March 9, 1998

Impish Fable

Kiran Desai, the 26-year-old daughter of renowed novelist Anita Desai, makes a much-hyped debut in 11 countries next month with a rollicking novel that has fetched huge advances in the US and UK, some rave notices and a rare Salman Rushdie recommendation.

By Binoo K John with Arthur J Pais

Sampath works in the Shahkot post office. Climbing up the government hierarchy is not his scene. So when the rest of his family goes for a wedding, he takes a bus out of town and climbs the guava tree. He stays there, crowded out from the harsh world below by the guava leaves.

Funny? Can you laugh at or empathise with Sampath's escapism? Or just baulk at the enormity of one man's tragedy couched as comic cameo? On a crowded train in New York last month, an Indian commuter reading the advance copy of this novel started slapping his forehead and drumming his thighs, making two other commuter move away from him. "I hope my readers laugh as much as I did while writing this book," says Kiran Desai, 26, creator of Sampath of Shahkot in her debut novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which is the cause of much agitated whispering in the portals of the publishing world on the eve of its worldwide release in April (Penguin in India, Faber in the UK, Grove Atlantic Press in the US, apart from publishers in 11 countries). Coming in the wake of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Hullabaloo could be a case of hype and hope rather than soul, but the phenomenal advances that Kiran has got (an estimated Rs 50 lakh), an initial print run of 50,000 each in the US and UK, early excerpts in the New Yorker and in the Salman Rushdie-edited anthology, Vintage Book of Indian Writing, is a pointer that another little Indian girl is on the threshold of big things.

Hullabaloo resonates with old-world charm and new-world noises, the '60s sounds and smells that we know belong to a little town called Malgudi. Kiran comes from true literary stock too. Through the '70s, '80s and the '90s we read her mother Anita Desai, twice shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1980 (Clear Light of Day) and 1984 (In Custody). Anita also examined the nature of pilgrimage in Baumgartner's Bombay and then again in Journey to Ithaca "in chaste Jane Austenesque style", as her publisher Ravi Dayal puts it.

Now the daughter arrives writing in chaste Narayanesque style -- R.K. Narayan is a family favourite -- laughing while she writes, impishly winking at her characters as they spring to life. The mantle of literary gravitas really does not weigh heavily on young Kiran as she spins a hilarious tale with smattering of Rushdiesque flourish "about an orchard with guava trees and in this orchard there is a hullabaloo", as she says, before bending double with laughter on the sofa in her mother's Cambridge home where most of the book was written. The finishing touches were given last winter as mother and daughter retreated to a villa in Mexico. Kiran worked in a room near the kitchen so that she could raid the refrigerator and Anita wrote in the verandah as if to frisk the muses winging by. Mother and daughter chat like friends, and to prove their culinary expertise rustle up a lunch of mildly spicy chicken in thick curry, raita and glorious looking yellow rice with spinach.

"I always knew she had a wonderful talent for the comic," says Anita, who teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "She would come home from her classes in Delhi and entertain us with her wonderful imitation of her fellow students and professors. But who would have thought she would turn her talent for humour into writing?" Even if she did not have Anita's corpuscles coursing through her arteries and even if she wasn't 5 ft 8 inches, she would have stood tall with Hullabaloo. "The book is welcome proof that India's encounter with the English language continues to give birth to new children endowed with lush gifts," Rushdie had commented about the book. Julian Loose, editorial director, Faber and Faber, which publishes the book in the UK, is also excited: "From the very first page, it is clear to the reader that the novel is going to be supremely funny and engaging, an immediately delightful celebration of the hullabaloo of Indian life. It is a wonderfully assured performance."

It was about seven years ago that Anita saw the first signs that her literary talent -- which some critics feel has dried up -- would be reborn through Kiran. Her three other children -- Rahul, Tani and Arjun -- have not yet written books. Kiran was then working at the Getty Museum in California and the letters she wrote to her mother were full of lively and rich stories. She tried to convince her daughter to collect and publish them. "I was sorry that she did not want to do it. I guess she was preparing for something else, something bigger," says Anita.

She was. The idea for the book might have eased into her subconscious when she heard about the Mauni Baba, the ascetic who perched himself atop a tree house in Allahabad and drew thousands of seekers. Her father Aswin Desai, a Delhi-based management consultant, remembers telling her about the Mauni Baba when Kiran showed him the story of a man on a guava tree. To summon that subliminal image of an escapist ascetic, etch it in the bold lines of comedy and irony and endow it with a grand sweep was Kiran's talent alone.

Yet, a writing career was hardly on Kiran's mind when she entered Bennington College in Vermont eight years ago to work for a degree in ecology. Kiran took a course in creative writing to lighten her load but a story she wrote about a man obsessed with his hair got an encouraging nod from writer and critic Philip Lopate. "I fell in love with writing with the first story I wrote but I wanted the space of a novel to be able to immerse myself in a subject for a longer period, to disappear into the world I was creating," Kiran says.

The writer was evolving. From the first experimental story to the first novel throbbing with the innocence of life and the complexities of living was a graceful Bob Beamon leap in full stretch. Says Magda Bogin, Kiran's creative writing professor at Columbia: "She has a wonderful ear and she can seduce with anything she writes. When she sits down to write, it is like a bird opening its throat into a full song."

A literary tradition is being reborn. A rollicking, slapstickish novel -- with none of Roy's searing insights though -- is not normally the stuff of much tom-tomed debuts. Kiran, like her pathetic anti-hero Sampath, goes off the beaten track to ensconce herself on a lofty perch. An admirable Indian trait for sure, only that microwave towers are preferred these days to trees. Up on the guava tree Sampath metamorphoses into a godman giving philosophical insights with deadly one-liners, thereby bringing his family much wealth. Kiran gives much more than one-liners. She sings for us a full-throated birdsong.

Write to us | Subscriptions

© Living Media India Ltd