IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine

Vikram Chandra's
Red Earth and Pouring Rain:
Entwining Narratives and Intertextuality.

by Christopher Rollason

[Editor's intro: "Christopher Rollason graduated in
English from Trinity College, Cambridge, and
obtained his Ph.D. from York University, England,
with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe. A former lecturer
in English at Coimbra University, Portugal, he is
currently an international official,and publishes
regularly on the Internet." -- c.j.s.wallia]

Vikram Chandra was born in Delhi in 1961, and now lives in Boston,
Massachusetts. He has risen to deserved prominence among Indo-Anglian
writers with Red Earth and Pouring Rain , his widely-acclaimed debut novel
of 1995, and, more recently, a volume of short stories, Love and Longing
in Bombay.

His writing, while highly individual in feel, shares a crucial trait with
that of his contemporaries Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie -- a quality
which may be called intertextuality, that is, a fascination with linking
stories to stories and books to books in ways that ground the writer's
latter-day subjects in a far, far older tradition of story-telling.
"Tell a story," declares the man-monkey Sanjay at the very end of "Red
Earth" (p. 616); and, indeed, the whole novel consists of a series of
interlinked and interlocking stories stretching across continents and
centuries. With a breathless virtuosity, the narratives propel the reader
backwards and forwards between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(India and England) and the contemporary world (India and the USA).

Fiction intermingles with history and myth: the dramatis personae include the
historical adventurers, the Frenchman Benoit de Boigne (1751-1830), the
German Walter Reinhardt (1720-1778) and the Irishman George Thomas
(1756-1802); indeed, one of the main characters, Sikander, is based on a
historical figure (Chandra himself explains: "At Columbia University in New
York, in the library, I found a translation of the autobiography of Colonel
[Sikander] Skinner, which was what made me write." Chandra's fiction also
incorporates divine personages from the Hindu pantheon: Hanuman the
monkey-god, the elephant-headed Ganesha, and Yama, deity of death. The
stories accumulate, hard on one another's heels: George Thomas loses
himself for years among a strange, archaic forest tribe; later, in
Rajputana, he falls in love with a princess whom he glimpses unveiled when
the elephant bearing her howdah falls into a gully; in Calcutta, a
Shakespeare-obsessed Bengali supervises an English-language printing press;
an English doctor's diary lays bare the seamy underside of his Victorian
public school; a group of students crossing the US by car pick up a hitcher
who identifies herself as a well-known sex-industry worker, and listen to
her confessions; Abhay, an expatriate Indian student brings Amanda, his
American girlfriend, home to the subcontinent, only for the relationship to
collapse under her culture-shock in a monsoon-drenched hill-station. The key
characters are Abhay, the cosmopolitan 1990s expatriate, torn between Indian
and American values; and the colonial-era duo of Sikander, the warrior and
man of action, and Sanjay, the poet who reincarnates as a monkey into
Abhay's late twentieth-century world. Many of the narratives are related in
the maidan (square) outside Abhay's house, by and to a strange company that
includes the family and its neighbours, the reincarnated Sanjay and the
three divinities -- thus merging the contemporary, the historical and the
mythical into a single story-telling circle.

II

 

The stories unfold as if endlessly: the closing words of the book, on page
617, are: "We will start all over again," sending the reader back full
circle to the beginning. It should be obvious enough that Chandra is writing
within a very ancient Indian tradition. The novel's title itself is, as the author
explains in a note, taken from a classical Tamil poem (quoted on p. 233).
Behind the narrative there lies, certainly, the presence of the great Indian
epics; to quote Chandra himself: 'As I wrote it, " Red Earth " seemed a
novel quite remarkably out of fashion. I mean, its form comes from the
stories of the "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana" which my mother
and aunts used to tell me when I was small. This type of spiralling narrative,
with its juxtapositions and unexpected meetings, is an ancient Indian form
"Hanuman the monkey-god is, of course, a major character in the 'Ramayana'.
Markline, the British owner of the Calcutta printing-press, speaks, in condescending Eurocentric fashion, of the conventions of classical Indian narrative:
"Plots meander, veering from grief to burlesque in a minute. Unrelated narratives
entwine and break into each other ... Beginnings are not really beginnings,
middles are unendurably long and convoluted, nothing ever ends"
(p. 335) -- and, whatever the prejudices of the character, the reader may
conclude that our novelist is here describing by stealth the features of his
own narrative, and, by implication, -- favourably-- comparing the Indian
tradition to which he lays claim with the linear, rationalist fictions of
the West.

