revised arundhati roy's god of small things
TRANSCRIPT
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THE BOOK(ER) OF THE YEAR1
by Ranga Rao2
Post-Booker, past gaga.
1 Two-part Essay on Arundhati Roy's The God of Small
Things in two parts."The Book of the Year’.
Published in The Hindu (Madras) 16 and 23 Nov, 1997.
2 Visiting Faculty, Sri Sathya Sai Insititute of Higher Learning, Prasanthi Nilayam, Andhra pradesh
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Few novels have drawn such a range of opinion as
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Though some of
it could be reactionary response to the hype—and
panic knee-jerk to the three-crore advance, made
worse by the five-crore sales—our own Booker-
winning novel is, in the flurry of critical darts
flung at it, an advance on Seth’s A Suitable Boy.
Let’s look at a few of these puzzling statements in
an attempt, tentative and cursory still because we
are looking at an extremely recent work, towards
achieving, with sahrudayata, oneness with the text,
a further critical debate.
STATEMENT 1: with extraordinary linguistic inventiveness Roy funnels
the history of South India through the eyes of seven-year-old twins.
Coming from the Booker citation, this deserves some
respect. But there are two problems. First about
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the South India bit; as it happens the text informs
us that the twins are born in Assam, in the North-
East of India, to a Bengalee father and a Malayalee
mother, and, more tantalisingly, ‘on a day of
national humiliation’: the national humiliation is the
defeat of the Indian forces at the hands of the
Chinese in 1962. The history, if there is one, is
of India as a whole, Rushdie or no Rushdie. And
straight we have another problem: ‘My book is not
about history....’ says Roy (Interview, The Week,
October 26, 97) But then if it is not about history
why make it a point, Ms Roy, to tell us about the
remarkable coincidence? Still we are told by
Professor Beer, the Booker chair-person: the novel
‘keeps all the promises it makes’.
The other, more serious, problem with the statement
concerns point of view: that the story is told from
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the point of view of the twins ( filtered through the eyes
of seven-year old twins). The twins and their point of
view occupy large spaces of the book, but how do we
place this passage about the Untouchable lover at
the rendezvous with Ammu, the mother of the twins
who of course are nowhere in the picture.
He watched her. He took his time.
Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress
was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Who can tell?
Whose point of view is this? Either of the twins?
And how is that possible, when they are not
ubiquitous? or, is it not the good old authorial
voice which in the conventional novel is the
vehicle of authorial presence and authorial
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omniscience both of which can be potentially
welcome, doubly welcome, to any reader? And there
are any number of such passages where the twins are
not present, are not likely to be: but the
omniscient author is. Roy’s ‘post-modernist’ novel
has a free-wheeling point of view.
Statement 2: ... ‘tells its tale quite clearly’
That is the Booker citation again. And what is
meant is that the book is readable; The Hindu, in
its handsome editorial tribute, represents such a
widespread impression: that Ms Roy could have appealed to
two diverse audiences—the serious and the non- serious, if you like—
is of course only one of the astonishing attributes of her novel.
I have doubts about this. Take the metaphor-rich
opening paras of the novel; a votary of say, Harold
Robbins or whatever—the non-serious, ‘time-pass’
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reader will find it as comfortable to wade through
these as a child through The Silent Valley. And
the vertigo of to-fros, reflecting perhaps the
twins’ high-strung state of mind. Or, take this
passage :
A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete.
Flailing in the air with no foothold. A friendship that never circled
around to a story, which is why, far more quickly than ever should
have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while the Loss of
Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every
season.
