Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  Cracking India also brilliantly conveys how a child can feel both protected and at risk. Lenny’s world is presented at the outset of the novel as “compressed.” She lives with her mother, father, and younger brother in their well-to-do Parsee household sustained by Hindu and Muslim servants; her aunt and godmother live nearby, and she ventures no further than the neighborhood park where she watches her Ayah, a beautiful young Hindu woman of eighteen, flirt with her suitors—Sikh, Muslim, Pathan, Chinese—and somehow keeps the peace among them.

  This is the small realm of Lenny’s childhood—seemingly safe, though with its undercurrents of sexuality that the child does and doesn’t understand. Her male cousin lures her into sexual games; one of Ayah’s Muslim suitors, the character called Ice-Candy-Man, whose name was the novel’s original British title, tries to wiggle his toes under the nubile young woman’s sari. But all this is on the level, if not of innocence, then at least of contained sexual play. Lenny’s world comes dramatically unraveled with the intruding violence of partition, as the Punjab cracks in two and Ayah, abducted, raped, and turned into a prostitute by Ice-Candy-Man, becomes the body on which sectarian violence is written. In the course of the novel Lenny’s mother and Godmother rescue Ayah and return her to her family in Amritsar. What struck me so forcibly in reading and teaching this book is the simultaneous strength and vulnerability of women, the disruptive force of sexuality, and the inevitable end of the idyll of childhood.

  My own parallel “compressed world”—one lived on orderly streets within a household sustained by people doing their jobs—included our beloved housekeeper Stella, who walked me to school, my mother’s secretary Adele typing the column in our bookcase-lined den, and the Japanese gardener working shirtless out of doors. To me this world was circumscribed and sheltering, though the potential for disruption was, of course, always there. I could sense it in my mother on the phone scrambling to get material for her columns or in small things that happened: a man, for example, who was staying with us at the beach, getting his penis caught in his zipper and having to be rushed to the hospital, though I didn’t question what he was doing with us in the first place. I think that was the same summer, when I was nine, that I can remember sitting on the sand in the shade of a wooden chair and listening to my mother and her friends talk about Joseph R. McCarthy and their fear of his politics. We were Democrats, but my mother was afraid to put an Adlai Stevenson sticker on our car. None of this touched me, though, until the intrusion of Bow Wow abruptly made the world unsafe.

  Of course, I’m not equating my personal trauma of Bow Wow with the tragedy of a whole region torn by sectarian violence. I’m only saying that Bow Wow taught me the destructive power of a sexual predator, so that when Lenny has an epiphany about such power, I understand it well. In one of the book’s most striking and dramatic scenes, Lenny’s Godmother excoriates Ice-Candy-Man for what he has done to Ayah as the child looks on, and Lenny in her role as narrator reflects on the significance of this moment:

  The innocence that my parents’ vigilance, the servants care and Godmother’s love sheltered in me, that neither Cousin’s carnal cravings, nor the stories of the violence of the mobs, could quite destroy, was laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged round me. The confrontation between Ice-Candy-Man and Godmother opened my eyes to the wisdom of righteous indignation over compassion. To the demands of gratification—and the unscrupulous nature of desire.

  To the pitiless face of love.

  In the ensuing chapter Lenny goes with her Godmother to visit Ayah in the brothel district where Ice-Candy-Man has been keeping her. Ayah comes into the room teetering on high heels, draped, bejeweled, and bereft of all her former “radiance” and “animation.” Her eyes are vacant. Even her voice has changed to a gruff rasp “as if someone has mutilated her vocal chords.”

  This for me is the novel’s most terrible moment, the moment of greatest loss for Lenny—when someone you love has been crushed beyond recognition or recovery. Although Ayah is subsequently rescued, brought to the fallen women’s compound and then repatriated with her family, she cannot be restored to her former self. A beloved person has been cracked and broken.

