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August 8, 2004
REVIEWS: Cart full of injustices
Uma Ranganathan is Bombay’s (Mumbai) child, a city child and a restless one. The only daughter of well to do, liberal, parents, she travels freely and frequently between her homeland and the West, and is equally at home among people of other nationalities and her own compatriots. She is on good terms with her parents and lives with them when at home. Their maid, Sarla, is a close friend and apart from the many references to her, a whole chapter in the book is named after her.
Uma began her working life as a copywriter in an ad agency. With extensive travelling as her hobby, she wrote travel pieces for magazines. Next she did a stint teaching deaf children, mainly to kill boredom while in Bombay, but became interested enough to continue teaching for a few years. The glimpses Uma provides into the world of the deaf are full of humour, empathy, and insight. Talking of insight, there is one particular (very short) sketch of a benevolent trustee — a familiar character in South Asia where in general they don’t take the handicapped condition really to heart unless they are ostentatiously and piously moved by it — which I found quite enchanting.
One feels she could have just stopped in the world of the deaf and written a book about it, instead of making it only one port of call among others. However, her interest in the deaf and the zone of abused, frightened children, is eclipsed by, or perhaps becomes one of the paths that end in, her fascination for the workings of the mind, and finally, her own mind.
Psychoanalysis follows, and delving into the past. What went wrong? Who was responsible? What kind of injustices made me what I am? Sometimes it seems that each of us has a ‘cart’— the kind that is offered by e-bookshops for the customer to drop the books in that he wants to buy. When we probe into the past we keep dropping all those injustices and unhappiness into our cart, which to be fair to nature, has to be equally full for everybody, whether it is with stuff like a smashed skull, courtesy an abusive father, or the scorn of a class teacher, or a polio dominated childhood like Uma’s.
The mind. It’s a wonder that more people are not obsessed by their minds. In the small space of the brain there is this mysterious, invisible, giant flower, growing like a parasite from the tiny, busy, blood vessels of the brain, a worthy competitor of the gigantic world outside the individual, all of which it can absorb, and making lightning connections, create more in the twinkling of an eye. Well Uma, is understandably taken by the workings of her mind, and she wants to demystify it. So she does what many people may sometimes want to do, but secretly, because it is illegal, and capable of having one hurled outside the charmed circle of social acceptance. Uma experiments with consciousness-expanding drugs. She finds peace, enlightenment and liberation. She likes it so well that the Afterword is like a recommendation for using LSD, Mescaline, and MDMA or Ecstasy.
Well that might be one route to peace, but it traverses dangerous rapids and has no protective rails on its sides. With drug addiction as one of the worst scourges of mankind, it is hardly the time to propose their free use, especially in an uneducated, frustrated part of the world, where comfort and escape are needed so desperately that such terms as ‘moderation’ and ‘discipline’ are totally irrelevant, cogent though her arguments may sound. But perhaps she is not addressing the ‘have nots’ at all, but only the haves, the haves, who have both, education and wealth. Perhaps they too are in need of comfort and escape, because they are surrounded by the flooding waters of poverty and injustice — an ugly sight.
However, whether or not one agrees with her views on the use of drugs, Uma writes exceedingly well, and I for one will look forward to the next book she writes.
Bombay to Eternity: Memoirs of a Laid-back Rebel
By Uma Ranganathan
Penguin India. For more information log on to
www.penguinbooksindia.com
ISBN 01-430-3123-6
289pp. Indian Rs295
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