story of the valorous Savushka who has an amazing talent as a cricket player and as a hunter, but he fails to succeed in either field as he does not dedicate his life to a single cause.

The storytelling then shifts to the experiences of Sarosh, who migrates to Canada because of the open hostility towards Parsis by fundamentalist outfits in the post-independence India. Like any other Parsi from India, the necessity for Sarosh to construct a homeland for himself amidst transnational spaces makes him go through immigration hardships with dignity.

However, there is something unique about Sarosh’s predicament. Before migrating to Canada, he declared that he would come back to India if he failed to become a true Canadian in every way within ten years’ time. The one thing that makes him feel that he is not yet an authentic Canadian is that he fails to use the water closet. He can empty his bowel only in the squatting position. In a sarcastic tone, the narrator elaborates on how Sarosh develops some sort of a neurosis.

In his own apartment Sarosh squatted barefoot. Elsewhere, if he had to go
with his shoes on, he would carefully cover the seat with toilet paper before
climbing up […] And if the one outside could receive the fetor of Sarosh’s
business wafting through the door, poor unhappy Sarosh too could detect
something malodorous in the air: the presence of xenophobia and hostility.

In his desperate attempt to fulfill his own criteria, Sarosh spends more and more time in the toilet trying to master the Western way of emptying one’s bowels:

Each morning he seated himself to push and grunt, grunt and push,
squirming and writhing unavailingly on the white plastic oval. Exhausted,
he then hopped up, expert at balancing now, and completed the movement
quite effortlessly.

As the ten year deadline comes close, he even approaches the Immigrant Aid Society, but none of their outrageous suggestions or so-called technological devices like ‘Crappus Non Interruptus or CNI’ can help him. In the meantime, he is fired by his Boss for keeping irregular hours at the office, thanks to his frequent visits to the toilet. Sarosh decides to go back to India.

Finally, once he is on his flight to India, he manages to perform in the toilet the Western way, as the plane takes off. But he still chooses to return to India. He is presented, in the end, as a person disillusioned by all his endeavours to negotiate cultural collisions in life. Just like a Shakesperian tragic hero, this protagonist of Mistry’s tragicomedy says:

Tell them that the world can be a bewildering place, and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious traps…I pray you in your stories, when you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, not set down aught in malice; tell them that in Toronto once there lived a Parsi boy as best as he could. Set you down this; and say, besides, that for some it was good and for some it was bad, but for me life in the land of milk and honey was just a pain in the posterior.

Apart from being among the Indian diaspora writers, Mistry is a representative of the Parsi diaspora too. While the cultural conflicts in Canada and other non-Indian locales brings him back to the imaginary homeland of India, the way in which the Parsis confront other sorts of cultural conflicts in India has to direct him to the fastidious preservation of the Zoroastrian faith.

For most diasporic communities, the urge to go back to their homeland is what makes their life worth living. But quite paradoxically, the original homeland of the Parsis is lost forever. For the Parsis, returning to Iran is an improbability, since their religion has not survived the Muslim attacks there, and it has become an Islam dominated area where there is little scope for building up a home of their dreams. Unlike the Jews, who always nourish the dream of homecoming, the Parsis are destined to create their own homelands. It is a strange but comprehensible fact that Parsis look at India as their homeland. It was the place that gave them refuge in their aimless exodus. The plight of Sarosh in ‘Squatter’ becomes all the more significant in this context, because he comes back to India, which is home for him more as a cultural construct than an ethnic, geographical reality.

---

* The Parsis are the people who followed the Zoroastrian faith in Iran and were forced into exile by the Islamic conquest of Iran. This makes them a diaspora in India itself. They are the successors of the minority of Zoroastrians who rebelled against the Arabs – refusing to be adapted to their religion and customs – following repeated attacks on the Persian Empire between 638A.D. and 641 A.D. *

First published in 

Thresholds: Home of the international short story forum, 

Chichester University, October 8th  2012.

The Greatest Show on Earth: Jaipur Literature Festival 2012

With 136 literary events spread across five venues in five days and more than 100,000 visitors in attendance, this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival was once again what Newsweek editor Tina Brown once aptly called ‘the greatest literary show on earth’.  At its humble start in 2006, the festival’s directors, popular Indian writer Namita Gokhale and India’s favourite Scot William Dalrymple, could never have imagined it would evolve into such a successful event in such a short space of time.  In 2007, Sir Salman Rushdie was among the festival’s more famous international guests who helped draw interest from the wider literary world.  This year he once more brought worldwide attention to Jaipur when he was denied a chance to return to India and speak at the three sessions where he had been scheduled to appear.  Even a video link with Rushdie had to be cancelled after protests were reignited over the blasphemy charges against his book The Satanic Verses. Ironically enough, this led to numerous discussions about freedom of speech, and several writers read excerpts from Rushdie’s novel to express their solidarity.