  There is a similar jolt of loss in The God of Small Things, another novel that uses the fragility of the body as both physical reality and cultural metaphor. Among the many sharp moments of loss in this tragic text, there is one I find especially poignant. It’s when Ammu, the twins’ mother and lover of Velutha, a woman whose beauty has so beguiled her children, comes back to the family home in Ayemenem after an interval of a few years, sick and swollen with cortisone and is “not the slender mother Rahel knew.” As the adult Rahel remembers the change, Ammu’s hair has lost its sheen, she coughs up vile-smelling phlegm and speaks “in a deep unnatural voice.”

  In Roy’s non-chronological organization of the novel, the description of Ammu’s decline is placed for maximum impact. Coming in a chapter midway through the novel, it digresses from the book’s two main strands of narrative: that of the present in which the adult twins, Rahel and Estha, have returned to Ayemenem and the account of the 1969 “Terror,” occurring when the twins were seven, in which their cousin, the half-English Sophie Mol, drowned and Ammu’s lover, the untouchable carpenter Velutha, was brutally killed. In the present-time narrative, Rahel finds some childhood exercise books that trigger her memory of her altered mother. In the next chapter we return to the earlier events of 1969. But now, when we reencounter Ammu’s beauty, a beauty Roy, with her acute eye for corporeal details, makes so tangible, it is shadowed by our knowledge of its brevity. We also experience fully what it means for Ammu’s life to end at the “viable, die-able age” of thirty-one. The chapter “Wisdom Exercise Notebooks” ends with Rahel’s memory of Ammu’s beautiful body being “fed” piece by piece to the crematorium when Rahel was eleven.

  Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. The way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed. We be of one blood, thou and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

  As a reader of the novel I wept at the death of Ammu and shuddered at the specificities of loss that stirred my own memories. It’s not that my mother died young; she lived to be eighty-four. But I, too, remember a child’s perception of a beautiful mother’s hair and skin and smile, the stories she read from The Jungle Book (we didn’t think of colonial implications), her goodnight kiss and the songs she sang to me at bedtime. My brother has said that as a little boy just sitting next to her was thrilling for him. Both of us huddled in the aura of her “radiance” and “animation,” wanting, I think, to stay there forever. We still speak to each other, sixty years later, of how we used to love getting into her bed in the morning—as Rahel and Estha love to be in bed with Ammu—to plan all those fun things to do. That was our haven, our world at its most compressed and most expansive.

  And, of course, as all children do, we lost this paradise. Bow Wow intruded. My mother, as I’ve said, was never the same after him. She gained weight and seemed more volatile and unhappy. Or maybe much of this was just the passage of time. She grew older and I did, too. I saw things I hadn’t seen before.

  When I read The God of Small Things for the first time, I couldn’t bear for my immersion in the book to end, and, as the young Susan Sontag did with The Magic Mountain, I immediately turned back from the last page to the first and started reading through it again. There are many reasons I love this book: its language that is at once lyrical and playful; its brilliant non-linear form, in which the whole story is cryptically compressed at the outset but only fully felt and understood by the end; its deft juggling of multiple layers of time; its rendition of the lush landscape of Kerala; its radical defense of the natural against the social, the oppressed—children,
women and untouchables—against their oppressors; its insightful postcolonial critique; its earnest yet witty engagement with other literature from Hamlet and Heart of Darkness to Midnight’s Children; its visceral depiction of the body along with compassion for the body’s yearnings and weaknesses. But I think what most transfixes me is the story of Ammu and her twins, theirs an even more compelling tale, if that’s possible, than that of the untouchable Velutha—carpenter, lover, river God and Christ figure—who is betrayed and sacrificed and whose beautiful body, though not his soul, we also see destroyed. I can feel what it’s like to be in the position of Ammu and the twins, to be part of a truncated family unit that feels both less and more than other families. My mother used to say, as Ammu does to reassure her children, that she had to be for us both mother and father. She seemed all we had, and, in the same compensatory way that Ammu tries to love Rahel and Estha, I believe our mother did everything she could to love us “double.” There are also ways in which she failed us out of her own great, unmet needs stemming from that childhood in the orphanage. So we felt the cuts of her careless comments, the uncertainties of her labile moods, the limits of her capacity to protect and sustain herself, let alone emotionally shelter two young children. Roy’s novel evokes both the magic circle of my own childhood and the shattering of the magic, both the gift of our beautiful mother’s love for us and the wound of it.

