COMMUNITY
16 December 23, 2011
a anita desai on longing and striving s
By ranDy y BoyagoDa (NYT) Sometimes a mango is just a mango. This is rarely the case in Indian novels, where mangoes tend to be luminescent orbs dangling in steamy air, glistening with sweetness, sex and Being itself, waiting to be plucked, caressed, birthed. Either that or they’re muddy and rotten and piled high on a dirty road, surrounded by rancid garbage, rank cooking fires, beggar children and grinning, greasy swindlers. In other words, mangoes in India’s literary fiction are much like India in literary fiction: distinguished by pleasing aromas or permanent anarchy, if not some chutneyed combination. For almost five decades, Anita Desai’s writing has avoided this easy trafficking in the delicious and malicious. She has instead created a body of work distinguished by its sober, often bracing prose, its patient eye for all-telling detail and its humane but penetrating intelligence about middling people faced with middling prospects. Whether in India, Mexico or America, Desai’s characters tend to be easy marks for new possibilities — for something, anything, other than life as it is. This vulnerability leads to promising experiences, which often become fresh disappointments. For a writer so taken with such arrangements, the best results are minor-key masterpieces; the lesser efforts are melancholy suffocations. Both outcomes are evident in the three novellas that make up her new collection, “The Artist of Disappearance.” “The Museum of Final Journeys” describes the early stages of an Indian civil servant’s career. Sent to a decrepit rural outpost, he must deal, day by gloomy day, with supplicants petitioning him about con-
Anita Desai Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
voluted property claims. Spectacularly underwhelmed by his monotonous duties and their depressing locale, he copes by lapsing into a drowsing wakefulness — until an old man implores him to visit a nearby estate that he says has been transformed into a museum and then abandoned by its eccentric owners. The young bureaucrat is skeptical, but as a relief from boredom goes anyway, only to discover a series of fallingdown rooms filled with wondrous prints, textiles and objects from distant places, as well as a bamboo grove occupied by a pathetic, chained elephant. Enlivened by what he’s found, he realizes that the seemingly “meek, obsequious” old retainer is more accurately, and distressingly, “a small, determined man doggedly performing his duties to the last” — attempting to secure government support for the failing estate. Will the young man find his purpose in saving this strange museum or will he be absorbed into its decline? As he considers
what to do, the story suddenly jumps forward, midsentence, to the civil servant looking back many years later, without much feeling or interest, at this posting as part of the larger story of his average life and typical career. After she has superbly built up the suspense of her narrative, Desai’s snappedapart transition to a desultory valediction is disappointingly fragmentary, a devaluation of our finely developed investment in this man’s life. In contrast, the title novella is a slow-drip tale about a sensitive recluse named Ravi, who survives his decadent, self-destructive parents and creates an intricate stone artwork in the woods near a North Indian hill station. When the place is chanced upon by a young woman who works for a documentary film crew searching for evidence of environmental degradation, this accidental discovery — confusing, then terrifying, then exciting for the young woman — offers a jolt of energy, but it’s not enough. Throughout, Ravi’s sensibility is both too dark and too precious: when he’s not doing his therapeutic art-scaping in the woods, he’s moping around the burned remains of his family home or hiding out from visitors. Meanwhile the members of the film crew are mostly variations on listlessness until they find filmable material — first Ravi’s delicate glade and then a large-scale mining operation, with its “great gashes that had opened out into caverns of white limestone.” Yet this juxtaposition of the artistic and the industrial seems surprisingly stark, coming from a writer of Desai’s usual subtlety. The collection is redeemed, however, by the third novella. Eloquent and understated, “Translator Translated” lays bare the soured
life of Prema, a middle-aged Delhi English teacher who attends a school reunion where she has a nervous, exhilarating encounter with Tara, a confident and flashy classmate who has since become a player in India’s publishing industry. After they agree that Prema will undertake an English translation of a book written in one of India’s regional languages, Oriya, excitements and disappointments follow. As Prema tries to reinvent herself as a translator, editor and even author, her energies are consumed by her ef efforts to catch up with a contemporary who has always seemed so far beyond her. Here Desai quietly, relentlessly exposes the longings of someone at the slack-end of life, trying to renew it by redressing a perceived early injustice. Happiness for Prema is not just seeing her name on a published book, it’s also visiting Tara in her office to chat about future projects — at last, as equals. But she tries too hard, makes bad decisions and eventually concludes that she is merely “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to,” one of those who have “had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlit world beyond,” only to see “that window close and remain closed.” At her finest, Desai is a brilliant anatomist of people like Prema — men and women who seek, gain, but fail to triumph in such moments and are left to play their own kind of solitaire, matching what was to what might have been. Randy Boyagoda’s second novel, “Beggar’s Feast,” was recently published in Canada. He teaches literature at Ryerson University and is writing a biography of Richard John Neuhaus.
Indo AmerIcAn news • FrIdAy, A decemBer 23, 2011 • Online editiOn: Ay, On: www.indOamerican-news.cOm O