Apart from the figurative viscosity, what is one to
believe, that a non-serious reader—or even a
serious reader—will find it easy to transit, so to
say, from one moss-covered stone to the next,
across this stream of thought and sentiment? Or,
consider: beyond the shadow, the light was flat and gentle: what
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is the average reader to make of the yoking of flat
and gentle: which non-serious reader will get at the
gustatory sense of the first and the tactile appeal
of the second? and savour the combination of the
two? It is startling, teasing, evocative, but
halting, distracting, confusing to the ordinary
reader. Or: The seas black, the spume vomit green: how many
readers of English fiction can make out spume? or
stand the slam of the image? She had half-moons under her
eyes and a team of trolls on her horizon : trolls? And: History
walking the dog: makes sense only to an alert reader of
serious fiction. Now look at the Joycean: He had a
greenwavy, thick-watery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless-
bottomful feeling: which makes contextual sense, but is
Joyce ‘readable’? (Ms Roy’s step-daughter mentions
two writers as favourites of our author: Joyce and
Marquez) Again: Here they studied Silence (like the children of the
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Fisher Peoples), and learned the bright language of dragonflies. Or:
And Ousa the Bar Nowl watched the pickle-smelling silence that lay
between the twins like a bruise. Or: consider the obscurity
of:
When they grew tired of waiting, the dinner smells climbed off the
curtains and drifted through the Sea Queen windows to dance the
night away on the dinner-smelling sea. Does it mean that
the dancers went back after a satisfying nocturnal
jaunt? Or in their absence, the hotel was rid of
them, the smells? Take another passage:
But anger wasn’t available to them and there was no face to put on
this Other Thing that they held in their sticky Other Hands, like an
imaginary orange. There was nowhere to lay it down. It wasn’t theirs
to give away. It would have to be held. Carefully and for ever. What
does one make of this?
Conceptually, rhetorically, stylistically, Roy’s
novel is not accessible to the common reader.
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Seth’s A Suitable Boy, as ambitious, is; and that in all
probability ruled out a Booker for him; a Jane
Austen, or a Dickens will not appeal to the Booker
Committee, either: their language, their ‘style’,
is not innovative enough.
And now for our next statement it is time to move
closer home.
Statement3: I don’t scrabble around and try, and I don’t sweat the
language.... No, not erasing much—language was never rewritten. I
don’t rewrite.
That makes Ms Roy, I am sure, unique; not for her,
it would appear, the intolerable wrestle with words. To be
fair to her, she has sound writerly instincts;
still a little vetting, even at the editorial desk,
would have helped:
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They only worried about the Naxalites, who had been known to force
men from Good Families to marry servant girls whom they had made
pregnant.
Who are the seducers? The Naxalites? or men from
Good Families? Of course Ms Roy’s sympathies
clearly lie with the former: but the ambiguity
impinges and impedes. Take another kind of problem
Ms Roy does not seem to have considered: Or husbands
who spent all their earnings in toddy bars. To a non-Indian
reader this will not have any problem; but to an
Indian, bars has affluent urban associations: a
translator from an Indian language will avoid the
term as culturally polluted; he will probably try
toddy shacks. Similarly: That Kuttappen’s a basket case.
Coming from an illiterate untouchable, basket case is
too slangy, too un-Indian, and the wrong register.
At another level we have: A giant burning ghat was erected
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on the highway. As it cannot be a permanent affair—
obstructing the traffic and hence objectionable,
and even unnecessary—what is meant perhaps is A giant
pyre. In a similar vein, and perhaps more serious to
an Indian sensibility we have: The man who had tried
publicly to undress the Pandavas’ wife, Draupadi.... Now we have
heard of people undressing to go to bed. What the
Kauravas attempt outrageously is a different
mischief: in the open court, in the presence of
nobles and elders, now that Draupadi is technically
no longer a princess but a dasi, they try to disrobe
her. Similarly both Bhima and his arch-enemy locked
in a duel may not be described as stoned: which is
too distinctive with foreign associations alien to
the context and ethos.
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Perhaps, Ms Roy, one should after all, scrabble and
try, sweat the language. Perhaps ‘re-breathing a
breath’ is not such a bad idea.
But then the Booker: doesn’t the book Booker?
Doesn’t it!
Does
n’t
it
!
