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May 26, 2002
REVIEW: On a sultry day
BRINDA Charry’s debut novel is set in a little town, Thiruninravur, in Tamil Nadu. The protagonist eleven year old, Nithya, from Bangalore is forced to spend six months with her widowed aunt and bachelor uncle. Her parents are away in Kuwait. The days are hot and sultry. The sheer boredom of every day life leads to Nithya befriending the young and pretty Sudha, a 20-year-old maidservant of the Iyengar family. She accompanies her on the various chores, feeding and milking the cow, cooking, cleaning the house and buying vegetable, and slowly learns the rhythm of the servant girl’s life. Sudha is a Brahmin priest’s daughter. Needless to say the setting is completed by the presence of nosy neighbours.
The turning point of the story is when Sudha is found dead, having hanged herself in her room. The entire neighbourhood is abuzz with gossip, and the family must learn to cope with their new isolation in an already desolate town.
The novel is essentially Sudha’s, and Janaki’s (the aunt), story told through the eyes, and words of Nithya. When Sudha hangs herself in her bedroom, because she has been impregnated by the uncle, Sundar, and fails in her attempt to get an abortion, the neighbours gossip and seem fascinated with the family. Nithya now learns more about her uncle and her aunt than she wanted to know.
But she is confronted with a society which does not want to face the reality. The endless speculations that follow, the ‘rumours’ about Nithya’s uncle’s alleged affair with the servant girl and the subtle but steady transformation that occurs in the life of Janaki are all reposited in the innocent Nithya’s heart. She bears the burden of the deep dark secrets of her family and Sudha.
Charry deals sensitively with a young girl’s thoughts in circumstances which given the parameters of the protagonists are not unusual. What else can one expect when one puts a bachelor uncle and a pretty servant girl together in the same house. Her descriptions of life in small town India are crisp and precise. The entire novel radiates a sense of incredible heat and aridity. The novel has a clear story line.
However, there is nothing new in the delineation of the characters or indeed even reflective thought. The end of the novel is predictable. The characters simply go through the motions of living without the reader being given a deeper insight into their mind. This makes the novel easy to read as it keeps going on one plane unlike the work of other English novelists of the subcontinent. This warrants some explanation.
Several artistic movements have challenged the philosophy and practices of modern arts or literature since about the 1960s. In literature this has amounted to a reaction against an ordered view of the world and therefore against fixed ideas about the form and meaning of texts. In its reaction against modernist ideals, postmodern writing and art emphasize devices such as pastiche and parody and the stylized technique of the antinovel and magic realism.
Many English writers of the subcontinent,for example Arundhati Roy whose debut novel was earth shaking to say the least, have very successfully used the postmodern techniques to tell their stories, just as Calvino and Borges have done with such brilliance. These novels are fascinating reads. The narrative technique, or pyrotechnique injects the streams of consciousness into the characters so that they are several beings all at once. The genre of the novel has changed. The modern novel comes with a heavy load of ideas that subsequently splits up into the tale and the thought. The world has moved on.
Charry’s technique is straightforward and flat. There do not exist any levels of consciousness or sub consciousness. Everything is as it appears. The characters do exactly as they are outwardly supposed to be doing. The twists and turns are foregone conclusions. This might appeal to some readers who want a body of writing to narrate to them a simple tale and the end of it they can go to sleep without any lingering introspection.
The redeeming feature in, my opinion, is the aunt Janaki who takes charge of her own life out of the tragedy wrought by her brother on Sudha. Because the tale is told by an eleven year old the author is unable to move beyond what a child would comprehend in for example the illicit relationship between Sudha and Sundar. That Charry has been able to keep it textually within the boundaries of a child’s discourse is perhaps the mainstay of the novel as a body of work.
One has to admit to the fact that reviewing novels is tricky business because the reviewer cannot put away the baggage of the novels read over the years for pleasure and not for critique. The hottest day of the year lacks depth and is too simplistic to appeal to the taste of the reader who has read and has available some of the most fascinating English novels, and antinovels published in the postmodern era, including those written by South Asians. But it could make pleasant, light reading, on a hot sultry afternoon especially when the electricity has been shut off.
Finishing with these words of Milan Kundera seems appropriate, “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as they seem.’ That is the novel’s eternal truth...The novel’s spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel.”
The hottest day of the year
By Brinda Charry
Viking by Penguin Books, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India.
Website: www.penguinbooksindia.com
ISBN 0-670-91236-0
234pp. Indian Rs250
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