April 19, 1999
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THE
BLUE BEDSPREAD Calcutta Blues A good novel - but not a great one. By Brinda Bose THE BLUE BEDSPREAD
Incest and intrigue on a blue bedspread ("our sky") in a nondescript house on a crowded Calcutta street; Sister and Brother locked in furtive embrace while drunken Father rants and raves and rolls into snoring slumber in the room next door. Of course, he used to beat (the now-absent) Mother. Memories -- and the reality -- of marital/paternal abuse choke the little Brother until his lungs are ready to burst. So is his love (read adolescent lust) for his Sister, four years his senior, and "dark and beautiful". The lesson he learns from another woman who dazzles him (what a precocious child!), a doctor with "arms as white as milk", is the one that finally burgeons into the novel we have in hand. For she shows him the worth of paper and pen; when you are too full of feeling to speak it, write it down. And so, while a day-old baby girl sleeps fitfully in his bedroom, our maverick hero strains to translate the stories he longs to tell her into the written word. The stories are those of the turgid world that she has been created out of, his stories, his Sister's, his Father's and Mother's, his domestic help's, an occasional girlfriend's, some unnecessary ones about neighbours and acquaintances (remnants perhaps of this novel's original birth as short stories), and about an old man who tended a cageful of pigeons. And about her Mother, who died giving birth to her, and about whom our hero is the most impassioned. We all now know, of course, of the embarrassingly gross figures of the advance payment for The Blue Bedspread against estimated royalties. Jha's novel is a good, swift read; for many of us, however, the book may assume a rather more awesome size and shape. For this (if it happens), one may blame or praise a brilliantly-orchestrated media blitz that has created a writer larger than life. The novel ultimately fails this hype, though it yet manages to stand on its own as a story well-told. Clearly, Jha intends to shock, surprise -- or even, perhaps, mesmerise -- his readers with the boldness of his central tale. But unfortunately for him (and for us), Rahel and Estha came first, and boy did they steal a march over Sister and Brother. Odious as comparisons always are, this one is inevitable: Arundhati Roy's Twins shocked us, surprised us, mesmerised us, they moved us and they touched us. It was indeed a tough act to follow, and it is not even a comment on Jha's story-telling limitations that his Brother and Sister are finally unable to do the same. What troubles me most about this novel is that despite its elaborate flamboyance of style and story, it finally neither unnerves nor puzzles nor bruises, to squarely contradict a blurb put out by Picador. And that is a most unsettled feeling to be left with, after numerous intricate tales about a Man, a Child and a Woman loved but dead. And/or, about a Brother and a Sister who dared to desire each other. NEW RELEASES » Atlas and Survey of
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Sigh. We may as well face it: we're turning out to
be the most willing -- nay, the forever-panting -- victims of a Roy-inspired generation of
wannabe wonder writers. Raj Kamal Jha is merely the newest kid on the block and, if all
the Picadorian hype is to be believed, he's almost done a better Arundhati act than the
lady herself. Almost ... but not quite. 
