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BOOKS
The Unbearable Weight Of Half-Truths
Evening Is the Whole Day
By Preeta Samarasan
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published in: 2008
Pages: 340
Price: Rs 395
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"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" – so goes the famous opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Set in the 1980s in "the godforsaken strip of land in the South China Sea" Preeta Samarasan's debut novel has spun a tale around an unhappy Malaysian family of Indian descent, the Rajasekharans.
The novel draws its storytelling strength primarily by tapping the imperfections in the lives of the members of the well-established and prosperous Rajasekharan family. By concentrating on the fortunes of this rich Tamil immigrant family in the context of the troubled emergence of a multiethnic Malay nation Samarasan has tried to map yet another space in the wide dispersal of the South Asian diaspora.
Samarasan draws the reader in with her deft management of the story line and a polyglot language that is a delightful blend of the multiethnic cuisine and other cultural trivia. Readers not familiar with the cultural mix of Malaysia – Malay, Tamil and Chinese – may find the first few pages tough going. But the discomfort, if any, would soon be dispelled by the human interest of the story rendered with all the intimacy and surprise of Samarasan's distinctive voice.
The author's style lingers over details of character and incident to build an engaging tale of a celebrated family developing putrefying cracks from within. Her language is leisurely and evocative, best suited to build an atmosphere that supplements the messy inner lives of the bedraggled characters, as in the sentence "…that stifling day gives way to a cool, breezy dusk, flickering with mothwings and stars and the gentle regret of the streetlights."
The novel gains by dwelling on the specific fortune of the family inhabiting the Big House on Kingfisher Lane in Ipoh, characterized as a "fishbowl town" by the US-bound eldest daughter. There are riveting, though pungent, portraits of Father Rajasekharan and Mother Rajasekharan and their three children – Uma, Suresh and Aasha. The death of Paati, the ageing grandmother and wily patriarch and eviction of the domestic help, Chellam provide the initial impetus of the story.
Samarasan does confine herself to a small domestic canvas most of the time but she keeps stoking the reader's curiosity by skillfully switching chronology and viewpoints. Even the revelations – the skeletons in the family cupboard – are woven into the structure of the narrative at strategic points.
Out of a total of 15 chapters, 10 are marked by specific dates beginning September 1979 for a period of one year. The remaining chapters provide crucial background details to the spectacular rise of the family and the intricate beginnings of a new nation. Mostly, though, it is the individual quirky members of the Rajasekharan clan that propel the narrative engine, and the extensive reference to the famous 1969 Kuala Lumpur Riots in a specific chapter provides the backdrop to the birth of a baby boy to lawyer Rajasekharan's wife in a strife-torn city.
The attempted interweaving of the personal and the political is there from the beginning but the political is mostly inflected and overshadowed by a copious unravelling of personal oddities. What stands out at the end is a sense of the unalterable nature of individual fates.
The title of the novel is an extract from a short poem of classic Tamil literature. Not only does it serve as an epigraph to the Rajasekharan saga it also underscores the inevitable pangs of separation in human relationships. It is interesting to note the imperceptible and sometimes cruel workings of time on intimate relationships – how these wither away and die or take new wings and newer directions over which the human agents have little control.
One comes away with the desolate image of little Asha going round the Big House in search of a loving parent or sibling and encountering visitors from another world at every turn – Paati the dead grandmother and Mr McDougall's drowned daughter who was pulled into a watery grave by her desperate mother. For Samarasan's purposes the potent metaphor of the evening offers the right note of melancholy promise – so thoughtfully worked out in the twisted fates of her characters in modern-day Malaysia.
Ram Shankar Nanda
The author is Professor, Department of English, Sambalpur University
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