At one remove from the literature of the subcontinent, there lies another
Eastern presence behind Chandra's text: "A Thousand and One Nights" (many
of whose stories are believed to have originated in India). Indeed, the
linking device of Sanjay the human monkey is a direct reference to the
'Nights.' In the opening episode, Abhay, back in India on vacation, shoots
and wounds a white monkey which has been annoying him. The monkey survives
and is tended by Abhay's parents; inside the house, it displays a surprising
facility with the typewriter, and begins to use that medium to reveal -- in
English -- the tale of its previous life as the poet Sanjay: "On the
twenty-ninth day, Ashok sat before his desk and pulled the cover off a
peculiar black machine, which I was later to realize was a typewriter. Then,
however, I watched curiously as ... the paper rolled up and curled over,
revealing to me, even at that distance, a series of letters from the
language I had paid so much to master. Intrigued, I lowered myself to the
ground and walked over to the machine. I hopped up onto the table and
circled the black machine, running my claws over the keys with their
embossed, golden letters. I touched a key lightly and waited expectantly ...
I pressed a key and an 'a' magically appeared next to the 'i' ... Ashok
looked on with growing uneasiness; clearly, my actions were too deliberate
for a monkey. I learned much too fast." (pp. 9-10). The reader is swiftly
asked to accept the outlandish phenomenon as given: 'I hurriedly typed: " do
not fear me. i am sanjay, born of a good brahmin family .... "' (p. 11); and
later on, discovers the monkey not only typing but writing with the pen:
'"After death? ", I wrote (wondering at the smooth glide of the strange metal
pen over the paper). " Why, this, all this: life again. "' (p. 123).

The simian scribe might appear a typically late-twentieth century
magic-realist device, a deliberate and arbitrary piece of strangeness like
the human-turned-axolotl in one of Julio Cortázar's stories: in fact,
however, not a few readers will have met him before, in the pages of the
"A Thousand and One Nights." As part of the tale, or, rather, the set of
interlocking tales that goes under the name of "The Porter and the Three
Girls of Baghdad," each of three one-eyed dervishes narrates his
life-history. In "The Tale of the Second Dervish," the narrator is
metamorphosed into an ape by a malignant jinnee, but, finding himself in a
king's palace, seizes a scroll of parchment and begins writing poems on it,
thus revealing his estranged humanity: "I sprang upon the men and snatched
the scroll from their hands ... ape though I was, I made a sign to them that
I wished to write. ' Let him try,' said the captain. 'If he scribbles we
will chase him away, but if he writes with a fair hand I shall adopt him as
my son. For never in my life have I seen a more intelligent ape.' I took
the pen, dipped it into the inkpot, and began to write. I wrote out six
couplets, each in a different script ... ' ('Tales from the Thousand and One
Nights', trans. N.J. Dawood, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, new edn.
1973, p. 272). The subsequent adventures of the ape are not paralleled in Chandra
(he is finally restored to human shape at the cost of losing an eye) -- although,
even so, the novel contains a character -- Moulin, a French adventurer -- who
has, like the dervish, lost an eye in a fight and bears "a scar that
stretched across his forehead to an empty eye-socket" - p. 234; but the
similarities between the two episodes are striking ("Clearly, my actions
were too deliberate for a monkey. I learned much too fast; never in my
life have I seen a more intelligent ape"). The parallel is particularly
arresting given that it is through a miraculous act of writing -- the production
of a text within the text -- that Chandra, paradoxically, anchors his eminently
modern fiction in the immemorial story-telling traditions of the East.

