Anjum a muslim, has both male and female genitals, but was raised as a boy, she is born as Aftab, the long-awaited son of Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali. . In her adolescence she leaves her family to live as a woman and joins a haveli filled with other intersex and trans people. They are a collective and family and become even more so when Anjum adopts an abandoned child named Zainab. When she takes this three-year old girl in: “Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield.” It’s so beautiful and moving the way this individual whose family feel disgraced by her and who is scorned by the majority of society finds a way to pour her love into caring for someone instead of allowing herself to be crippled by being branded as a hijra outcast. However, we quickly learn that in her later years Anjum leaves her haveli called Khwabgah (the House of Dreams) to live in a graveyard where she gradually establishes a home for herself and eventually forms a community of individuals displaced by social conflict. She has a wonderfully unprejudiced view when taking people in stating: “I don’t care what you are… Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole.”
On her visit to a Gujarati shrine, Anjum gets caught in a massacre of Hindu pilgrims and subsequent government reprisals against Muslims. She is anxious about the future of her own community, especially the new generation. Zainab is brought up at Khwabgah and later goes on to become a fashion designer who marries Saddam.
Roy introduces a dizzying array of people all connected with particular political movements, social clashes or devastating disasters. These centre largely around a location of vast protest called Jantar Mantar. In the centre of this vast amount of voices of dissent, a baby is abandoned and kidnapped. Who this baby is, where she came from, why she was left and what happened to her is gradually explained over a few hundred pages. But built around her story are the tales of people still caught within the repercussions of Partition, national/religious battles and especially the conflicts within Kashmir, the northernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. The novel mostly focuses on a group of people who knew each other in childhood and worked together in a theatrical production in their youth, but have gone on to take different sides in the political struggles.
There is no grudging marriage of art and politics in her work; as John Berger, one of her longtime interlocutors and a formative influence, wrote, “Far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics.” Roy’s work conveys a similar spirit. She is a great admirer of the world. Her strongest writing is always at the margins of the main story—the pleasure of finding “an egg hot from a hen,”. From the fine-grained affection that stirs her imagination springs an ethical imperative—after all, how can one appreciate the world without desiring to defend it? And it must be defended not merely from war or political calamity, but from that natural, more insidious phenomenon: forgetting. This is the literary tradition that Roy belongs to—and that was intimately transmitted to her by Berger and her other great friend, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (she has called him her twin), for whom the great tragedy of humanity wasn’t that we die or suffer or make each other suffer. It was that we forget. And because we are so prone to forgetting—because it is so easy to make us forget—we accept the conditions of our suffering as inevitable and cannot fathom alternatives. (“The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia,” Galeano once said. “It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.”)
Tilottama (With shades of her) is a student at the Architecture School who is estranged from her Syrian Christian mother - Mariyam Ipe.
Tilo becomes friends with three men - Musa Yewsi, Nagaraj Hariharan and Biplab Dasgupta whom she meets while working on sets and lighting design for the play Norman, Is That You? directed by David Quartermaine. Nagaraj Hariharan, Cast as Norman in the play. He later becomes a top-notch journalist who works in Kashmir. Tilo marries Naga as suggested by Musa for strategic reasons and later abandons him. Musa Yeswi (Commander Gulrez) Musa is a reticent Kashmiri man who is classmates with Tilo in Architecture School and her boyfriend. Musa later returns to his homeland to become a militant and fight for Azadi. Musa marries Arifa and fathers Miss Jebeen the First. Biplab Dasgupta - Biplab was to play the role of Garson Hobart in the play Norman, Is That You?. He later works for the Intelligence Bureau as Deputy Station Head for. Biplab secretly loves Tilo and rents her room after she walks out on Naga.
The author weaves together a dazzling narrative nearly as complex as the reality of the fallout of the bloody partition by forcing her characters through themes of Hindu nationalism and Kashmiri separatism and exposing them to atrocities like the 1969 Gujarat riots, the most deadly incident of Hindu-Muslim violence since the 1947 divide, until the 1989 Bhagalpur riots.
It charts their various romances, quests for revenge and how they’re helplessly drawn into conflicts that seem to have no end. The story goes all over the place. There is near-total confusion about point of view.
A poem tucked into the pages of Roy’s novel seems to encapsulate the author's own intentions: “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.” As was true of The God of Small Things, there is more than a touch of fairy tale in the book’s moral simplicity—or clarity, if you’re feeling charitable. Consider the book’s dedication—“To, The Unconsoled.” Note the cover photograph, a grave, and the setting: The story begins and ends in a graveyard. It tours India’s fault lines, as Roy has, from the brutal suppression of tribal populations to the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. Roy has imagined an inverse of the Garden of Eden—a paradise whose defining feature, rather than innocence, is experience and endurance.
No comments:
Post a Comment