They say that leprechauns bury their gold at the end of a rainbow. An elusive treasure, that evades humanity because it as much an illusion as the rainbow that marks its presence. Kalyan Ray’s notion of home is equally obscure
“What is home?” asks the Indian-American writer, whose novel No Country , explores belonging, identity, upheavals — physical, political and emotional — loss and longing. The novel, a saga, set across three continents, two centuries and multiple generations, is in some way an expression of his own sense of displacement, “My family was uprooted from East Pakistan, and I grew up in Kolkata. Yet if you ask a Bengali even today where he is from, he will not tell you that he is from one part of Kolkata — he will say he is from Dhaka or Comilla or Sylhet. None of these have been to Bangladesh but their sense of identity is coupled with a sense of loss — the identity of loss.
“When I went to America, I met many other migrants and realised that their stories don’t end. People don’t migrate for the heck of it,” says Kalyan, who teaches literature at the County College of Morris, New Jersey and is married to award-winning Indian filmmaker and actor Aparna Sen.
The journey, journeys rather, undertaken in this novel are not just geographical but spiritual as the name of the book, derived from the first line of William Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium , (That is no country for old men) suggests, “Every section of my book prefaces with a line from the poem. Yeats has been a huge influence in my life. You know, he was a friend of Tagore and was one of the people who were instrumental in getting Tagore the Nobel Prize in 1913. In fact, one of the people who got shoved aside due to Tagore was the great English novelist — Thomas Hardy, another big influence. Hardy’s stories were all about little individuals caught in fate, in destiny, call it what you want. You will see a similar trend in No Country — how little factors and coincidences can affect an entire life.”
The book which begins in 1989 with a death of an Indian-American couple in New York, goes back in time and space to the little seaside village of Mullaghmore, Ireland in the 1840s where the lives of angry young man Padraig, his best friend Brendan and true love Brigid are unalterably changed by a strange set of circumstances. The story winds its way to India, slips for a bit into Canada and then comes all the way back to the United States, the years in between, sitting lightly on the narrative.
“I took the structure of my novel from William Faulkner who comes full circle in his novels. I started to write the Ireland segment and wrote more or less chronologically. Most of the story was clear in my head. And as I began to write, some of the characters began to write their own story. There were certain fixed points that I knew I needed to touch but in many cases some of the characters surprised me. I just wondered where it came from,” he says adding that though his novel is replete with historical and literary references, “they are draped on the novel in a loose, comfortable way. You don’t have to have a mountain of research to enjoy my stories — I think I have made it comfortable for the reader to know what’s going on without it.”
Yet you cannot escape the almost analogous histories of both Ireland and India, in this novel, “There is a long history between Ireland and India. In this book, I have told many harsh truths of what the British did and didn’t do in Ireland and then in India, 100 years later. For instances, in both cases they let famines happen and did nothing about it,” he says referring to the Great Potato Famine (Ireland, 1845) and the Famine of Bengal (India, 1943).
An interesting fact, “The maximum money raised for the Irish famine didn’t come from the English crown or government, not from America where a lot of Irish had gone but from Calcutta where a lot of Irish troops were stationed.”
And how did a man whose tone still holds the sing-song, lyricism of his Bengali roots manage to recreate the lush, green landscape of 19th Century Ireland, bathed in both blood and beauty?
“I really had to work at getting the Irish voice right,” he says adding that for six months he immersed himself in Irish newspapers, novels, poetry, pamphlets and folks songs of that era. “I wanted the lilt of the language to come out in it.”
But though the voice of the story constantly changes depending on the person, the setting and the mood of the moment the crux of it is univocally the same, “I took the inimitable old embroidery of life, picked at its threads and made my own pattern. More than migration, separation and search for identity, this story is about how interconnected we all are. Our common nationality is mortality and we all stand on the isthmus of time. It is also a book about human hope and dignity. I believe in the transcendence of the human spirit, its indestructibility. The final human note is one of hope not of despair. All my characters find some version of home, one way or the other,” he says.
