Of History and Haze

Sikandar Chowk Park by Neelum Saran Gour; New Delhi: Penguin India; 2005; pp. 286; Rs. 295

The narrative begins with Vakil Shahib Mahendra Chandraji watching from his balcony as a funeral procession on 31 December makes its way through the streets with what looks like a corpse in the Vakil's 'old kutchery coat-pant'. The 'soul-shaking spectacle of his own dissolution' makes the Vakil contemplate making his own unique joke by bluffing on as the Millennium Corpse. He could throw his own funeral feast, better yet fashion it as a Millennium banquet. They could have a 'rip- roaring, belly tickling guffaw of a party'. Alternating between English and Urdu, Professor Mathur in an expansive mood, sips tea and explains to his landlady Sakina Bibi, 'The Darkling Thrush', a poem Thomas Hardy had written on the last day of the nineteenthcentury. On the first of January, Masterji Hargopal Misra wakes up with a start. His small bitch Kurkuri returns, wet and shivering, her 'lozenge eyes' glowing as she nudges him for the Parle G biscuits her master keeps handy for hapless hungry beasts. After that Masterji checks his precious violin, tenderly pawing the writing on the case: Antonio Straivvarius Cremonenfis, Faciebat Anno 17.

On 22 March, 2000 a bomb blast rips their lives apart. The guffawing lawyer, the poetry-analyzing professor, Kurkuri's mild master all lie in mangled heaps, their stories gaping to be reclaimed and filled in. The occasional narrator Siddhanta, a journalist by profession with a feel for literature, enters Gour's narrative, packing it with his nervous energy and frothing passion for reconstructing the lives of eleven people in the Sikander Park blast. Siddhanta's stance and vocabulary will vacillate curiously between that of a scientific trail-finder and an ardent artist: 'Much high-powered technology was set in action before the hieroglyphic of their essence was decoded and their mislaid names subsumed. I was angry on their behalf. I felt one with them, one of history's ciphers, unchronicled potential history-fodder.' Gradually Siddhanta begins to piece together 'their personalities, lives, stories of pain and love and betrayed trust and fantasies and forgiveness and fresh resolves.'

The media reports on the blast spin off tired phrases. But to Siddhanta, the blast has become a blatant particle of history. He compares history to a drizzle, a thrashing downpour, the squelching puddle beneath one's feet. 'Do you hear that sick buzz, behind all the other noises? That's history, its engines never switched off'. All one can do is 'clutch at a single news item, a micro-monad of all the essential tale, to my mind at least, a minor, practically trite bomb blast in a certain park in the middle of a certain crowded market of an obscure small town.' In a pseudo-formal tone he explains his method: 'I went postulating, anticipating, where necessary inventing and that's how I wrote out their approximate stories. But I have always, to the best of my power, fine-tuned it to the last knowable milli-pulse of truth.' Siddhanta's method and manner is anything but clichéd: 'If history has only taught us how to make the old mistakes in new ways, all this literature stuff has trapped me' he says, 'into recounting the old tractable sub-truths and flexible personal meanings in new ways.'

Sikandar Chowk Park is the story among others of Shirin, the convent-educated secretary with an alcoholic husband sick at home with cirrhosis. As he turned into a nervous junky fighting his addiction, she becomes the steel-hearted care-giver. Strong and unrelenting as a person, she describes her love as a fraught emotion, one that gives uncomfortable power and intimacy, but also is composed of dull mistrust, a lasting grievance. As the man suffers a relapse into drinking, Shirin discovers her love 'without a drop of soda or lime or water to muffle its potent blow'. There is Suruchi Chauhan, Secretary of the Allahabad Development Authority who has a dalliance with a physically-challenged, urbane stranger who brings her a strange token in the form of uncashed cheques transacted between their ancestors. There is Swati Maurya, a Dalit woman, and also Neelesh Trivedi, a man who sells his blood for cash. They come together seeking to work as parents on hire for the benefit of a precocious but difficult child.