Does
It still does. Without a shred of doubt. The power
of Roy’s book is such that it absorbs any omissions
and commissions, any lacunae, artistic shocks; and
triumphs. The God of Small Things remains memorable.
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Roy’s novel belongs to the metro stream of the
80’s made popular by Upamanyu Chatterjee and later
Firdaus Kanga. Consider Ms Roy’s antecedents:
include Ooty’s Breeks School and Lawrence School.
But Roy also marks an extension from the metro to
the cosmopolitan: consider the foreign,
international presence in The God of Small Things
(which begins with a quote from John Berger,
whoever that is): joeys, roos (Australian); slicked
buff and gofers (American and Canadian usage),
diddled, and of course, trolls (Scandinavian);
Elvis Presley-puff, and Love-In-Tokyo; New York:
Ireland and Holland; Kipling, Charlie Chaplin; and,
well, The Sound of Music.
Neither Chatterjee nor Kanga has Roy’s rural
reach. Her desi roots show not only in liberal use
of Malayalam, but in her descriptions of Kerala;
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Rushdie seems to err in commenting that Roy’s India
is any place. After Menon Marath, Kerala gets
spectacular representation in Indian fiction in
English.
Roy’s book is the only one I can think of among
Indian novels in English which can be
comprehensively described as a protest novel: it is
all about atrocities against minorities, Small
Things: children and youth, women, and
untouchables. And the narrative achieves, at the
same time, the appeal of a fairy tale, with
archetypal characters, such as two lovers
bedevilled by vamps and ogres.
‘I was an unprotected child in some ways’, says Roy
(Interview, The Week, 26 Oct). She continues: ‘Two
things happen. You grow up quickly. And when you become an adult
there is a part of you that remains a child, so the communication
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between you and your childhood remains open.’ The only
writer I can think of endowed with comparable
empathy with the child is R.K.Narayan. Compare the
sunshine and sparkle of the ‘30s story of little
Swami supported by the matrix of a loving family,
concluding on the merest suggestion of mortality,
with the sombre atmosphere surrounding the
disturbed twins in Roy’s novel who are products of
a debilitated, debilitating ethos (‘a hopelessly
practical world’), ending up, in each other’s arms,
like babes in the wood. The incest, as the
masturbation scene earlier, fits in disturbingly:
the twins go through a savaged childhood, through a
mine-field of demoralised parents, and callous or
cunning adults, even a paedophile or two; for them
the adult spectacle is but a Play, hypocritical,
scheming, brutal. Their tender dreams are
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perpetually in danger of being hi-jacked and
redreamed for them. Nature is offered in the novel,
among other things as a matrix to the human child:
the natural is contraposed to the adult Play.
Their high-voltage imagination results in
linguistic, stylistic exuberance, in the profusion
of capitals, inspired mis-spellings, punctuational
liberties, single word sentences, repetitions,
single sentence paras etc., in a comic strip-
cartoon style. After R.K.Narayan no novelist has
realized a child’s vision of the adult world as
much as Arundhati Roy; and Rahel and Estha, the
names sound almost Biblical, but they experience
the joy and purity of childhood in just one scene:
when they visit Velutha’s cottage, and can see
Jesus in a mini. It’s Estha’s spontaneity, his
singing which, ironically, brings him into the
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company of Terror, the OrangeDrinkLemondrink Man;
the singer is silenced; and as if this were not
enough Estha offers the final betrayal to their
only friend, Velutha, and he ‘would keep the
receipt’, carry the guilt to the end: ‘memory of a
young man with an old man’s mouth’. The twins,
traumatized initially by parental strife--remember
the wrenching scene where their Ammu and Baba
squabble over sharing the burden of the twins--and
brutalized by the society--the twins, the off-
spring of Malayalee-Bengalee union, ‘with their
sometimes strangeness’, represent modern urbanized
Indian environment of crumbling family values,
‘old roses on a breeze’; and Sophie Mol, the
shortlived fruit of an Indo-British encounter, with
‘first world panache’, and in comparison with the
unfortunate twins, reported ‘Hatted, bell-bottomed
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and loved from the beginning’ only underscores
and confirms their experience. In an unforgettable
scene Sophie coolly watches her cousin make a
mayhem of ants, and advises: ‘Let’s leave one
alive so that he can be lonely’. The only other
novelist in English who seems to have experienced
Loneliness is, once again, R.K.Narayan in The English
Teacher, after the death of his wife. In Roy’s
novel, the major themes all seem to tie up,
unlovedness, loneliness (‘You can’t trust anybody’,
Ammu tells her children), madness (the ‘hum’ in
Rahel’s or Estha’s head, for example), betrayal.
