Eastward Ho!: Kalyan Ray's remaking of Shakespeare

Eastwords is a brilliant--and at times brilliantly flawed--work, that brings two of Shakespeare's greatest works, and references to some more, on a level, dovetails them into a seamless timeframe, transforms the characters into more ancient and more mythical ones than what they have been, and generally, orientalizes their content, raising million dollar post-colonial questions like 'Why did they come from their cold western coasts with incomplete maps, cannons, desperation and Christianity to the East?' along the way that would indeed be the envy of question setters of a PC 101 undergrad course. As the title suggests, Eastwords almost rivals the 'Punpundit'--who else?--'Bill Babu' (these are some of the terms of endearment addressed to Shakespeare) with its seemingly endless parades of puns. So endless, indeed, that it seems Eastwords should have fared better with a name like Feastwords. If Willybaba were alive today, he'd probably be turning green with jealousy or pink with merriment. The possibility lies either way. For, Kalyan Ray's novel is both an edifice that stands on its own solid foundation, and an echoing chamber where once words release their echoes, the repetition becomes endless, and after a while, indistinct.

But then, this minor carping aside, one might point out that the novel was meant to be an echo, in the first place, of the words spoken by the 'beringed Bardshah of Britain.' Or is it a ventriloquist's show, with the dhoti clad, wiry, toothless Shiekh Piru playing the dummy? For an answer, let us posit a compromise, one that brings us nearer to the truth of the matter: Eastwords is a sparkling edifice all right, but with a huge echoing chamber inside.

On that happy note, let me plead for its inclusion in a Postmodernism 101 course. The novel indeed is a postmodern tour de force, with its self-conscious artistry, its careless abandon of verisimilitude, its colourful world of parody and pastiche, and its super self-reflexive plot/event line. Kalyan Ray doesn't even spare himself--he metamorphoses into Caliban, the aquabat (a new coinage in honour of Ray!) son of Sukumari (a.k.a. Sycorax). The eponymous character goes about his business in the novel (including making Pandeyji's--Prospero's--daughter Meera--guess who-- big-bellied) with the same abandon as Ray does in writing the novel. Indeed, the novel's big-bellying business comes in overripe passages heavy with loaded, velvety descriptions, such as this:

'The fruits were jade orbs with the suggestion of white ripeness under the stretched surface. Around the weightiness of jackfruit hung the sphere of its ripe smell, a heady neighbourhood of growth and tumid stillness. The roseapple tree was bent with loaded growth and scattered about its swollen trunk lay, in a white and pink circle, the small rounded fruits like rococo pearls on a green floor.'

Rococo indeed, and baroque, too. But these are exceptions, mercifully. By and large, Eastwords employs a prose that is gripping in its easy, almost effortless telling, and its ability to create emotional equivalents of thought. Evoking the 'Princely Papa of Pentameter' and the Sultan of Sprung Rhythm (description mine!) might have induced the prose to labour at times to become poetry, but there are moments when Ray does succeed as a poet. Example:

'For time is a moulting snake . . . the child Kalyan had begun to explore the island beyond the clawroots of the shore mangroves . . . . Peepal trees let down their dreadlocks from their dense-tangled branches into a willing soil . . . .’

If one discovers a time-obsessed sonnet of 'Sir Shakescene' lurking behind the passage, and expects more of the same to follow, then Ray administers a corrective by quickly taking his language through an entirely different field of engagement--one that needs both verbal agility and mathematical skill at permutation and combination to squeeze out meaning(s) from an innocent cluster of words. Let me refer to the instance of Pakhee--Puck--the aerobat (another nonce word in the spirit of Eastwords!) son of Sukumari fetching the juice 'Love in Idleness' for Oberon--for you know what. 'Love in Idleness' became flotsam in Pakhee's mind as he goes through the permutation and combination process:

LOVE LIES IN DENS SELL DIVINE NOSE . . .
LESSON LIVE DINE DINE LESS LIVE ON . . . and so on.

Clever? Yes. Ingenuous, perhaps. Brilliant, certainly.

But that's hardly the way to write a review of a novel. Sorry. First things first.

Q. What is Eastwords about?

A. It's about a woman named Sukumari, whose husband had died when she was three months pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Pakhee, who knew how to fly. Pakhee grew up a happy child. Then one day, Oberon came to the shore of the Bay of Bengal, only now he was called Abhiram, and he had such a terrific time with the widow Sukumari. While he made Sukumari big bellied with a child of his own, he left with the boy Pakhee. But don't blame Abhiram alone for the cruel act. The mother too, was excited by the prospect of her son going to a far country (the Dubaiwallah Syndrome!) and allowed Abhiram to become a child trafficker in the process. Pakhee never returned as Pakhee. Sheikh Piru tried to warn the boy--'he will make a slave of you'--but who listens to an old man? Besides, Abhiram pummelled him some, which made him run short of breath.

