In a memorable, almost cinematic, passage in All the Lives We Never Lived , the new novel by Anuradha Roy, the protagonist Gayatri Rozario (then 17, unmarried, and using her maiden name Sen) and her father Agni Sen are floating in a boat on a lake in Bali. “They sailed towards a raft moored in the middle of the lake and when they came closer they could see that there was a man on the raft, lying on his back, face hidden by a flat straw hat of the kind farmers wore in that country. The man pushed away his hat and stood up when he heard the splash of their oars. Standing, he was a tall, angular figure with golden hair thrown back by the wind. He could have been the figurehead on the prow of a ship.”
In another passage, set in a fictional place named Muntazir in the foothills of the Himalayas in what might now be Uttarakhand, Walter Spies (the man previously floating on the raft), Myshkin (Gayatri Rozario’s 9-year-old son), and Batty (Gayatri’s father-in-law) are on a hilltop just outside Muntazir “with a view of the city,” when they saw “a wavering line of fireflies. It came closer, and [they] saw it was a stream of women and girls, holding candles that lit up their faces.”
The dabbler
There is something spectacularly visual in Roy’s writing in this book which gives the reader a feeling of being there, making this story of loss and search so absorbing.
Gayatri, a free spirit, loves to paint. “Propriety, sobriety, obedience: these were the very things she had made it her life’s mission to annihilate.” It is the 1920s and though her family does not approve of her inclination towards the arts, Gayatri’s father is supportive.
Agni Sen takes his daughter to Santiniketan to be taught by Rabindranath Tagore. Upon knowing that Tagore will be travelling to Bali, he takes Gayatri all the way to Bali, where they meet Spies, the famous German painter and music composer who has settled there. Gayatri is married into the illustrious Rozario family, which brings her from Delhi to Muntazir. Gayatri’s husband, Nek Chand, teaches at a local college and is a follower of a local freedom fighter and spiritual guru, Mukti Devi.
Though Batty is a liberal man who calls his son “a dabbler” and does not mind his daughter-in-law painting, dancing, or spending time with her white friend Lisa McNally, Nek Chand advocates frugality in one’s life. “Control your appetites,” he says. With Spies’ arrival in Muntazir with his friend Beryl de Zoete, the English ballerina, to meet Gayatri, tensions escalate in the Rozario family as Nek Chand does not approve of Gayatri hanging around with her foreigner friends. Just two years before the start of World War II, at the age of 26, Gayatri leaves her family to go to Bali with Spies and de Zoete. Myshkin is nine, an age when it’s easy to forget anything and anyone.
A mother-son story has ample scope for tear-jerking moments and as Myshkin discovers his mother, this novel does open the sluice gates. The narration, for the most part, is in the first person in Myshkin’s voice, and Myshkin’s solitude haunts one long after the novel has been read.
Myshkin is a horticulturist, preferring plants and animals over humans, and Roy describes his solitude in moving words – “People think of my solitude as an eccentricity or a symptom of failure… It is hard to explain to them that the shade of a tree I planted years ago or the feverish intensity of a dog fruitlessly chasing a butterfly provides what no human companionship can” – and this novel feels like an ode to memories – “We have no precise recollection of how long things took: a few days, weeks, a month?” – and separation: “Is this how partings happen? No word, no preparation, it is over and you didn’t even know it.”
Roy’s attention to the period setting and the detail with which she draws real people from history is admirable. There are at least five actual people making cameos in this novel: Spies, de Zoete, Tagore, the singer Begum Akhtar, and the horticulturist Alick Percy-Lancaster. I looked up de Zoete on Wikipedia and found this line: “According to Harold Acton, [de Zoete] had a tendency to overstretch the hospitality of her friends.” Roy uses this facet of de Zoete’s personality to write an anecdote in which de Zoete, unsatisfied with the laundry service at the guest house she is staying at in Muntazir, brings her dresses to Gayatri to have them washed!
Benign dictatorships
Another detail is in the chapter beginnings. The chapters set in Muntazir begin with ‘Muntazir’ written in Urdu, while the chapters set in Tjampuhan in Bali begin with a word in the Balinese script, which I guess must be ‘Tjampuhan’.
With the themes of nationalism and the conflict between desire and duty running through it, the novel also has lessons for the contemporary world. Scandalised by Gayatri, a wealthy lawyer friend of Nek Chand tells him: “What families need – what this country needs – is a benign dictatorship.” The scramble for power and control we see now is reflected in this one sentence.
Similarly, what happens to Spies at the hands of the Dutch East Indies government is what is happening now to those who do not conform to the majority. The municipality in contemporary Muntazir, while building a flyover, cuts down 44 neem trees that Myshkin planted over several decades. Myshkin is unable to save them because nobody cares about trees.
From Sleeping on Jupiter to this book, Roy seems to be bettering her own brilliance. Though the narration is effortless, Roy’s research and imagination in recreating a bygone era shines out. This is an excellent, unputdownable book.
The writer is the author of The Mysterious Ailment Of Rupi Baskey and The Adivasi Will Not Dance, both shortlisted for The Hindu Prize .
All The Lives We Never Lived; Anuradha Roy, Hachette India, ₹599