III

Chandra is, of course, a member of that generation of subcontinental émigré
writers whose life and work straddle East and West; and the text of Red Earth,
as might be expected, is also pervaded by references to theliterary heritage
of the West. In this respect, Chandra's narrative resembles Michael Ondaatje's
prize-winning novel of 1992, The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury Press,
1992; new edn., 1997). Ondaatje, who is a Canadian resident, born in Sri Lanka
and bearing a Dutch surname, presents in his novel, among other stories,
an intense, but ultimately doomed, wartime relationship that unfolds in a
Tuscan villa between Hana, the Canadian nurse who tends the patient of the title,
and Kip, a Sikh sapper in the British army. He thus explores the problematic
subject of East-West communication, a theme also taken up by Chandra
in the Abhay-Amanda relationship. Ondaatje's text deploys a formidable
arsenal of literary allusions -- though from the Western tradition rather
than from the East. In the villa's dilapidated library, Hana takes up a
stray volume of Fenimore Cooper (p. 61), or Stendhal (p. 222); she reads
aloud to her patient, and the novel's text directly quotes the famous
opening of Kipling's Kim ("He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride
the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform" - p. 93); Kip, in a flashback
to his recruitment in England by Lord Suffolk, recalls how his gaze focused
on a copy of Melville's "Pierre, or the Ambiguities' (p. 188).
The density and recurrence of these intertextual references --
which stretch even to the Bible (pp. 93, 294)-- suggest that Ondaatje is
deliberately placing his own novel within a much older tradition in which
sense is made of a chaotic world through the written word: the bedridden
'English patient' recalls of another character: "He was a man who wrote,
who interpreted the world ... When we came on messages on our travels
-- any wording, contemporary or ancient, Arabic on a mud wall, a note
in English written in chalk on the fender of a jeep -- he would read it and
then press his hand upon it as if to touch its possible deeper meanings" (p. 243).

Chandra's text follows what may be considered a similar intertextual
strategy. There is explicit allusion to some of the same writers -- to
Melville ("Mrs Christiansen has started on " Moby Dick "' - p. 196), and,
crucially for the Anglo-Indian theme, to Kipling: Abhay discovers a copy of
Kim at Amanda's parents house (p. 588); and the Irishman George Thomas
finds himself "taken for a Pathan" thanks to his "sunburnt skin" (p. 125) --
a detail which may recall Kimball O'Hara, the all-but Indianized Irish
orphan who blends effortlessly into the backstreets of Lahore. Shakespeare,
the cult of whom persists in India to this day, briefly appears centre-stage
in the episode of the Calcutta printing works and its overseer and devotee
of the English dramatist, Sorkar (p. 316). The later adventures of Dr.Sarthey
-- whom Sanjay, after following him to London, eventually discovers
to be the perpetrator of the infamous 'Jack the Ripper' murders -- have
something of the atmosphere of Stevenson's "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde."

Chandra's novel is, then, laced with literary allusions of both the explicit
and the hidden type. A number of the intertextual relationships thus set up
merit particular comment.

IV

Chandra's text also contains a fascinating trace of a writer who has
himself been seen as the modern high priest of intertextuality, namely Jorge
Luis Borges. Towards the end of 'Red Earth', Sanjay receives the gift of
longevity from the god Yama, in exchange for the agonizing loss of his
tongue. He laboriously tracks his adversary Sarthey from India to England,
passing through endless vicissitudes on the way: "In the Punjab, on the
banks of the Ravi, Sanjay was assaulted by robbers ... and left for dead in
the water ...; near Kabul he was kidnapped by a minor chieftain and enslaved
for thirteen years in a barren village near Herat ...; in Basra he was given
a place on the deck of a ship sailing to Cairo ...; he walked into a sandy
wilderness that seemed endless ...; when he emerged in Jerusalem he was
detained as a madman in a squalid prison ...; when on the outskirts of Jaffa
he found an open window in a merchant's house, he entered and took bags of
gold and silver ...; then a passage to Crete and on to Otranto was simple,
and the walk up the long length of Italy to Rome was nothing but easy"
(pp.546-547). This arduous journey, elongated beyond all verisimilitude by the
device of the traveller's miraculous longevity, in some ways recalls a
comparable sequence in Borges' tale of the marvellous, "The Immortal" ("El
inmortal," collected in "El Aleph," 1949; trans. in "Labyrinths,"
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Here, the narrator, a Roman legionary who has
lost his mortality by plunging into a magic river, recounts his wanderings:
"I travelled over new kingdoms, new empires. In the fall of 1066, I fought
at Stamford Bridge ... In the seventh century of the Hegira, in the suburb
of Bulaq, I transcribed with measured calligraphy, in a language I have
forgotten, in an alphabet I do not know, the seven adventures of Sinbad and
the history of the City of Bronze. In the courtyard of a jail in Samarkand I
played a great deal of chess. In Bikaner I professed the science of
astrology and also in Bohemia. In 1638 I was at Kolozsvar and later in
Leipzig ... On the fourth of October, 1921, the " Patna," which was taking
me to Bombay, had to cast anchor in a port on the Eritrean coast.' (pp.146-147).
The resemblance between the two sets of wanderings is striking;
there are certain differences (Chandra uses a less drawn-out time-scale than
Borges, and Sanjay's travels are towards a purpose and a goal, which is not
the case with Borges' wanderer), but in both cases there is a sensation of
the arbitrary and the magical, in a bizarre odyssey that seems everlasting
but finally ceases: in the end Sanjay dies to be reincarnated and Borges'
soldier becomes an ordinary mortal once more. Borges, it may also be noted,
evokes the "Thousand and One Nights" (Sinbad the sailor), in an episode
that, through the calligraphic detail, even suggests the ape of "The Porter,"
and also refers to India, the original home of the famous tale-sequence
(the " Patna," Bombay). The parallel may be considered especially striking
if we recall that Borges' work as a whole has been seen as a summation or
condensation of the entire literary heritage; in the words of the American
critic Harold Bloom ("The Western Canon," 1994; London: Macmillan, 1995),
Borges' work "draws upon the entire Western Canon and more" (p. 471).
Chandra, it may be, has drawn in turn on the Argentinian master in constructing
his own all-inclusive, multi-dimensional story of stories.

