‘Jasmine Days’: Spoilt by a preponderance of politics

Jasmine Days is a victim of the literary affliction that substitutes political incidents for plot

One of the truly loaded problems that the literary establishment faces internationally is the debut author. Since the debut author is an unknown quantity, he can be marketed well. The debut author is a good hanger for all the hopeful publishing lies. If the book doesn’t do well, the establishment looks for its next debut author. And there are so many of them. The debut author is the great brown hope of Indian publishing, a mostly derivative industry with its imported Anglo-Saxon values and trends. Indian publishing is desperate for debut authors.

Benyamin’s debut novel, Aadujeevitham (Goat Lives), in Malayalam, came out in 2008, and it was a success. The novel dealt with the life of an immigrant worker from Kerala to the deserts of West Asia, where he was forced to lead a life not too different from the goats he herded for three years before he effected his escape.

It is a story based on real life. The novel went into over 100 editions and won several prizes. As a debut author, Benyamin was made, so was his publisher. The debut principle, the wire from which the hand-to-mouth house of Indian publishing hangs, was alive and good with Benyamin. Such success has serious repercussions for literature though.

Set descriptions

Benyamin’s second novel is

Jasmine Days , the story of a young woman from Pakistan, Sameera, making a home of a dictatorial West Asian country fictively called The City, building and breaking her life against the backdrop of the delusive Arab Spring.

The novel, competently translated from the Malayalam by Shanaz Habib, is a rather leisurely effort in espousing the pointlessness of religion — the violent strife in this instance between the Shia and Sunni factions of Islam; the futility of the urge for freedom in a kingdom that stifles it by means of terror, rewards, and money; the privations of Sameera, a girl with a spark unable to catch fire under the wet blanket of a joint, conventional Muslim family; and a furtive love affair whose defining moment occurs late — perhaps too late— in the novel when the potential lover and protester, Ali, turns out to be the one who killed Sameera’s father, a police officer, in the course of a riot.

Jasmine Days deals with important themes of freedom and tyranny, consumerism and individuality, woman’s rights, and the issue of migrants. The last especially is a crucial element shaping the politics and society of contemporary world, and the novel raises this question with persistence and determination. Compared to the commercial fiction that is now peaking out, and the middle-grade novel which is predictably going nowhere, Jasmine Days is a serious effort to come to terms with the world around us.

But it is not exceptionally inspirational either in terms of writing or flow of the narrative. The plot point takes its time to be reached. The plot movements building up to the crisis are needlessly repetitive. Most of the characters are accompanied by set descriptions, rather than being allowed to evolve in action.

Benyamin’s plotting intelligence does tie up everything in the end. But the emotions and even the words that his characters speak are often clichéd. The dangers attending Sameera’s world are real; it is just that its documentation has a pastiche feeling to it — as if we have seen it all on TV before.

Broad strokes

It is this writer’s newly-arrived-at prejudice perhaps that fiction and poetry in India are about to be made extinct by a preponderance of politics. In dramatic countries like India, or in those kingdoms of West Asia, good, liberal people — and there are so many of them among writers and publishers — often substitute political incidents as both plot and props. The individual characters are then drawn in broad strokes. Jasmine Days is a victim of this literary affliction.

The novel resorts rather ornately to a typical Borgesian structural device. It claims to have been written by one Sameera Parvin; and that Benyamin has translated it from the Arabic, if the afterword of sorts is to be seriously believed. Then, Habib translated the story from the Malayalam. But, of course, all this is to impart a sense of docu-realism to the reader. The truth is — if there is such a thing as that, for there could be a Sameera somewhere who lived through the experience claimed for her by the author — no such process happened. In Borges, the structural devices he uses integrate well with the themes. In the case of Jasmine Days , I thought it all quite redundant. How does it matter? Perhaps it is premature to judge as a sequel is being written.

Bon luck

Had Benyamin not become an industry with his debut novel, an editor with a vision might have sat him down and told him: Mon cher Benyamin, you might want to cut this down by 50 pages and focus on the characters instead of the politics?

And Benyamin, much talented in mistaking people for stories, would have said: Why, Mademoiselle, that is such a très good idea. Give me a little more time, then.

Bon luck, Benyamin.

Merci, Mademoiselle.

And we would have possibly got a novel fragrant like jasmine.

The writer, whose latest collection of poems is Available Light , is working on a novel next.