Jeet Thayil’s new book begins and ends by the Muvattupuzha River. “And so, let us go then, you and I, to that riverside, to meet Ammu who has an ancestral home there, Anniethottam. Let us meet George, the man Ammu weds, let us attend their hesitant courtship, their wedding where Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is discussed and a call to revolution made!”
A memoir of the author’s parents, you ask. Well, the dedication is to ‘my mother Ammu George’, but two pages on, the author firmly states,‘The real names and photographs in these pages are fictions. The fictional names and events are documentary. The truth, as we know, lies in between.’
This sophistry aside, the book is a beautifully written memoir/travelogue/family saga that spans genders, switching the narrative effortlessly from a father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, a cousin, some uncles and aunts. We are told just enough about all of them to form some kind of opinion, but it is clear that the writer writes the book because he has to write it, not to garner appreciation.
The prose is decidedly unsentimental. Yet, typical of this writer, lyrical; the reader absorbs the family saga silently, moved beyond words. The dammed-up sentiment breaks through once in a while, in the telling of the life and times of Ammu, the strong woman who holds home and family together. She plays the market in Hong Kong, and after the same markets crash, picks herself and the pieces up and moves on. Ammu, who becomes somewhat inured to managing everything by herself, grows a stoic exterior, learns to cope when her journalist husband has them moving cities, (Hong Kong, NYC, Bombay, Bangalore) countries and jobs, when he goes to jail (thus acquiring in the words of the narrator notoriety, fame and unemployability, all at once), and when he eventually retreats into silence. She knows what it takes time for the other members of her family to realise: that when an Elsewherean fetches up in a new place, there’s no sense of belonging or welcome.
George is looked at through a lens devoid of sentiment, described as a man with a grand idea of himself. The legendary journalist, known to readers across India and Southeast Asia for decades now, is a keen observer of people, places and practices. He is prone to quoting from the Hindu scriptures (he has an interesting take on travel in the Ramay ana), and at one point, his brother-in-law wonders if George is also a communist…which would make him a Hindu Christian Communist! George turns that old saying ‘water finds its level’ on its head; his take is, ‘a river cannot rise above its source.’
The story Jeet Thayil tells is an engaging one, despite the laconic tone of its telling. The Hong Kong chapter, where George sets up Asiaweek, is interesting; the Vietnam one, where the author goes tracking some personal history, is even more interesting. The Germany account, wherein the author tells Germans about their own George Grosz and Otto Dix, and eventually gets a black eye, is rather esoteric, while the China chapter, where the author gets a lesson on slavery Indian style, is both frank and funny. In Paris, the author searches for and finds Baudelaire’s tomb as a sort of tribute to his uncle, who was obsessed with the poet. In Bangalore, we hear the gardener Govindappa’s story of his travels during the pandemic. And in the end, everything loops back to the Muvattupuzha River, the river of three rivers.
The author reflects at length on being an Elsewherean. Everyone is from elsewhere, he says. We are drawn to those whose experiences mirror our own; migrants and emigrants, post-colonials, the displaced, those who’ve been set apart by history or pigmentation and are looking for refuge. To know history is to know loss, and the displaced know it best.
All the Elsewhereans in the book are tormented in their ways and find their coping strategies. One buries his aspirations in silence, another cloaks herself with pragmatism. A third refuses to look the ghost of his dead wife in the eye. Yet another immerses himself in Baudelaire, one renounces social media where she was once a star. They all have a place marked for them, but wonder if they have claimed it. And it is the sensitive portrayals of these people and their torments that have this book rise several notches above other books I have read this year.