And I’m back!
Sorry for the unexpected hiatus. The last few months have been quite busy for me – we’ve temporarily moved house (renovation underway), all my books are in boxes (don’t ask how many!), and we couldn’t get our internet service transferred. Now that things have calmed down on the homefront (plus I need a distraction from current events), I’m back to blogging, and I must say I’ve really missed it.
I’ve been reading a lot, so there’s plenty of backlog to work through, but bear with me, and I’ll do my best to keep up.
I’ll start with the book I read for Flips Flipping Pages’ May book discussion on Indian literature: “The Leaving of Things” by Jay Antani.
We were tasked to read one work of fiction for the book discussion, and I was supposed to read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (because I have a signed copy!), but I didn’t have the energy to go rooting through my boxes of books (*groan, don’t ask me how many) so I was checking out booklists online. I couldn’t make up my mind, so I put off choosing.
Then, you know how these sites keep track of your search history and then email you recommendations based on what you’ve been looking for? Well a day later, I got a recommendation from Amazon for the Kindle book “The Leaving of Things.”
I liked the cover (ha!) and the premise seemed like it was something I would read. Plus I got encouraged by the awards the book received and the fact that it was 70% off, at only $3.99, so I figured it was worth trying out.
Winner of the 2014 International Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the 2014 Kindle Book Award, “The Leaving of Things” is the story of Indian-American teenager Vikram Mistry, who moves back to Ahmedabad, India with his family, after having grown up in the States.
Vikram struggles to come to terms with his new life in India and his Indian roots: he has to adjust to living in the “backwater” village of Ghatlodiya (where he contracts dysentery less than a week after arrival, after an incident where he falls out of a rickshaw and he swallows some stagnant rainwater), improve his pidgin Gujarati, deal with antiquated education in a conservative local university (which had to be bribed to accept him), and make new friends in school.
I enjoyed the point of view of this novel. I like that it’s male POV (which I hope to see more of in the emerging New Adult Genre), but accessible for both male and female readers. It’s also refreshingly candid, succeeding in illustrating the reality that Vikram finds himself in: the puttering of the rickshaw; the “smoky, dusty, dung-scented air”; the strict rules separating the male and female students at the university; the squalor in the streets; the unfamiliar language (he only speaks pidgin Gujarati); and copious amounts of chai (which I also consumed while reading this book).
The growth of Vikram’s character is another aspect of this novel worth mentioning. Vikram does not having an easy time of it, to say the least; and the fact that the novel is set in the 1980’s compounds it – he is cut off from the life he knows from the US – no friends, no girlfriend, no burgers, and he is reduced to checking the mailbox daily and reading the one English newspaper that comes to his library to stay connected. He starts out as melodramatic teenager horror-struck about his new circumstances (“India may have been the land of his roots, but it was the land of my exile”) — and as the novel progresses, he learns to make the best of the situation as he grows to understand the circumstances of his family and comes to terms with his cultural identity. I thought this coming of age was well-executed in the novel, and by the resolution of the novel, we see Vikram taking charge of his life and forging his own path – he’s far removed from the brat we encounter at the start of the novel, and we know he’ll be okay.
The novel is more introspective than plot-driven, and there are some beautiful lines from the book, like this passage on gratitude:
“And I realized that there is a gratitude that cannot be articulated. No words I knew, and no picture I could ever make could be equal to it. It was a gratitude you spent your whole life trying to live up to – you tried in the choices you made, the paths you took. You tried in the sum total of your actions. This, I sensed, was a rare kind of gratitude. It made me feel like a small child.”
Finally, I love how the novel explores the phenomenology of leaving – it strikes a chord in me (I miss my house and my neighborhood, even if we’re just a few blocks away and we’re moving back home in a few more months; it’s just not the same…), and this is my favorite passage from the book:
“When you leave, you leave everything. Not just your brother, your mother, your father, uncle, aunt, and cousin—you leave everything. You leave the light in your room; you leave the tiles of the floor you walked on from your desk to the balcony. You leave the sound of running water as the cleaning girl washed your clothes. You leave peacocks in the courtyard cawing under the trees, the sandalwood and jasmine and oils anointing theair of the college corridors, the play of wind from summer to monsoon to winter and back to summer. You leave arguments and conversation, notes recorded into a tape recorder. You leave Vinod to his choices, Pradeep to his songs, and Devasia to his sureness of purpose. You leave the hallways of students you avoided out of shyness. You leave the aromas of snacks at a vendor’s stall on C.G. Road, the route you walked to and from the dairy counter or the barbershop while the afternoon sun silenced everything but the call of crows by the roadside. You leave the scent of the wash hanging on the line, the sun creating lemony trapezoids through the saris, and the squares of the balusters. You leave the bed where you slept and the desk where you read and wrote letters, listening to your music in retreat from the alien rhythms of an alien world.
How could it ever be that way again? By what trick could I bring all that back? If I could have it back, it wouldn’t be the same anyway. Because the discoveries would already have been made. What you left behind had its time and its purpose, and all became memory, a sentiment, a lesson learned, and history. I told myself you had to leave; it could never be again.”
I’m not usually big on reading recommendations, especially when an algorithm does the picking, but this one really paid off.
***
The Leaving of Things by Jay Antani, 4.5/5 stars
P.S. Be back soon with another post – hope to keep this up before things get too crazy again. I expect another disruption when we move back home in a few months – but by then, at least I’ll finally have brand new bookshelves to show you!