  BRICK Lane by Monica Ali, the last novel I will introduce into these pages, differs from Cracking India and The God of Small Things in that the family at the heart of the book is working, not middle class. Brick Lane moves between two major settings: the eponymous London ghetto, into which Nasneen, one of two sisters, has come from her Bangladeshi village to enter into an arranged marriage with an older man, and Bangladesh, where the other sister, Hasnia, has remained. The novel begins in 1967 East Pakistan (not yet Bangladesh), briefly recounting the birth and girlhood of Nasneen before shifting to London (1985–2002) as the book settles into its close third-person presentation of Nasneen’s experience of her immigrant neighborhood. The main narrative is spatially confined, with few scenes occurring beyond the Brick Lane council flats, though this is punctuated throughout by letters received from Hasnia (written by Ali in poor English, to reflect Hasnia’s limited literacy in Bengali) that convey that sister’s ongoing life in Bangladesh.

  Ali met with strong protests from London’s actual Brick Lane Bangladeshis over what they deemed an unflattering portrait of their community. She was attacked as a person of privilege, someone with neither the right nor the credentials to speak for garment workers and other poor Bangladeshis. As an outsider to the culture, it’s hard for me to judge these concerns. Hasnia’s poor English does seem something of a contrivance. But from my vantage point, one of the greatest strengths of Brick Lane is the author’s compassion for her characters as they struggle to find their bearings in diaspora.

  The stricter meaning of diaspora is the experience of a people who have been dispersed and who desire to return to the homeland. Nasneen’s husband, Chanu, who for all his degrees can find steady work only as a limousine driver, holds to the notion of return in the face of his own failures and the assimilation of his daughters into British culture and actually does return to Dhaka at the end of the novel. Karim, the middleman in the garment business who brings Nasneen piecework and becomes her lover, turns for self-respect to Islam. And he, too, though born in England, chooses return to his “imaginary homeland.” Whether going back to Bangladesh will bring the restoration of dignity these men seek is left at the end of the novel up in the air. But I like Ali’s respect for their struggles. Brick Lane is a solidly feminist book, yet never unkind to men.

  Diaspora has also come to signify, more broadly, all aspects of cultures of displacement, and Brick Lane explores the diasporic experience in these more general terms as well. Hasnia in Bangladesh is equally alien and equally resilient as her sister is in England. Both their lives are rooted in place yet at the same time reflect the routes of globalization. In Hasnia’s life there are many vicissitudes as she moves from runaway, then battered bride to worker in a garment factory to prostitute to exploited nanny for a nouveau-riche family that has made its money in global plastics. Finally, not giving up, she runs away with the cook!

  Nasneen leads a seemingly more settled life in England, although in a sense nothing can be settled as her husband and lover struggle to find their dignity in a global economy that offers them such constricted choices. Still, we see her evolve from a woman passively accepting her fate to one taking charge of it, and the novel ends with a satisfying scene. Having for the sake of her daughters decided not to accompany Chanu to Dhaka, Nasneen has entered with two friends into their own fusion-style dress making business. At the end of the novel her friends and daughters give her a surprise. Since her arrival in England she has been fascinated by ice skating, and they take her to a rink. As her daughter hands her a pair of boots, the text reads:

  Nasneen turned around. To get on the ice physically—it hardly seemed to matter. In her mind she was already there.

  She said, “But you can’t skate in a sari.”