The children in the novel are all social victims,
as much as the adults. The tragic death of Sophie
Mol (an inspired name) is caused by the adventure
of ‘unloved’ children running away to reclaim
countermanded love, and Sophie joins the fatal
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cruise in the canoe in a bid to get close to her
cousins; her death gives the final push to a family
that had been rotting for three generations, the
rot begun by the beastly patriarch, Pappachi. The
comparison with Narayan offers a further contrast;
no doubt Narayan himself charts the disintegration
of the institution of the family in his post-‘47
novels, but he does it, in comparison with Roy, but
indirectly. Now at one bound our novel in English
has ushered India into the modernity of advanced
civilizations, the comity of neurosis.
Roy achieves superb success in realizing the
child’s world; in the writing styles (Wisdom
Exercise Notebooks) and some of the ‘overwriting’
goes with the child sensibility; in their
playfulness, recalling Alice in Wonderland; in the
child’s total commitment to life, in the child’s
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pristine approach to excreta etc.; in the
child’s dread of punishments meted out by the adult
world; and above all in its terror of being
unloved. In the treatment of the twins Roy makes do
with a dash of magic realism, (though she calls
herself a realist in contrast with Rushdie); in
this autobiographical recall of childhood, Roy
recreates a real-life brother and his sister
separated by eighteen months into twins born within
eighteen minutes of each other; what is emphasized
perhaps is likemindedness, identity, ‘As though they
were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint
identities.’
But their childhood experiences cruelly isolate
them and transform their lives hopelessly.
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Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because
separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever
thought They’d
be.
Humanity duplicated: human misery replicated.
The God of Small Things is also a powerful feminist
presentation. I cannot think of a more moving
image of a feminist in our fiction than Ammu, who
of course is partly built on the novelist’s mother
Mary Roy. Says Lalit Roy, the novelist’s brother:
‘My mother is a powerful personality and she
brought us up to be very independent’. (But his
uncle, the real-life model for Chacko dissents) Ms
Mary Roy fought single-handedly and brought
property rights to Syrian Christian women; she also
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went quietly and bravely through the trauma of a
broken marriage: “I tried to hide the pain from my
children.’(India Today, October 27, 97): when
Arundhati grew up she always stood by her mother.
In Ammu, the novelist has presented, with
compassion, a woman, a feminist locked in a
struggle with her family, its ‘hidden morality’,
with society, and tragically, with herself. All
the more moving, because she is a Malayalee woman,
and the Malayalees are traditionally the only
major matriarchal society among the peoples of
India; Mammachi’s hypocrisy in catering to her son
Chacko’s ‘Man’s Needs’ and condemning her
daughter’s affair is blatant. And Ammu’s tragedy
too is presented in a context of broken or failed
marriages; what is being dramatized is ‘The whole
Question of a woman’s Locusts Stand I’. And the
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struggle between the mother and the woman in Ammu.
In the event, the Syrian Christian community
suffers, inevitably, but incidentally; so does the
East Indian community in Naipaul’s novel, A House for
Mr. Biswas, autobiography turned into art.
