It seems a deeply ironic title – probably intentionally so – given this novel tells 5 stories of lives of Indians which seem mostly to be trapped in a state of fear and want and poverty. One of its protagonists is upper-classed, but most of the stories are of the poverty-stricken, slum dwelling Indians, from rural to urban, from farmers to domestic help. It is a visceral novel, very skilfully sketching out a whole set of socio-economic and cultural circumstances in Indian societies, so even the uninitiated reader can comprehend and appreciate how social deprivation and poverty are mutually informing. Cruelty and mistreatment and abuse are all norms in places of extreme want, in this depiction.
One of the most heart-rending stories is about a villager who finds a bear cub and sets about training it to do a dance routine so he can earn money that way. The ignorance informing the training and whole endeavour is already painful to read, but more than that, it appears the animal abuse takes place routinely, not entirely out of malice or cruelty, but as the story represents it, because the villager knows no better, is himself stretched and stressed by his constricted conditions and frustrated and lashing out, and who is as much a victim as he is the abuser. The hapless bear lives a terrible life of constant pain, mistreatment, random and frequent violence, a prisoner and slave in perpetuity. ‘
They leave him out in the rain for days until his battery of grunts and yowls drives a hot knife through Lakshman one night and he comes out with his thin guide stick […] and brings it down on Raju’s flank and head and face and sides wherever can, and on the tree trunk too, for he cannot see to aim in the dark. Raju cannot run or hide because he is chained to the tree with the rope that is only four feet long, so he lets out a run of cries that span the spectrum from roaring grunt to high-pitched shrieking without any punctuation, one modulating into another seamlessly. […] In the grey, drenched light of the following morning, Lakshman comes out top find Raju cowering and whimpering at the sight of him. But Lakshman hasn’t forgotten or forgiven yesterday, so Raju goes without food. The cub whimpers all day…
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there are many such lacerating accounts of the bear’s suffering in this short story, and yet Lakshman is not depicted as a monster, simply as a very desperate, ignorant, helpless man himself.
Mukherjee also juxtaposes privilege with poverty; one of the stories is about an upper-middle class Bengali man (who lives in London but has returned to Calcutta to visit with his parents) interacting with the domestic help, particularly with the cook, Renu, or ‘cooking aunty’. He is warned Renu has an attitude, is hostile and gruff, but having an interest in food preparation, he tries to engage her, and succeeds to a large degree. The employer’s son and ‘cooking aunty’ have exchanges which Mukherjee captures the class-based tensions of beautifully:
Her tone was playfully chiding, taking some liberties and sailing riskily quite close to a few unbreachable boundaries of class: it was a measure of how easy she felt with me, and how fond she had become. We still addressed each other using the most respectful form of ‘you’
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There are lovely hints at where the unspoken but set-in-stone boundaries are, sketching out the untranslatable in a manner which conveys much without needing to spell it all out. (Although the book is written in impeccable English, sometimes there appears a very Indian phrasing, for example, how ‘fond’ she had become – which comes without a subject – but presumably, it means how fond of the narrator she had become; or perhaps even how fond of her the narrator himself had become, it is unclear, but not atypical of Indian speech.)
Mukherjee continues to unpack the delicate dance of communication between these two characters of such different social statuses, who are both pushing the boundaries of what is permitted:
By the time she reached the end, that slightly forced tone of jauntiness had come back. It was her insurance, should she have found herself accused of stepping out of line in her conversations with people above her station. Whether, this time, the return of the tone was the result of her awareness that she had allowed herself to take liberties, I couldn’t tell.
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The two become so friendly that Renu invites her employer’s son to go to her village and spend a night there, which upsets his mother:
I knew what was bothering her – the traversal of class boundaries, the queasiness that derived from the dissolution of certain impermeable, separating membrane that the intimacy of the son of the master going to stay in the home of a servant entailed.
