We all have such moments when on being prompted we walk back through our past, walking some stretches again and again, and pretending to have forgotten some. The memory lane has many nooks and corners, like a deep labyrinth, some straight, others straighter, or some convoluted and others still more convoluted. Some of these lanes have clear cut bold-lettered words which pull us again and again (like my first trip to Nicco Park and how can I forget the day when I purchased my first video game in Singapore, so distinctly do I remember the nicely combed oiled hair of the seller, his store stuffed with infinite numbers of consoles, even toy trains arranged neatly on the right corner). The others, we just pretend to look to the other side. I replayed some of these episodes while reading the book.
The book opens with a phone call to the nameless protagonist that his sister has died and he has been entrusted with her newly born daughter before she can be put for adoption. He brings her and puts her on the blue bedspread. He then starts to pen down the history of his family, his relationship with his father and sister, the mother is almost absent. He takes us on a ride, a ride so meticulously designed that there are no jerks, no honks, and no long stops or irritating delays. There is a fleeting reference to his sodomy by his father, how his father was drunkard and how he used to beat them. The father seems to be broken and there are signs of eccentricity in his behavior. There are brighter instances also when he bought a pair of pigeons for his daughter when she witnessed the death of a pigeon across the street. The protagonist delves in deeper details when he speaks of his unnatural relationship with his sister, how they held each other tight under the blue bedspread and felt each other. These were perhaps the moments of joy for them, the moments when they could escape their father’s anger and violence. There is a passing reference to his mother, all he remembers is how she used to bathe him on the wash-basin while making gestures to an unknown man standing on the road. All these put in the form of separate stories, along with a number of other narratives which seem to unconnected to the main plot, make up the life of this man. It is finally revealed that the girl is his daughter.
Writing a story like this, full of family eroticism and illicit incestuous blood relationship, can shock the readers at different levels. The stories of sexual abuse of children and irregular companionship between siblings, written in a jigsaw manner, could have scabbed our imaginations. But the author does a fantastic job in narrating these stories, leaving no sharp edges to hurt the readers. The ride has been made so smooth that these stories seem to hit you like gentle breeze and not as a gale. No one else could have written the same book in a simpler language than Raj Kamal Jha, just like no one else could have conjured images of Kolkata tram lines and middle-class family house-holds. Such is the imagination of the author that he does not even miss the slightest details of the different settings, be it the auto ride to the ghat or the fall of the husband from the roof. The non-linear narrative, using the new-born as a peg, to tell his story keeps the readers on the edges, though I must admit I failed to connect a few incidents without turning the pages back and forth. It’s a beautiful collage of multiple colors blotted sporadically, but in totality is nothing less than a master-piece.