V

 

Another episode contains what seems to be an equally significant reference
to Edgar Allan Poe - another master of the enigmatic short tale (and a
crucial influence on Borges), who also, in 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of
Scheherazade' (1845), offered up his own eighth voyage of Sinbad, an ironic
pendant to the 'Thousand and One Nights'. Poe is mentioned by name in 'Red
Earth' (in one of the American sequences, a character called Tom confesses:
'I read Poe behind the gym' - p. 196), and, as in the case of Borges, a tale
of his appears to lie behind one of Chandra's episodes. The story in
question is 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' (again from 1845). This is a
tale of mesmerism, set in Virginia in 1827, which includes an inset
narrative that flashes back to an episode in the conquest of Bengal by the
British East India Company under Warren Hastings --the revolt of Cheyte
Singh, Rajah of Benares, in 1780 (according to Poe; actually 1781 -- Poe
found the historical circumstances, and numerous details for his story, in
an essay on Hastings by Thomas Macaulay, published in 1841).

In Chandra's novel, George Thomas, in the course of his wanderings, enters
the warrior-land of Rajputana (now Rajasthan, and ironically the scenario
of India's recent nuclear tests), and the reader is told: "Here, Raja Cheit
Singh of Benares had come to marry off one of his sons, and Thomas was
retained as part of a cavalry escort." His new employer is in a "desperate
hurry," anxious to return home as soon as possible: "the Rajah was
threatened by his eastern neighbour, that profiteering, hungry amoeba-like
being that had not yet metamorphosed into an empire, the East India Company.

An old question of ascendancy and tribute had simmered for months ... and
the enemy had taken advantage of the Rajah's absence to escalate the level
of conflict to open manoeuvring in preparation for war, for invasion and
besieging ..." (p. 126). This is the same Cheit/Cheyte Singh as appears in
Poe's tale, at a slightly earlier stage of his career. In 1781, Hastings
demanded tribute from the Rajah, who refused to pay; the British took
revenge by imprisoning him in his own palace, and Poe's narrative focuses on
Cheyte Singh's dramatic escape. It was a short-lived triumph, however, as
soon afterwards the Company incorporated Benares into its dominions. In "A
Tale of the Ragged Mountains," "the man escaping by the string of turbans,
was Cheyte Singh himself' (E.A. Poe, ed. H. Beaver, 'The Science Fiction of
Edgar Allan Poe', Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p. 107).

The parallels between Poe's and Chandra's texts go beyond this single
episode; there is also a structural similarity, for both fictions alternate
between India and the United States. The Benares episode appears in Poe's
tale as a waking dream experienced by the protagonist, Augustus Bedloe --
which appears to have been put into his head, via distant hypnosis, by his
physician, a Dr Templeton, who had actually served as an officer under
Hastings and had witnessed all the events in person. Poe's story thus moves
from Virginia to India, then back to Virginia again. One may also note that
the theme of the manipulative doctor, on which Poe's tale centers (Bedloe
dies soon after the dream -- supposedly from a poisonous leech, but the
reader may suspect murder by Templeton), returns in Chandra's novel in the
shape of the Jekyll-and-Hyde figure Dr Sarthey. "A Tale of the Ragged
Mountains" is Poe's only story including an Indian theme; nonetheless, it
strikingly anticipates certain aspects of Chandra's novel, by combining a
structure based on East/West alternation with the motifs of imperial warfare
in India and exploitative professionals in the West.