Q. Who is Sheikh Piru?

A. An abject Indian who has Macaulay for his father and who likes to think himself as Shake Pear's (f)alter ego. He, an old man inhabiting a violet hour with his biological taxi throbbing waiting--although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', yet is (one of the) most important personage(s) in the novel. What Sheiikh Piru--Piru Baba--sees, is the substance of the novel.

Q. So who is Kalyan?

A. He's the seed of Abhiram that grows into a full, Dionysian dude. Before he is born though, queen Titania comes to Sukumari's shore looking for her hubby's ship. She is full jealous and possessive, and takes hold of Sukumari: 'Thou shall be a vot'ress in my order and shall bring the child into the world, O,O,O.' But then, while Titania remained as a real lesbian/child snatcher treat for a while, she left as abruptly as she had come, rushing back to Athens for the marriage of Theseus and Amazon Hippolyta.

Good riddance!

Q. Where does Prospero fit in?

A. He comes, eventually, to the highly orientalized shorescape of Kalyan's little kingdom. Kalyan is there. And you know the rest of the story. Only Prospero's--Pandeyji's--punishment of Kalyan for his offer of a grandchild was extreme, registering a high notch in colonial brutality. But wait, the story is not finished yet. For Pakhee--Puck--Ariel has to be accounted for. Now in Prospero's employ, he had wanted freedom all his life, and in the end, finds his power of flying abruptly coming to an end. As Prospero's spell on him breaks, he tumbles from the top of the sky, down towards the green surface of the delta. And he lands on a 'stack of boxes on which was written in large letters: GUNPOWDER.

It is the battlefiele of Polashi--Plassey for you--and the time is some June day in 1757, and he quickly goes through another sea-change to become Harilal the British spy and confidant of Lord Clive.

He is the one who eventually kills Siraj, as he sits eating his last kingly dish of halwa.
So it goes.

And Sheikh Piru? Eastwords has him last seen in a small backroom of a crumbling building at 2, Sambhunath Pundit Street in Calcutta in an 'abandoned office of the defunct Indian National Congress Party.' 'He whispers to himself sibilantly of flying. That is what I have heard people say,' writes the narrator, and adds, as a famous last line, and a punch line at that, 'I do not know if this is true.'

Yes, Eastwords is about making and remaking stories and histories; of meta-narratives and material narratives; about colonization, but more importantly, about re (and/or de) colonization of minds with every telling of those quintessentially colonialist encounters. Only, Ray's treatment is not that academic-serious. He shows how people can fly and narratives can fly and then tumble headlong down to ground zero below where intertextual warfare ravages known and alien shores. Tinged with magical realism, Ray's description ranges across classical mythology, the Puranas, the glittering world of Renaissance England, Hecatommithi, Der Bestrafte Brudermord and the narrator's Indian Stories--which, by the force of their eclecticism somehow do not allow magical realism to gel. Indeed the two braids Ray weaves (or yokes together by violence) are i) The plot line, where MSND and The Tempest and Sukumari and her two sons and lots of others come together, and ii) The sub-plot line where Ray/ the narrator/ Sheikh Piru all become one. Shakespeare, in this sub-plot, is evoked with the nagging name-calling of a supplicant (O baba Shakespeare, O thakur. . .). One feels that here, in this in-between passages/chapters Ray overdoes his part. 'Tell me how, sweet Bard of gentle English Avon. Here I am, by the groaning brown roil of the wide Ganges. . . let me confuse myself with you. Let me confess, that we two must twain, like the East and West. . .' etc. One wonders, what's the point of this overemphasis on the double Shakespearian bind. Why the excuses for the narrator's India/Bangaliness. 'I know those words too, even here in monsoon-battered India.' So we see. More food, perhaps for a PC 101 repast.

Lastword: Eastwords is for the strong-hearted. And for those with no colonial hangover. For those who can make sweet meaning out of life's unsweet chaos. For those who look on the world with a postmodern nonchalance.

In short, Eastwords works your imagination and your intellect. And in case, you are beginning to take my review seriously, here is what the publisher says as a caveat: 'This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.'

How about it, Willyumbaba? Old stuff, you say? John Barth did that in Giles Goat-Boy? Perhaps. But that's another story and should wait another day.

Syed Manzoorul Islam teaches English at Dhaka University.