An American pilot meets Bengali girl during World War 2. At its core, Papri Sen Sri Raman’s Song of India would sound like a simple love story. But as they say, it’s the details that matter. And the details are what make this story worth telling.
The American pilot, Michael, is posted to Jorhat in Assam in the early 1940s, to help set up an air base and a supply line to the China frontier. Michael is an accomplished cello player, and so, during breaks, he travels to Calcutta to play with the Calcutta Symphony Orchestra. He finds a place to stay with a Bengali family that is also interested in music. He’s welcomed as a possible reincarnation of a lost cousin. At this home, he meets Swarnalata, the daughter of his host, and the two bond over music. Calcutta is a hotbed of western classical music in the last years of the Raj, and Michael fits in well. As the months go by, and Michael makes multiple visits to Calcutta, he and Swarnalata grow closer together. But fate has many surprises in store for them.
The story is written mainly as the characters narrating to each other, which provides a good inside-out, personalised view of the events. Michael’s slow realisation of his affection for Swarnalata, his feeling of being an outsider yet belonging to Calcutta, his sensations of the sounds and colour of India, all are conveyed through his eyes and words. Or when Swarnalata, stuck in a bad situation, decides to make the best of it. These internal narratives are some of the best parts of the book.
Sen has made another interesting decision, story-wise: the timeline covered is part of a larger continuum. Several major events have taken place before this story began, and any number of things will continue to happen afterwards. The practised reader is used to employing the Chekhov’s Gun principle to understand why each story component is introduced into a book, but Song of India deliberately uses unresolved elements and unexplained history to make the story realistic, and the characters come alive.
The part that doesn’t work as well is the pages-long dry explanations of historical detail. Sen uses Michael, a pilot, to plug in a lot of exposition about the efforts to set up air bases, to create supply chains to China, to transport goods from the western Indian sea routes to the eastern war front. There are long lists of all the bases, of the various types of airplanes, of the chain of command, numerous anecdotes about the pilot’s life, and so on. When Swarnalata’s family is travelling, there are descriptions of the various temples and points they go through. Considering that the book is being told through narration, wouldn’t the characters have already internalised these things? A better editor, me thinks, would have cut these short, or at least have shifted focus to the characters’ emotional response to the environment instead.
Still, there are many passages of good writing that stay with you, and the basic story keeps you interested. The milieu of the book feels fresh and unexplored. The book is short, atmospheric, read in spite of a few editorial mis-steps.