The novel portrays the lives of the living too, Sakina Bibi, nautch lady turned into landlady and a patron of arts, who 'knows the difference between gerunds and infinitives despite the bells on her old ankles.' Some victims/subjects are dearer to Shiddanta than others. I too, felt that the heart-aching stories/histories of Sakina, Shirin, Professor Mathur, and the slow, grey and powder-dusted Anglo Indian widow called Lynette Shepherd make poignant impressions. After sifting through old papers of her dead husband, Lynette Shepherd discovers the full extent of her husband's involvement with another woman. But it had struck her three decades too late. Retrospective injury it may seem but the magnitude of Lynette's loss is not lost to us. Betrayed or disenchanted, many of us have felt the raw panic Lynette reels in as a lifetime's faith is 'lost' and all of one's memories 'have gone wrong.'

Even though by count there are twelve characters, including the narrator, it is impossible to miss the thirteenth one which I felt was Gour giving herself away through the text. It is impossible to read that text and not recognize that she is a professor of literature well-versed in literary polemics. In Sikandar Chowk Park issues of postcolonial identity or questions of mimicry, intertexuality and appropriation crop up rather unexpectedly. It is a strange world Gour takes us into where Sakina Bibi knows her infinitives and gerunds and what 'coppice gate' means whereas Professor Mathur's student Munna writes him an essay titled My struggle with the English language. The class-room drifts into Sikandar Chowk Park, courtesy of Prof. Mathur. Strolling one day with Munna by his side he works out why the Thums Up Logo says I want my thunder. He suddenly has an epiphany: 'Now I know. Thunder was thunda all the time. A pun. A piece of Shakespearean wordplay. What was that word you used-funda? Short for fundamentalsno?'. After listening to Munna's excruciating essay the good Professor recounts to Munna his days in Scotland: 'In a combination language--Hindi, Urdu and English-- he described the gently moulded hills, green and brown and blue-grey in patches with the mist floating across their crests in a big, fleecy fume. The brilliant green meadows, lochs full of swans and intricate shadows, the water deep-green or silver. Cities of stone in many modulations of grey from chalk to slate to dove to charcoal. And the palest biscuit or faded camel-brown.' It takes more than a stretch of imagination to believe that someone like Munna should be able to make sense of his mentor's memory, or what Mathur poignantly says about histories interlocking through flags and medals left in museums or left etched on memorial stones, in churches and graveyards on different shores. For Munna (who asks a girl if he may eavesdrop her) to return triumphantly with a pretty poem celebrating his homeland and ending with the promise to make a language of his own reeks too strongly of Caliban infected with Ariel's disease!

The text however, has one of the liveliest mixes in terms of idiom and style. The slum at Fatehpur Bicchwa is described in one masterful stroke of genius: 'loud with TV blare and hooch brawl, baby-squeal and shrew shriek.' Then there are gems like: 'Why must we be hypnotized by history....We're only accidentally connected to those people in the past, so why should we share their follies?', or 'I am a Hindu because my being a Hindu allows me to be a Muslim or a Christian or a Buddhist or a Jew or whatever have you whenever I wish. It's a bit like carrying a remote control with multiple channels. I have an Islamic channel, a Christian channel, a Buddhist, a Jewish...there's this dish antenna in my head which freely catches vibes from any faith.' There are awkward lines like when Shirin describes her love: 'It's there--like the covert pain in my limbs. That's silent all day, gathered in a microcellular mist just beneath the level of sensation.' There is also a great deal of words from vernacular tongues which might prove a stumbling block to some. I don't read Urdu and have very little comprehension in that language, I was able to appreciate 'surmai fog' but had to wonder what the thrush singing away 'shigufta khatir' meant. A state of bliss, I guessed but no way would I be able to appropriate it as blithely as Munna does his mislaid English words like 'funda'.

Neelum Gour's theme may seem a wee bit grandiose to some people. My conclusion is that Sikandar Chowk Park makes for a true hyper-text, with stories branching out and blossoming in ways that you can read them in fragments or all together and not miss the effect. Gour produces quite a busy novel: we get a raft of both vivacious and dull characters; the narrative shimmers with scintillating acuity, then nose-dives to become fitfully sentimental; Gour's wit, both hilarious and heart-aching, deftly mingles with scholarly observations. I started to read Gour under a haze. And then I was down with a week-long fever. I guessed the haze was connected to the fever-- unless of course, the haze had something to do with the unmistakable sparkle of Gour's sharp pen.

Nuzhat Amin Mannan teaches English at Dhaka University.