Controversies apart, the 2012 festival had many attractions for regular book lovers too, including talks on long and short fiction, performances of folk art forms, music, poetry readings, and discussions of non-fiction in both English and Indian languages. With multiple events on offer at any one time, I found it almost impossible to decide which to attend, but fought the temptation to run from one venue to another before each session had finished. (The festival website features videos of most of the sessions, and I am still catching up with the ones I missed).

There were, though, many, many writers I just knew I couldn’t miss out on seeing: Ben Okri, Tom Stoppard, James Shapiro, Michael Ondaatje, Ranjit Hoskote, Ilija Trojanow, Kunal Basu, Mohammed Hanif, Richard Dawkins, K. Satchidanandan, Tim Butcher, Philip Gourevitch, Steven Pinker, Shashi Tharoor – the list could go on and on. I wanted to see them all and attend as many of the discussions as I possibly could. But that takes stamina. Midway through the first morning, the friends I was with announced they were taking a break, claiming that eight continuous hours of listening to writers talk would give them a headache. I, however, never missed a morning session, even when I had to queue for over an hour to secure a seat in the sixteenth row to see Oprah Winfrey. Many others were turned away, though, and for a while we feared the session might be gate-crashed by the throngs of disappointed fans. All this for a session that was just like any other Oprah Winfrey show, but the crowds and commotion were all part of the spirit!
                         

A few of the programme’s events included discussions on short stories, though as is frequently the case, these were overshadowed by the attention given to novels. In one of these, David Davidar, the famous Indian publisher, spoke about the difficulties of getting a collection of stories published, especially for new writers, though he suggested that linked stories might have better luck. Kunal Basu, author of the collection The Japanese Wife, said he didn’t see any reason why it should be so hard to publish short stories in India. Short stories in regional languages, after all, get a lot of attention here. He said that it had not in fact been all that difficult to get his collection published, but that it had happened after he was already established as a novelist. The title story of his book has even been made into an award winning movie by Aparna Sen, starring Rahul Bose (who stars in the movie version of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as well). Other sessions also dealt with translations of short stories from Indian languages to English, and a number of stories were read in their entirety to an appreciative audience. That should give a strong cue to both the festival organizers and Indian publishers.
 
The highlight of the festival was the DSC South Asia Literary Prize. The winner was announced following memorable readings by the authors and translators of the shortlisted novels. Shehan Karunatilaka, a Singapore-based Sri Lankan writer, bagged the $50,000 prize for his ambitious novel Chinaman, which had already won the Gratiaen Prize in Sri Lanka. One of the judges, Dr. Fakrul Alam of Dhaka University, praised the novel for its understated yet innovative narrative style which he said was in the tradition of works such as Tristram Shandy. Although Karunatilaka’s novel revolves around cricket, it cleverly takes a peek at present day Sri Lankan society, and Dr. Alam said the judges had found in it an entirely new voice, one that was contemporary and engaging.

The Jaipur Literature Festival can rightly claim to be the biggest literary event on earth, not only because of its size but also in terms of the quality of writing it presents. Everything is very well planned – something which is quite difficult in a time and place where the unthinkable can happen at any moment. The list of authors coming to the 2013 Festival was already provided in this year’s catalogue, and there are names to satisfy every literary taste.  Be warned, however. Once you’ve been to the Jaipur Festival, I can guarantee you’ll want to come back – to renew the friendships you’ve made, to interact with your favourite authors and buy the latest books, to collect autographs, and, if you’re a writer, to look for publishers for your own work.  Most of all, though, you’ll want to return because it’s the perfect place to reflect on what really matters in the literary world.

First published in 

Thresholds: Home of the international short story forum, 

Chichester University, March 7,  2012.

Of Free Will, And Not Killing: ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ By George Saunders

The stories of George Saunders never fail to create unique characters and life situations. But they can have devastating effects on readers on many occasions. I have come across quite a few such readers who react vehemently to the Saunders worldview. Why does he bend the moral situation too far that it almost breaks? But some, like me, may beg to differ. We think the very act of constant counter-cultural philosophizing is what makes his stories pertinent, and capable of disturbing the safe, established views.

     ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ is a story which fights for a space between ‘Science’ and ‘Speculative’ Fiction. While science and dubious experiments are at the centre of the story, what really bothers us here is how human beings, even when they are reduced to lab rats, are capable of retaining free will. One may be reminded of all the previous works of literature and art that run on similar lines – ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Anthony Burgess), ‘The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner’ (Alan Sillitoe), ‘Solaris’ (the Tarkovsky movie), ‘Oryx and Crake’ (Margaret Atwood)  and so on. However, the story by Saunders doesn’t sound like a copy of any of them at any point, despite the fact that the moral dilemma presented in it is a shared feature in all of them, in various doses.

     Jeff is the central character in the story. He is revealed to be a wasted entity, the remnant of a young murderer after so many punishments, corrective measures and mind-altering experimentations. He is presented in the beginning as one among a bunch of similar people who are used for pharmaceutical tests. A set of drug-names that can be understood from the contexts are presented all through the pages –  Verbulace^TM, Veritalk^TM, ChatEase^TM, TemperBerst, InstaRaje, LifeRooner, Bliss Tyme^TM, SpeedErUp^TM  Darkenfloxx^TM  and so on. They make Jeff and the other experimental scapegoats go through experiences that are monitored by someone named Abnesti. Verlaine is the one who administers the drugs.

     The first part shows how the drugs transform the perceptions of Jeff and others. They could see more than the ordinary in a garden or someone from the opposite sex under the influence of the drugs. Jeff has sex with two women, Heather and Rachel, three times each, in a ritualistic manner. He is even able to feel love in all the acts. But the catch is that when he is under another drug, everything returns to normal and the objects and human beings don’t excite him beyond a point. Even the feeling of love is erased, though the memory of love remains in his mind.

     Later on Jeff realizes that there had been a complex web of human interactions in a single day, involving him, the two women, and two other men, Rogan and Keith. They have all had the similar experiences among them and are then called to the task of choosing one of their sex partners who would then be administered Darkenfloxx^TM. Jeff doesn’t want anyone to go through the emotionally damaging experience under Darkenfloxx^TM. Given the choice, he says he would like them to choose someone at random, between Heather and Rachel. Abnesti is elated to know that all the participants react the same way, proving his hypothesis that love can be initiated and then erased fully, with no residual feelings, from human mind through the drugs. No one gets Darkenfloxxed.

     In the final part, Jeff is called once again for further confirmation of the findings. He is now forced to witness one among his partners, Heather, being administered Darkenfloxx^TM. He has no choice but to watch her go through immense emotional turmoil immediately after the drug is administered. In a self-destructive despair she disassembles the impossible-to-disassemble chair in her room and using one of its legs she keeps harming, and eventually kills, herself. Jeff is administered drugs that stimulate his ‘language centers’ and is forced to describe what he sees: “I used my words. I spoke volumes, was precise.” Though Heather’s death upsets Abnesti, he is glad about the drug-induced Jeff’s reactions. 

Jeff is called once again to witness Rachel being administered Darkenfloxx^TM. He refuses to undergo the experience once again, and Abnesti and Verlaine get busy with some red-tape regarding a waiver to administer a drug on Jeff without his consent. The quick self-reflecting time Jeff is granted reveals that he and all the fellow inmates are criminals who had gone through so many corrective measures and finally used for the pharmaceutical experimentations. Jeff grabs an opportunity to escape from all this manipulation. He decides that he cannot allow another human being to be killed, for whatever lofty concepts. He self-administers Darkenfloxx^TM using the remote that Abnesti left near him in a hurry. His death is described in a chilling manner.

Then came the horror: worse than I’d ever imagined. Soon my arm was about a mile down the heat vent. Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here’s how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk.

His death liberates him from the thought processes and linguistic restrictions inflicted upon him by other forces. He thinks deep on how much the so-called criminals like him were in control over their real lives, since they were born.

At birth, they’d been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuck-ups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life-enders?

Here, a striking parallel is drawn between the way the minds of the criminals are manipulated by the scientists and how the real mind of them prior to this, from the moment they were born, were manipulated by unseen forces – be it what they call God, life circumstances, or simply the way their mind is formed.

     Jeff doesn’t want to come back to life, at any cost. He just regrets the fact he was never able to explain anything to his mother. He chooses to join a group of birds and fly upwards – an image of a death and what could happen afterwards that may please a lot of readers and disappoint some others.

     Why does Saunders do this? Why does he have to disturb us so much? And why do some of us feel good after allowing ourselves to be so disturbed? His characters are allowed the freedom to escape from the traps that many of us, including Saunders, are not allowed to escape. Jeff says in the end, “…for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.” 
     It’s not all about killing. It’s about not doing what we wouldn’t, if we were fully ourselves, at any time.