VI

The intertextual element in Chandra goes beyond the literary tradition,
Eastern or Western, and also takes in implicit reference to contemporary
Anglo-Indian writing -- specifically, to his celebrated coeval, Salman
Rushdie. The critic Lucy Hughes-Hallett (writing in the Sunday Times;
quoted in the introductory matter to the paperback edition of 'Red Earth')
has observed: "Chandra has clearly read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children ... He is not so much Rushdie's imitator, as a writer who
belongs, like him, in a tradition of storytellers stretching back in the
east to Scheherazade.' These comments are surely apposite, for Rushdie, like
Chandra, has drawn quite visibly on the 'Thousand and One Nights' for his
fictions of the contemporary subcontinent. The 'Calf Mountain' of 'Grimus'
(1977) is the magical Mountain of Kaf, as mentioned several times in the
'Nights'; at the beginning of 'Shame', Omar Khayyam Shakil imagines his home
mountains populated by angels who could have stepped out of the seventh
voyage of Sinbad (Rushdie, 'Shame', 1983; London: Picador, 1984, p. 23; cf.
'Tales from the Thousand and One Nights', p. 160); and Rushdie's fable for
children and adults, 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories', transparently evokes
the famous story-cycle, in the characters' names Haroun and Rashid
(recalling the famous Caliph of the 'Nights', Haroun-al-Rashid -- Rushdie,
'Haroun and the Sea of Stories', 1990; London, Granta Books, 1991, p. 60).

Rushdie and Chandra further resemble each other in their use of intertextual
references to Western literature; Chandra's literary allusions are
paralleled in, for instance, 'The Moor's Last Sigh', a novel which puts down
Borgesian roots in the literary tradition by overtly recalling the likes of
Lewis Carroll and - again - Edgar Allan Poe (Rushdie, 'The Moor's Last
Sigh', London: Jonathan Cape, 1995, pp. 238, 360). There are also visible
echoes of Rushdie in the substance of "Red Earth," and Hughes-Hallett
is right to point the curious reader towards "Midnight's Children," Rushdie's
twice-garlanded 'Booker of Bookers' (1981; London: Picador, 1982).
Both novels are modern epics of the subcontinent, stretching from the British
era to the present day. Both, too, are structured, inter alia, around a duo
formed by two male characters: in Rushdie, Saleem and Shiva; in Chandra,
Sanjay and Sikander. There are certain similarities between the two duos,
heightened by the magic-realist mode employed by both novelists:
Major Shiva ('the war hero' - 'Midnight's Children', p. 411) and Sikander
('bravest of the brave' - 'Red Earth', p. 440), are both confident, outgoing
men of action, with whom Saleem and Sanjay are contrasted as more introverted,
insecure figures. Both pairs are linked by strange circumstances of birth:
Saleem and Shiva are changelings, exchanged at birth by an ayah's machinations,
but are also both members of the privileged group of 'midnight's children',
born on the stroke of Independence and endowed with magical powers
('to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war ... and to me ... the ability to
look into the hearts and minds of men' -- 'Midnight's Children', p. 200);
Sikander and Sanjay are linked by the manner of their birth, both of them
conceived from miraculous, glowing laddoos (sweetmeats) initiatically eaten
by their mothers ('Red Earth', pp. 153-154). The shadow of part-European
origins hovers over Sikander, for, the miracle of his birth apart, his father
is an English soldier, John Hercules Skinner; while, similarly, Rushdie's
Saleem believes that, if Shiva's 'mother' is actually his own, his (Saleem's)
true father may be a Bombay Englishman.

