Book of the week

THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT SEE RAJORSHI CHAKRABORTI (PENGUIN) $38

‘Exile,” philosopher Edward Said wrote, “is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.” Migrant New Zealand author Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new novel, The

Man Who Would Not See, beautifully examines this “unhealable rift” between the “self” separated from its home.

One November night in Calcutta, the book begins, a power cut turns the daring explorations of young halfbrothers Ashim and Abhay into a disaster. And so unfolds an event which not only results in familial conflict and separation, but shadows the boys and their relatives as they grow into men and meet – a reunion – in New Zealand.

If this is a novel about dislocation from event and homeland, it’s also a book which wonderfully synergises the disparate perspectives of its diverse cast. From young Abhay’s recollection of the night and reasons he and Ashim strayed into the unfamiliar geography of a dark Calcutta to his wife Lena’s voicing of their fraught coming together in Wellington; from the expression of Ashim’s recent mysterious illness and mystical attempts to divine its source to Lena’s concerns about daughter Mira’s unhealthy relationship with cousin Tulti, this is a cast bonded and segregated by perception.

Sometimes similar, sometimes starkly divergent, these insights speak of the intricacies of what it means to be “family”. In this, it also provides a welcome and valuable portrait of difference, of Indian migrant experience, a sense of identity rare in contemporary New Zealand literature.

Thematically, the narrative and its conflicting voices produce another rich element to The Man Who Would Not See. For these aspects expand concepts of migration beyond the physical and environmental to the philosophical, familial and spiritual. To be exiled from family and from the “truth” of mutual experiences is as important, Chakraborti proffers, as the removal from homeland.

Plagued by their naive actions that momentous night the power was severed, sent to different colleges (and so, different lives), reunified by the need to heal and Abhay’s later return to the heart of the place which split them: these events spur the brothers’ search to make sense of what home and family truly is. Is it a place? Or is it found in being with those closest to us? Chakraborti’s novel explores and firmly enshrines its take on these questions, and does so in a way which is particularly relevant to current global events connected to migration and, closer to home, New Zealand’s own identity which is composed from the wonders of multicultural resettlement.

The Man Who Would Not See is a compelling book about the dislocation of belonging, geography, culture and, ultimately, memory.