  Razia [her friend] was already lacing her boots. “This is England,” she said. “You can do whatever you like.”

  The metaphor of ice skating with its suggestion of the sweep of movement within a confined space seems well chosen for this slowly unfolding yet powerfully moving novel, and I come now to my personal relation to the book. It lies, first of all, in my admiration for Ali’s characters. Nasneen and the others find power within themselves, despite their dislocations, in their tolerant ties of affection that strengthen family and community. The ties occur in specific places—indeed the book takes its name from place. But more than place, more than Bangladesh or England, Brick Lane, it seems to me, celebrates a kind of sweep of spirit—spirit that adapts and resists and even flourishes in whatever cramped inhospitable settings it may be asked to dwell.

  This achievement is all the more moving for me because the Brick Lane neighborhood of London, now inhabited by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, was home a century ago to an earlier immigrant group of Russian and Ukranian Jews. Stepney Green, where my mother lived with her mother and two of her brothers in their two-room basement flat, is adjacent to Brick Lane. I see the two place names a half inch apart on the map I have pulled up on my computer, and I feel a surge of excitement that Ali’s novel is set in the same part of London where my mother experienced her early poverty.

  Then I’m led to ponder the differences between my mother and Ali’s heroine. My mother couldn’t wait to leave the East End of London. Nasneen takes root there. My mother believed that only through a herculean act of self-reinvention could she find and seize adequate opportunity. Nasneen lives within her family, an ordinary woman but also a heroic one as she slowly and steadily evolves. Nasneen, Chanu, Karim—these are good, ordinary people. They aren’t physically beautiful. Chanu is called “froglike,” Nasneen’s eyes are too close together. But the novel shows the beauty of their loyalty and decency and persistence. It teaches the important lesson that it isn’t necessary to be mythic to have a good life. There is dignity in the ordinary. The ordinary is extraordinary. I’m not sure my mother knew this. I think that I do.

  Given who she was, growing older for my mother was especially hard. She faced old age with courage and without complaining but at the same time missed her former status and influence and the effect she had had simply walking into a room. An incident I consider poignant brought this home to me—occurring in the early 1980s. My children and I were on a train with her going from New York City to Darien, Connecticut, where my mother had arranged for us to spend a weekend at a Holiday Inn—pale reprise of our old getaway weekends in California. I sat in a row of seats with the children, while my mother sat in the row in front of us. At one point she seemed to be whispering to the woman beside her, and I couldn’t help overhearing. “I don’t want my daughter behind us to hear me,” she said, “but do yo
u know who I am?”

  I wish I could tell her about the Illinois junior high school girls who recently got in touch with me. They were doing research for their National History Fair project, a play about the “Unholy Trio” of Hollywood gossip columnists: Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Sheilah Graham. Why the Unholy Trio? I asked when we had our conference call. They explained that the project needed a link to Illinois, and it had this in Louella’s being from that state. I hadn’t known about Louella Parsons’s Illinois connection, and it amused me to imagine my mother’s tough old rival as a girl in the Midwest. The present-day Illinois girls had already garnered a prize for their play at the state level, and it was headed now to “the nationals.” They sought details for their portrayal of my mother and questioned me about her clothes and her gestures, her way of speaking and her opinions. I told them what I could. It was nice to enter into the spirit of their project and to sense their young energy. The girl who had the part of Sheilah Graham was named Anjalika Mohanty.

  When I got off the phone, I thought how wonderfully apt it was that Sheilah Graham, born into a family of immigrants and spending her childhood years in a London orphanage, should converge with an Indian-American girl who came from the same Midwestern state as Louella Parsons! So much of my life seemed to come together in that moment: Hollywood, my mother, my interest in the Indian diaspora, the reading trajectory that had carried me from orphan to immigrant, my dedication to helping young people. Anjalika on the phone sounded very self-possessed for an eighth grader. I found myself wondering afterwards if she was a reader.