Like Naipaul’s masterpiece (and Seth’s A Suitable Boy),
Roy’s novel too is a filial tribute; it brings to
Mary Roy her daughter’s ‘interest and anger’, a
phrase from Naipaul’s novel. Roy does to her mother
what Naipaul has done to his father. The book is a
vindication.
The God of Small Things breathes the spirit of youth. It
is one of our protest novels, an outstanding one;
in its taboo-breaking it goes further than either
Upamanyu Chatterjee or Firdaus Kanga. It is
radical, subversive; it attacks several holy cows:
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the family (the novel presents three generations of
a family), religion, Communist Establishment, even
public administration: the linguistic excesses are
just one dimension of the rebellion. Roy brings in
even environmentalism, the concern of many young
people today. In its ability, its keenness to view
things as they are, a passion for things, all
things, any thing, from human beauty, floral beauty
to sexual candour, a Renaissance interest in this
world, in the beautiful and the ugly, to the
extraordinary explicitness, and explicitness with a
vengeance, the scatology carried to, for example,
the colour and consistency of shit, the book
represents the spirit of modern youth. What we have
uniquely in A God of Small Things is a suffusion of
protest. The story is about an Indian village,
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authentic India; but the sensibility is urban,
westernized, modern.
Both minorities, the minors and the minority woman
are drawn to Velutha, the dalit, the ultimate
Indian minority. The ebony-skinned Untouchable is
called Velutha, which means White in Malayalam--because he
is so black. And he certainly is the fairest of all
and is apotheosised by the author, he is eminently
qualified to be the titular hero. A carpenter with
wonderfully creative hands, he is a Christ-like
figure to the novelist; and his merciless torture
at the hands of the police is a re-enactment of
Passion; he is also the cheerful man with one arm
whom Ammu sees in her dream; the handicap is a
concretization of his outcaste status. In the
idealization of the dalit, the only parallel I can
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think of is in classic Telugu fiction; in the hero
of the novel Malapalli by Unnava Lakshminarayana. And
in a fabulous short story by Veluri Sivarama
Sastry, ‘Maladasari’ which I have translated for my
Classic Telugu Short Stories (Penguin Books India).
The role of the local Marxist leader in the
Velutha tragedy has been interpreted as anti-
communist slander; the Chief Minister of Kerala,
torn between pride for the daughter of the soil
making it big and his own party loyalties has
dubbed the episode as pandering to the western
prejudices. This is gross misreading of the novel,
though mentioning Mr. Namboodripad by name marks a
failure of invention; and maybe Rushdiesque. But
the fact remains: Roy’s hero is a card-carrying
communist, and is suspected by the local Marxist
leader to be a Naxalite; being a dalit, Velutha is
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also a nuisance, a ‘wrinkle’ in the local Marxist
leader’s political domain which has to be quietly
ironed out--an illustration of caste prejudices
swamping secular ideology. If the Booker committee
is to be accused of any political prejudice it is
partiality for Naxalism; that is what Roy reveals
in her novel. In the blatant murder of Velutha she
offers an allegory of the alleged complicity of
the Marxist Communist establishment in the
suppression of Naxalism, yet another betrayal in
the novel. Roy is not being ideological, she is
being post-ideological, and perhaps, pre-
ideological. It is the NGO spirit.
One of the fascinating aspects of Roy’s treatment
of Velutha’s story is the way she associates him
with Nature.
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Naked now, he walked down the thirteen stone steps into
the water and further, until the river was chest high. Then
he began to swim with easy, powerful strokes, striking out
towards where the current was swift and certain, where
the Really Deep began. The moonlit river fell from his
swimming arms like sleeves of silver. It took him only a
few minutes to make the crossing. When he reached the
other side he emerged gleaming and pulled himself
ashore, black as the night that surrounded him, black as
the water he had crossed.
Black is beautiful: argent, elemental.
