A tale of India on the brink of war told from a personal and political perspective
Each character represents a different facet of India on the brink of war
ALL THE LIVES WE NEVER LIVED Anuradha Roy Loot.co.za (R298) Hachette
REVIEWER: JENNIFER CROCKER
INDIA, a small town, the looming threat of World War II and a young boy who wakes his slightly eccentric mother Gayatri Rozario by ringing the bell on his bicycle to lure her out of sleep to say goodbye to him as he heads off to school.
Anuradha Roy has conjured up a devastating story of love and loss in All the Lives we Never Lived. Myshkin, her son, is the narrator and we meet him first as an older man, living in the old family home in a small town with his stepsister.
The town is fictional, the story rings very true.
Gayatri, or Gay as she is nicknamed, is the daughter of a man of vision, a man who believes that young women should live their lives, should experience foreign countries, dance, paint, exist beyond the narrow confines of arranged marriages and the moral strictures of the times. Unfortunately we discover early in the story that he does not live long enough to save his daughter from the marriage parade.
She ends up marrying an academic who is known as Nek, a kind man, but one obsessed with the political changes that are starting to sweep India.
He wants a wife who goes to protest meetings with him, he has a wife who wants to paint and dance.
When visitors come to the town in the form of Walter Spies and Betty de Zoet, the circle that Gay’s adventurous father has drawn by taking her on a grand trip to Bali is closed.
Because Gay has met Walter before in Bali, the unconventional pair settle into the household of Gay and her husband, they stir up a whirl of discontent that causes a separation in the family. Roy has the extraordinary talent of being able to move her narrator from that of being a young boy to a man at the end of his life.
Through this tricky dance of narrative and description she tells a story that at first seems like the tale of a simple betrayal and then becomes far more complex.
Each character comes to represent a different facet of India on the brink of war: Nek is the stern nationalist; Batty, Myshkin’s grandfather is the voice of reason and the centre of the calm. Lisa McNally lives in the family compound but will go back to her family in Canada.
The richness of the lives of the ordinary people in this novel, will shake the foundations of a small town and the life of a small boy. What he discovers as he grows older will be that we are charged with the possibility of many lives and perhaps all we can do is make the choices that seem right at the time.
A brilliant book about human relationships and a particular time in the history of India, woven together in a book of blinding perception and compassion for the human condition; or perhaps a reminder that the personal is almost always political and that growing trees matters a lot when they represent a life, lived smaller than it need be in Myshkin’s case.