A story amidst an uprising
Muneera Parbeen reads a revealing work of fiction
Jhumpa Lahiri's much awaited new book The Lowland appears to have all the right ingredients for a brilliant masterpiece.
It is a story set around the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, a political chapter of India many in the west will be not familiar with, and thus be intrigued by it. It has a storyline dripping in human tragedy. And the novel is structured in the most precise way that only good writers are able to do.
What then is outcome of this story about two brothers from Kolkata who are bound deeply by a destiny neither of them could have foreseen in their growing up years?
The immigrant experience is always fertile ground for fiction and Lahiri makes no mistake in using her expertise to tell a story set across two continents over several decades and generations.
Shubhash and Udayan Mitra - born just fifteen months apart - are two siblings who appear almost identical but are as distinct as chalk and cheese as they grow up. As children they are as inseparable as only two siblings can be while growing up in 1950s and 1960s Kolkata. They spend their waking hours together --- one taking a slight lead on the other. After high school when they move into different universities, their lives begin to show different colours as the serious Shubhash is lured by his ambitions and the more charismatic Udayan by rising militant politics arising from a discontented society in a newborn country.
Udayan joins the Naxalite movement which Lahiri describes at one point "Udayan had given his life to a movement that had been misguided, that had caused only damage, that had already been dismantled. The only thing he had altered was what their family had been."
Shubhash moves to America, leaving Udayan and his ideals rooted in Naxalite West Bengal. Udayan meets a young woman Gauri - intellectual and totally submissive to Udayan - without the approval of his parents (or hers) before he is caught by the police and shot dead. This tragedy that occurs some 80 pages into the book changes the tone of the story. Udayan leaves Gauri in the early stages of pregnancy. Shubhash does what perhaps a man in his shoes at the time would have thought was the right solution. He offers to marry Gauri and bring her to the US, saving not only her but also her unborn child from a life of probable misery with his parents.
That Gauri and Shubhash's marriage doesn't work out is probably the most predictable part of this story. Gauri looks for solace in her own way, looking for a way out of the prison that has caged her mind, and at one point abandons her already neglected child and disappears from the story line. Shubhash lives with the circumstances, trying to bring up the child who in quick succession also distances herself from him. In the course of half a dozen pages we see Bela, the child, grow from a young girl to a teenager to a woman in her thirties who decides to have a baby of her own, outside wedlock.
The story starts out as if it is building to something grand. But as with human tragedy the story turns with Udayan's death. Somehow the ramifications that the pages are filled with to illustrate how the individual characters cope with life following his death is what falls short of expectations.
One of the central characters is that of Gauri. Lahiri presents her as an intellectual person who loves philosophy and whom a university lecturer marks out to inform her that she belongs in a doctoral class and not in a masters programme. But Gauri finds it hard to cope with her inner conflicts. Shubash's mother early on in the story remarks that she (Gauri) is 'incapable' of bringing up a child. Shubhash himself thinks of Gauri as 'cold-hearted'. But there are mental scars not spoken of clearly until the very end of the story that somehow doesn't do justice to her character. Gauri appears disconcerted, distant, selfish and somewhat elusive of reality. How she spends an entire life like this is a mystery when she simply disappears from the main storyline for over 30 odd years after abandoning her only child. She only returns in the end to revisit her past and make her own amends, but by this time it is hard to empathise with her.
The disappointing character in the story, however, is Shubhash. He is made out to be so damagingly passive, even though in the first part of the book his observations about his new life in the west seem to suggest something else. Shubhash doesn't really have much pressure on him to conform to anything. And yet he just accepts his fate, his circumstances, even his failures and unhappiness. He seems to exist to only serve first Gauri and then Bela. What is evident to the reader is that Udayan's death has affected his life in impossible ways; it has somehow made a claim over his existence. A character from mid eighteenth century Bengali literature is often of the tone in which Lahiri depicts Shubhash.
Because of these two impossibly emotionally evasive, almost dysfunctional, characters, Udayan's daughter Bela whom Shubhash brings up somehow comes out stronger of them all. She is the real tragic one in the story. Born almost unwanted, and into the kind of disturbance that no child should be subjected to, Bela becomes strong, decisive and thoughtful of her own life. She is fully aware of her distance from the conventional and ordinary and eventually strikes a balance on her own. Although the writer dwells very little on the interceding years --- her age jumps from seven to 12 to 17 to 30 and beyond in a matter of half a dozen pages --- it is still Bela that the readers are most likely to be drawn to and able to see through, and understand. She is the only one who makes sense of her existence amidst all these misfortunes.
A tragedy so early on in people's lives can rarely bring about a happy or normal trajectory into the future. The Lowland thus doesn't waver or disappoint. It is really the story of a broken family, a family broken in spirit by one tragedy that stays with it forever, remapping the destiny of all of its normal members into rather abnormal lives.
The story flows swiftly for a while. The writer traces the roots of the Naxalite movement and very fleetingly describes its affliction in society. She never quite gets to the point where one can sense the way the movement inflicts people's lives. But then Lahiri's writing style is all about understatement and her strength is her characters, not incidents. The narration is slow paced, almost halting, as she jumps back and forth between the time-line, telling readers about the past in retrospective glance. It is almost like she is trying to prepare her readers for what had happened by telling them about the present before delving back for finer details of the truth.
It is a clever way of narrating but one that leaves the reader with too much of the burden to put things together.
In the end, the book is not as haunting as it could have been, or should have been. The characters do not stay on in the memory etched as hauntingly sad characters when it is said and told. Somehow, despite the deep-etched tragedy in all their lives, the characters do not leave that impact. The story ends with a slight longing to understand them a little bit more. After 340 pages that is a bit disappointing.
The book is ultimately yet another example of Lahirian writing, but less emotive than her previous works.
The Lowland has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize for 2013.
Muneera Parbeen is a Bangladeshi
journalist based in London.
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