The birthmark on his back is repeated like an epic
epithet; it is believed to bring the monsoon on
time. In the entire world the twins have only one
adult who can put them entirely at ease, Velutha,
as in the enchanting episode ‘The River in the
Boat’, one of the most riveting in the novel,
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where, on a visit to Velutha’s cottage in the
woods, the twins experience joy as they never do
anywhere else, the only time they seem to regain a
little of their lost childhood. Incidentally, Roy
moves in this scene with incredible ease between
joy of life (represented by the twins and their
friend Velutha) and the terror of death (Velutha’s
brother Kuttappen paralysed with a spinal injury,
bedridden, aware all the time of the Presence
stealing on him.).
When the policemen penetrate the woods on their
sinister mission to the unsuspecting Velutha’s
‘hideout’, Roy presents their headway lyrically,
and as transgression, a violation, a rape of
Paradise:
Quick piss.
Hotfoam on warmstone. Police-piss.
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Drowned ants in yellow bubbly.
Deep breaths.
Roy describes in cold fury the police battering of
the defencelss dalit,Velutha; and, with brilliant
narrative skill, Roy makes the twins witness to
this outrage; and the trauma endures. Here is yet
another Roy, with a clinical description of a
victim of police brutality (this under a communist
government):
His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both
his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy,
undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his
upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were
embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his
beautiful smile. [That is a deadly touch--the
twins are watching.] Four of his ribs were
splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what
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made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath
bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was
ruptured and haemorrhaged, the blood collected in his
abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places,
the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted
in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his
knee caps were shattered.
No pathologist could have done better: the Roman
soldiers’ handling of Jesus, in comparison, was
decency itself. A shattering experience to the
reader.
In an interview (The Week, Oct 26, 97) Roy talks at
length about the structure of her book and seems to
take particular satisfaction in the way the novel
ends. But I am afraid her structure does not always
work the way she imagines it does. Velutha’s
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death, caused, like the destruction of the epic
hero Karna in The Mahabharatha by multiple
betrayals, (abandoned by God and History, by Marx, by Woman,
and ...by Children), marks the aesthetic climax, the
emotional high-eminence of the drama; the whole
novel has been moving towards the tragic
denouement. A coda follows, the incest scene. If
Roy had stopped here, the book would have gained
immensely; but in her anxiety to end on a stubborn
amor vincit omnia note ( as in Emile Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights), Roy seems to have, at the very
end, distracted her own narrative rhetoric ,
undercut the affects of her own story. Naipaul’s
novel and Seth’s are, in comparison, works of
immaculate craftsmanship. By projecting the last
scene, though it is authentically erotic, Roy has
committed an act of dislocated sensibility, an
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egregious error in craftsmanship; the ending is
optimistic, not artistic. The sultry love-making
scene at the end of the novel hangs out, an
appendage, loose, wobbly. Like a camel’s lip. On
a Yakshi.
The best thing about Roy reposes outside the book:
her humility. She went to the final function
without an acceptance speech and in an interview
remarked: ‘My book is not the best book.... It is
the luckier book’. And she also said ‘I don’t know
if I will ever write another book’. That
possibility is real; Roy has put so much into her
first book.
Ms Roy should prove herself wrong, believes at
least one reader.
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THE END
Ranga Rao is the author of three novels, Fowl-Filcher,
The Drunk Tantra, and The River is Three-Quarters Full (all three
Penguin); he has completed work on his fourth
novel. Ranga Rao’s collection of short stories An
Indian Idyll and Other Stories was published by Ravi Dayal,
Delhi.
Ranga Rao has compiled, edited, and translated two
anthologies of outstanding Telugu short stories
from the earliest to the latest for Penguin: Classic
Telugu Short Stories and That Man on the Road.
The Sahitya akademi (India’s National Academy of
Letters), Delhi has published Ranga Rao’s
monograph, R.K.Narayan. Ranga Rao’s two volume study
of R.K.Naryan, the Man and his Art and all his
novels and novellas is ready in manuscript.
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