No country stands still and India is no exception. Usha KR’s latest novel Boys from Good Families is the story of a boy, of a home, of a city, of a country. Hometowns and houses we lived in are never outgrown, never emotionally discarded though life takes us all over the place, replacing what was with what is.
Ashwath is heir to a prime piece of real estate, his childhood home. It is where he and his sister larked around, where he suffered teenage angst, where he fell in love. Lacking ambition, the vast acreage gives him a sense of space, of continuity. This was before fleeing abroad, ostensibly seeking a better life. But what constitutes ‘a better life’ is not a question easily answered. Life is just life; goes its own way but comes full circle when least expected.
In the 70s Neel Kamal stood tall, newly built, recently white-washed, the greenery around it sun-dappled and dewed, home to a family of four. The author, who has the literary habit of gently cataloguing nuances of change, stays with Neel Kamal through thick and thin, through abandonment and anxiety. And though in the main we hear the narration in Ashwath’s voice, it is the house really that is an equal protagonist, who must age, whose walls must peel and who, in the end, is uncertain about its own future. Will it be divided into two equal parts between the siblings, will it be sold to the highest bidder, will it be pulled down for a swanky, sexier replacement?
In the US, Ashwath becomes Ash, learns that pepperoni is not a variety of pepper, and gets to hold a blonde’s hand with long smooth knuckleless fingers that ‘felt like a soft animal in his clasp’. Here he meets an Indian lady called Sunoh—what her spouse calls her. Here ‘winter progressed and gave way to an uncertain spring’.
His sister Savitri, meanwhile, is back home. The sight of a beautiful bird averts her sudden urge to end life; ‘Woman, 36, contemplates jumping into well—saved by magical peacock’. Also, ex-maid top-work Kaveramma has already sat in their drawing room and dared to propose her son for her! With an iffy hubby and ailing parents, who till their dying day only want to see their son just one more time, she is more daughter and mother than sister or wife. ‘Her brother’s absence was an undertone in the orchestra of their lives’.
Kaveramma’s son is doing well in the US, so is a cousin. Then why is it that he alone is beset with failures, with a dull kind of nostalgia, a prophecy of self-doom? It is not a twist of fate but sheer grit to improve their lot that brings others their newfound prosperity—new generations improving their finances and fate, while in Ashwath’s case there is only the daily dullness of drudgery and of wondering if an acquaintance called Bhagya calls herself Bag for short.
Back in Bengaluru after 25 years, Ashwath is listless, listening all night to ‘the music of the death of the insects’, those buzzing around the tubelight. Everything’s changed, even water. A gadget that’s ‘a jumble of alphabets proclaiming its magical properties—RO+UV+UF—that could, like the gods who had churned the ocean to separate nectar from poison’, convert plain water to potable. It is the house that stops the scatter of him. ‘He had started feeling quite tender towards it, like one would towards an old love who had lost her looks’.
Usha records with delicate dexterity and in dazzling detail the clash between worlds old and new, balancing nostalgia and the practical, familiar and unfamiliar. Prose at once clear-eyed and moving, Boys from Good Families amplifies John Greenleaf Whittier’s words:
The night is mother of the Day
The Winter of the Spring
And even upon old Decay
The greenest mosses cling.