The Financial Express (Delhi Edition)
History in the making
Is a story of loss and forgetting, of migration and picketing of boundaries in a new landscape, while clinging to the tatters of the past
Two Irishmen, Padraig Aherne and Brendan McCarthaigh, both boys when we first meet them, set the tone of the book. Their voices entwine with each other’s histories
STORYTELLING IS a tradition as old as history, and author Kalyan Ray belongs to that tribe of wandering storytellers who go from village to village with a bag of stories. Just like the Bauls (the wandering groups of singers as they are known in Bengal) thrum their one-stringed instrument, a storyteller unloosens the string of his bag and the characters leap out with a life of their own. They twist, spin and turn, throwing shadows upon the walls of the cave of our collective imagination. When morning comes, the storyteller stuffs them back into his bag and we are left wondering whether we were asleep or awake.
Ray is that kind of a storyteller, even though he may be a little old-fashioned— we, of the electronic age, prefer our stories beamed at us at the speed of a button. So it takes a little time to agree to the willing complicity of belief that invites us into his world, particularly when you realise that his world zooms dizzily from upstate New York in the late 20th century; Mullaghmore, County Sligo, western Ireland, in mid-19th century, and to undivided Bengal in 1844. There’s a haunting evocation of a family mansion in Barisal (now Bangladesh), where it could be that these stories first began to be seeded in Ray’s memory. No Country is a familiar enough story of loss and forgetting, of migration and picketing of boundaries in a new landscape, the shifting and forging of new identities, while clinging to the tatters of the past.
Ray negotiates his territory through literary devices that sometimes work. He is, after all, a teacher of literature in North America and other parts of the world. At other times, Ray’s literary backpack proves to be a burden full of desperate attempts to use artificial pegs, or fictional markers, favoured by earlier practitioners of the genre like Alexander Dumas and William Faulkner, to climb the enormous mountain of historical material that he has amassed.
To make it easier for us to figure this out, Ray has neatly devised his histories into two main parts. Two Irishmen, Padraig Aherne and Brendan McCarthaigh, both boys when we first meet them, set the tone of the book. Their voices entwine with each other’s histories, though, for the most part, Ray prefers the first-person narrative. Some characters are still talking while a bullet is piercing their chests, very riveting that!
During the course of the book, Aherne is catapulted to India and McCarthaigh, who suffers the Irish famine, is shunted off to America. There is yet another river system that is embedded in these two lives, one that appears in the form of a near-dead boy named Ramkumar Mitra, who happens to be both saved by and be the saviour of Aherne in his new country.
One cannot help but quote a small vignette from the book about the first glimpse that Aherne has of the Bengal delta: “Sliding through the nightwater, a moving head, the crawling powerful torso and paws, its round, furry ears tucked back, its fanged mouth drawn in a grin, the muscled glide of the yellow and black stripes. The tiger was making its easy way from one isle to another. I knew who ruled here. We would make landfall far inland, away from this king of the night.” Who can escape this irresistible lure of the exotic east in all its colonially-sanctioned trappings?
To an Indian reader, the earlier parts of the book set in Ireland may ring truer than those that depict pre- and post-colonial India. There are some portions that are cringe-inducingly annoying, for instance, a scene where every cliche of Anglo-Indian life is repeated, as a posse of old women talk about fair and dark complexions. Cut to Ray’s wife Aparna Sen’s film, 36 Chowringhee Lane, on the same subject and we cannot help but be reminded of the real thing as against the pastiche we are offered here.
In a similar vein, Ray evokes the spirit of the mysterious Anglo-Indian actress who became famous as Merle Oberon. In real life, Oberon (1911-1979) had a partial Maori heritage. This may explain why she also figures in the story Medicine Women by Witi Ihimaera, a New Zealand Maori writer. Oberon was one of the most glamorous actresses of her time. In the film, Wuthering Heights (1939), she acted opposite Lawrence Olivier, the first of many roles in which her exotic beauty was noticed. She was romantically linked to men such as David Niven, and, if tabloids are to be believed, Prince Phillip. But throughout her long life, Oberon went to extreme lengths to deny her origins.
She was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson in Mumbai and lived there till she was 17 years old. As in Ray’s account, she called herself Queenie. The aura of mystery about her background hid a sordid story. Her father Arthur Thompson, a Welshman, lived with his girlfriend Charlotte, a Eurasian with Maori genes, who already had a daughter named Constance by a tea planter in Sri Lanka. Thompson fathered Oberon with his stepdaughter Constance when she was 12 years old. Oberon was brought up to believe that Constance was her elder sister. Is it a wonder then that when she became a star, Oberon preferred to erase her past? If Ihimaera gives Oberon’s mother’s story a certain poignancy, Ray drops her into his bag of memories as a piece of candy that one of his young men, Robert Aherne, grandson of Padraig Aherne, drools over for a wee moment in time.
Then again, the Oberon connection is just one of the episodes in the panorama of real historical events that Ray pulls out of his bag, from Jallianwala Bagh to the Partition of Bengal. In fact, Irish and Polish resistance movements, muggings, murders and Dickie Mountbatten’s death by a bomb attack at Mullaghmore—it’s all there. You just have to learn to enjoy it one at a time. That’s what storytellers are meant to do—entertain on the sidelines of history.
Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based writer