There are, of course, also significant differences between the fictional
trajectories of the two pairs. Sanjay actually gains in self-confidence and
physical presence across the novel, finally acquiring -- at a terrible price
-- magical longevity, and going on to kill Sikander, by now his deadly rival.
Saleem, by contrast, born with a miraculous faculty of second sight (or
hearing), in the end loses that power when he becomes a victim of the
sterilization campaign of the Emergency; while Shiva goes from strength to
strength, rising from humble origins to become an officer in the Indian
army, and is one of the handful of the "midnight's children" who keep their
magic powers intact. In addition, Chandra's narrative strategy contrasts
markedly to Rushdie's. One may reasonably claim that Rushdie's four major
novels to date - 'Midnight's Children', 'Shame', 'The Satanic Verses' and
'The Moor's Last Sigh' -- form, taken together, the author's work-in-progress
towards the subcontinental epic of the twentieth century; and that 'Red Earth
and Pouring Rain' reveals a comparable ambition on Chandra's part.

Both novelists describe a wide historical and geographical arc, linking
contemporary India (and in Rushdie's case, Pakistan) to the epoch of
European domination (with Chandra going back further into the Anglo-Indian
past than Rushdie), and also to the Western world outside (Britain in 'The
Satanic Verses', the USA in 'Red Earth'). Both include, in their dramatis
personae, invented characters alongside historical figures (Rushdie choosing
more rather celebrated figures than Chandra -- the Gandhis in 'Midnight's
Children', Nehru in 'Moor' -- but also keeping them more in the background,
with the signal exception of 'Shame,' where the main characters are barely
disguised versions of the Bhuttos and Zia-ul-Haq).

Despite these parallels in content, Rushdie's narrative technique is --
however experimental in other ways -- decidedly linear, at least in three
novels of the four. 'Midnight's Children', 'Shame' and 'Moor' all start
their family histories around the turn of the century under the Raj, and
gradually usher the reader, in approximately chronological fashion and
allowing for flashbacks, fast-forwards and narratorial comments, up to
today's subcontinent and the time of writing (the exception is "The Satanic
Verses" (1988), a novel structurally rather more similar to "Red Earth" in
its disorienting alternations of time and place, but which has, for
extraneous reasons which I scarcely need mention, rarely been examined from
the point of view of narrative construction). Chandra's method contrasts
with that typically employed by Rushdie, as being visibly and consciously
non-linear, confronting East and West, past and present, in a patchwork
quilt of multiple narratives that refuses any notion of straightforward
linear development.

VII

There is no doubt, however, that Chandra has staked out his novelist's
claim on the same time-honoured ground as Rushdie -- the territory of the
ancient planetary tradition of story-telling, be it of East or West. In
'Haroun and the Sea of Stories', Rushdie offers the reader a metaphor for
the fictions of the world: "The Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact
the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here
in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions
of themselves, to join up with other stories and to become yet other
stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of
Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive'
(p. 72). Haroun's father, Rashid the professional story-teller, loses and
finally regains his gift; and the sea of stories risks being poisoned
forever, but in the end is preserved. Chandra, too, is surely drawing on
that same age-old ocean of story, 'not dead but alive'. In 'Love and Longing
in Bombay', whose five stories are related by the same linking narrator,
'Shanti', the final tale, culminates in a marriage created out of the woman's
genius for oral narrative ("By the time Shanti had finished telling
the story, the train was an extra two minutes late" - p. 251).

At a crucial moment in 'Red Earth', with the listeners still clustering on
the maidan to hear the tales, it seems as if, here too, the sea of stories
may have to dry up: "Today the television cameras came, and also the death
threats. We have been warned by several organizations that the story-telling
must stop. The groups on the very far right -- of several religions -- object
to the " careless use of religious symbology, and the ceaseless insults to
the sensitivities of the devout ". The far-left parties object to the "sensationalization
and falsification of history, and the pernicious Western influences on our young."
Everyone objects to the sex, except the audience.' (p. 419). The cultural reference
behind the "death threats" needs no glossing: the forces of religious and
political obscurantism seem intent on silencing the narrative flow, in
Vikram Chandra's fictional world as in Salman Rushdie's all-too-real universe.
Still, the wise monkey-god Hanuman insists: "Go on ... Don't be afraid of
what you have to tell ... Tell the story" (p. 420). Even when, at the very end,
a listener is tragically injured by a gratuitous terrorist bomb, the story-telling
refuses to stop.The characters go on weaving their tales; the reader reads on; and Vikram Chandra, in his first novel, offers the reading public of both East and West
a tribute to the age-old, yet ever-new, power of the word to bridge cultures
across time and space, in the act of weaving "narratives that entwine."