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The mother warns her son against asking Renu, the cook, too many questions about her family and domestic set up, and the author demonstrates the differing expectations of social norms between different generations and the Indian and diasporic Indian perspective:
‘You will go away in a couple of days, it’s I who will be left to deal with her everyday, I don’t want to field any consequences of you and she becoming friendly.’
‘But what consequences? What do you mean by friendly? I’m only going to ask her a few questions about her life. She may respond positively to someone taking an interest in her. God knows, the people who have domestic help don’t exactly treat them as their equals.’
‘Ufff, this ‘equals’ business again. You live abroad, you don’t understand the culture here, you shouldn’t come trampling in with your fancy notions. There will be difficulty for us to clean up afterwards’.
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Sometimes, the stories are of acute suffering which seems to have no purpose, no solution, and feels despairing because there is no way out. A poor village woman develops a tumour on her jaw, which causes her so much pain (“the pain seemed to have come alive” (p175)) that she is “thrashing about like a cow in labour” (182)
Soni watched her mother let out the screams of a woman possessed at night […] At other times she saw her writhe and thrash on the floor, beating her head on the mud wall so hard that a small crack appeared on it.
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Soni’s father has no money but borrows some to take his wife to a hospital, putting himself in debt. He has no idea how to negotiate the hospital and comes home without treatment for his wife. He borrows more money and goes again:
The same crowd of afflicted people again, the same assortment of maimedness and leprous sores and growths, skin like crust, arms and legs no longer arms and legs but leaking barrels, withering branches, spongy sacks. And everyone waiting, some for days, months, who knew how long, waiting to be relieved of pain. Illness was a luxury for the rich. Illness had reduced everyone here to a beggar.
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Even with a friend who could speak for him, all Soni’s father learns is that there are no doctors available, and so he brings his wife home again. Soni’s mother hangs herself. Soni’s elder sister meanwhile had been raped by supposedly forest officers, and Soni joins the Communist Party of India (Maoists) (CPI (M); the guerrilla wings easily find willing recruits from the youth who are the poorest of the poor, educates them, feeds them, trains them, and then utilises them as an army, because
Theirs was a different approach – no longer the old lies of ‘If you vote for me, I promise to bring this and that change’, but the direct action of taking power in your own hands. ‘If you kill, we kill too. If you have guns, we have guns,’ as one comrade had put it so simply. Here was a kind of equality at last.
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The last story is one of the most interesting, relating the life story of Soni’s childhood friend, Milly, who chooses a very different path in life from Soni, though for most part, she has precious little choice. As a child, she is already sent away from home to be a servant in one house after another, to bring in income for her family. Her travails as an exploited servant and cook in each household are related in fascinating detail, opening up a window for readers into the life chances, expectations, and mindset of a Milly, a bright girl born into fairly desperate circumstances, living a very circumscribed life. In Mumbai, Milly works for a couple who at first do not mistreat her overtly, but she slowly discovers that she is a complete prisoner in their apartment, never allowed to set foot outside. Her escape enables her to have a much better life, marriage, children, continuing her profession as a domestic help but with kinder employers now, until her last one, the Sens, where Renu the cook had worked. And so, although the tales in this book and their characters do not all come together at the end, although many of them do not touch one another’s lives or stories, there are a few who appear in more than one story, lending a little connection between the tales.
The book is basically 5 short stories (some very short, some much longer) rather than one sustained novel, but it really does not seem to matter too much because the writing is so immediate, so beautifully balanced in terms of minute detail and broad brushstrokes, so well paced, that these Indian lives are brought in sharp focus for the reader, in a way which performs the skilful feat of conveying completely alien worlds in terms which make them accessible. Neel Mukherjee’s writing is compelling, smooth, riveting, such a pleasure to read. The only improvement one might diffidently suggest is perhaps the structure could have been more deliberated and stronger, made more coherent by weaving the 5 stories together, for a more satisfying narrative experience.
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