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The
Hero's Walk
by
Anita Rau Badami
Review by Aparita Bhandari
I
fell in love with the beautiful cover of the book, which
is basically an imprint of a lovely Kolam sari, and had
an intense desire to possess the book solely because of
it. But therein lies a problem. Flip to the back of the
book and you read the review of Tamarind Mem, Badami's debut
novel, by the Ottawa Citizen, "Intoxicating... as jewel-bright
and weightless as a silk sari shaken out of its folds."
You read a piece like that and groan inwards, thinking,
"Oh no, not another exoticized work of fiction..."
Fortunately, The Hero's Walk 'tries' not to create the fiction
that a lot of people like to believe is India.
Despite
sundry reviews that laud the book for being 'Rushdie-esque,'
the book has nothing to do with Rushdie. It is as far as
magic-realism and opacity as possible. One could perhaps
draw a much more successful comparison with the immensely
transparency of Vikram Seth's works. Still, if it is absolutely
necessary to draw parallels, I must say that I was reminded
of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things within paragraphs
of the first chapter. Badami shares the lyric impulse that
Roy loves to revel in, and balances a very precarious line
by trying to avoid the sensual import that pervades Roy's
work. Just as the Roy's Ayemenem sweltered in the heat of
May, Badami's Toturpuram is dazed by the July heat that
'drapes' it. However, where Ayemenem ended up reading like
a sexual paradise, Toturpuram is a city that also suffers
from the periodic bouts of dysentery, diarrhea and houses
with sewage floating in them.
Badami
is good at description; she draws up Toturpuram in front
of our eyes in all its magnificence and depravity with great
precision, in accordance with the characteristics of realism.
She is also especially good with the performative aspect
of the book, creating a coterie of characters that are wonderfully
idiosyncratic: Sripathi, the patriarch of the family who
vents his spleen by writing letters to the editor under
the pseudonym of Pro Bono Publico, Nirmala, the sharp-tongued
wife, Amayya, the eccentric grandmother, Putti, the yet-unmarried
forty-two years old sister, etc. One gets to 'hear' the
various characters through their idiomatic dialogue that
brings in the notion of language, one of the many themes
that South Asian diasporic novels like to play with. However,
as the novel meanders on, one gets the feeling that 'language'
becomes merely a vehicle for the plot to be carried on.
In fact, this issue also becomes a problem at times when
those who are not aware of the context. Since the novel
does not distinguish whether various characters are speaking
English, English infused with a Tamil sensibility, or even
in Tamil that is being translated by the narrator, the novel
not only refuses to deal with the complexity of the issue
of language but can also leave an uninformed reader merely
with images of people speaking with a strange syntax.
Even
though one senses a valiant attempt to fight the current
trend of 'creating India', there are times when the novel
seems to fall (unwittingly) into the trap. It is hardly
surprising to find out that Badami did her M.A. in Creative
Writing, as is evident from the textbook techniques employed
in the novel. I too followed the story of Sripathi trying
to come to terms with the death of the daughter he had disowned
for marrying a Canadian, and the arrival of his Canada-born
granddaughter Nandana. Yet, try as I did, I could not find
the book's agenda. There seems to be an interesting reversal
of the immigrant experience as Nandana goes to India to
live with the grandparents she has never seen, but that
theory does not hold water for long.
The novel, then, raises some interesting questions as to
which way South Asian diasporic writing is headed. What
do we expect from it? How would we differentiate works of
the South Asian diaspora from other works? And in what way
does Badami's work fit into the South Asian Diaspora? These
questions become especially important in light of the fact
that even as I enjoyed reading The Hero's Walk, the enjoyment
heightened by the fact that I was familiar with it's context,
I was still plagued by a feeling of unease with the novel's
overall lack of agenda, especially since various reviews
that I read claimed an affinity with the Rao family and
the country that lies beyond the seas by virtue of this
novel.
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