IN SEARCH OF LOST MEANING
Janice Pariat weaves a story of four people whose paths, though they never cross, are powered by a strong quest
Whether in search of the holy grail,
a dragon’s hoard, or the source of the Nile, the quest remains a genre irresistible to readers. In Everything the Light Touches
(2022), Janice Pariat crafts a classic narrative with four characters—all in search of something—nested like Russian dolls, two fictional and two historical.
The recently unemployed Shai opens the story, flying out of Delhi to see her parents in Shillong. She soon leaves them for the remote village where her old nanny is nearing death. And there she stops, searching for something.
A century earlier, Evie, sailing on the
“fishing fleet” that ships superfluous Englishwomen to the colonies in search of husbands, has also escaped her family, though not their proxies. She attaches herself to new friends who may bring her closer to what she is looking for—not a husband, but a mysterious something that may be real or imagined. Evie is a student of Goethean science, a vision of study in which the natural world is examined and understood in a connected, holistic way rather than in the Linnean tradition of separation and classification. Goethe and Linnaeus are the
other protagonists in Pariat’s novel.
Goethe travels to Rome in search of a unifying principle in botany, and his observations of plants are among the best delights of the novel, conjuring up a time in which close study was a kind of play. “All is leaf,” he declares. He is a man in a man’s world, flush with opportunities. Though his privileges exert their own pressures on him, Goethe still aims to discover the first tree, the tree that contains all trees, regardless of whether it is real or a metaphor.
Linnaeus, as Pariat writes him, is as much a poet as a scientist. Can we ever think of him as a plodder when his codes and treatises gave us the rich language in which we still describe our world? He seems more focused in his search than the other explorers of this novel, but perhaps that is an effect of time and fame, and perhaps he was as full of uncertainties when he started out.
Evie, hampered as she is by her era and its expectations of women, does reach the people who hold the secret she is looking for. Shia lands in the hills of Meghalaya with scarce ideas about life there, stumbling over the outdoor privies, buckets of water instead of taps, and a feeble mobile signal that allows her only fleeting contact with her old world. She lingers week after week, puzzling her hosts and dismaying her mother, till, like Evie, she discerns the connection between exploration, exploitation and expropriation. In Evie’s time, colonialists assessed forests and hills as resources for timber, rare orchids and unpaid labour. Shia learns that roads and healthcare will come to her nanny’s village only in exchange for uranium mining rights, and that the visitors dazzled by the hills are almost always calculating how their beauties can be monetised.
Pariat weaves her four richly imagined worlds into a unified tale. For every reader who has been struck speechless by a forest, she gives us the words. ■