A whirlwind of emotions accompanies the characters, living and inanimate, in Geetanjali Shree’s expansive narrative, Tomb of Sand, which last week won the International Booker Prize, a first for any Indian novel. Translated by Daisy Rockwell from the original in Hindi, Ret Samadhi, it is a story that revolves around the central invisible figure in any Indian home (Ma), her daughter (Beti) and a family which extends to birds, trees and other beings like a small, cracked Buddha statue.
Giving an intimation of what is to be expected, we are told at the outset that “women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.” We are asked to go along as the story’s path “unfurls, not knowing where it will stop, tacking to the right and left, twisting and turning, allowing anything and everything to join in the narration. It will emerge from within a volcano, swelling silently as the past boils forth into the present, bringing steam, embers, and smoke.”
‘A story as a living being’
With past, present, future promised in one sentence, and after unimaginable but magical twists and turns, this story turns out to be about transcending borders of all kinds: “Think of a story as a living being… The gardener has no permission here: to artificially shape the garden, forming a boundary hedge, measuring here, pruning there, perfectly precise, standing like a scrap of an army under a flag of false pride: We’ve got this garden surrounded! This is a story garden, here, a different light and sunlight rain lover murderer beast bird pigeon fly look sky.”
The ‘living’ story about the family is also compared to the grand old epic, the first hint that whatever is happening in the internal worlds of Ma, Beti (daughter), Bade (the elder son), Bahu (daughter-in-law), a beloved transgender friend/child (Rosie/Raza) has to be seen as a reflection of the world outside too: “Anything we say about the Mahabharata could also be said about families: they contain all that exists in the world, and whatever they don’t contain doesn’t exist.”
For this reason, every member of the family knows that “what exists in me exists in no one else, and what does not exist in me has no call to exist.” So, “If I speak in English, I’m giving myself airs, if you do, you’re educated”; or “…if I’m fair, I look like a skinned quail, and if you’re pale, you look like a foreigner”; “my city has been highly cultured for centuries, whilst you choose to talk on and on about some recent goondas and give it a bad name”; “why do you see only cow dung and crap where Radha once danced, and Ganga descended from Shiva’s locks? Yes and no, no and yes, me and you, you and me…”
An epic in three parts
Initially, Ma seemingly gives up on life, turning towards the wall in her bedroom, her back against everyone else, which makes up Part 1 of the book, ‘Ma’s Back’. But soon her refrain, “No, no, I won’t get up”, begins to acquire another meaning on being repeated, and it appears that she was saying, “Now rise new. Now, I’ll rise anew.” Is it an expression of “true desire” or the result of “aimless play”?
In Part 2, ‘Sunlight’, and Part 3, ‘Back to the Front’, Ma, nearing 80, is emboldened to find her own path to joy, contentment, acceptance, and a life of new beginnings. Whiffs of freedom come, first when she leaves her son’s home and wakes up at Beti’s home, and then when she crosses the border at Wagah for Pakistan, no longer mourning for a past she is ready to confront. At Beti’s home, Ma “hears the unfurling of her own body… she hears the blossoming of the unfurling.”
Past writers, future stories
Shree dedicates the book to the late Hindi writer Krishna Sobti, calling her “my guru, my inspiration”. And Sobti is all over the pages, not least in the desire for independence in the true sense of the term that Ma embodies. This is a Partition story in which the protagonist, like in Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, is insistent on looking for hope, letting go of boundaries that can encumber an individual to prejudice, doom and gloom. That doesn’t make Ma’s story of loss, like many others who suffered the carnage of Partition, any less heartbreaking, of course.
After she won the prize, Shree said her achievement was not that of an individual, but an entire culture of literature of South Asia. No wonder then that literary giants from Faiz to Manto, Sobti, Firaq Gorakhpuri (the pen name of Raghupati Sahay who wrote in Urdu) to Tagore and a host of luminous artists and writers, each representing the diverse universe that is the subcontinent, appear in the novel.
Shree celebrates the syncretic culture and mourns its loss in equal measure. So we find an assembly of crows loudly cawing dissenting views, because “the era of debate was still extant among crows.” Conversations proceeded boldly, and the “heavens echoed with their versions of Bhojpuri, Maithili, Avadhi and Braj”, political correctness thrown to the winds. Shree loves to play with words, even when she is singing a dirge. Lamenting the fall of Buddha’s seat of learning, Bodh Gaya, she writes, when the brains – the bodh — drained away, voh bhi gaya (the city too disappeared).
It’s a delightful, original novel, beautifully translated keeping the ‘dhwani’, or resonance, of Ret Samadhi in mind. It would have made Shree’s mentor proud if she was around. It will surely be a torchbearer for future writers of the subcontinent who dare to imagine a world filled with possibilities where borders are fluid, hate replaced by love.
