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| May 22, 2000 | ||
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Wanders The little boy who used literature to escape a lonely island and build a new world By Madhu
Jain
The essay, aptly described by the publishers as a "literary autobiography", was written for the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust. And in it the Trinidad-born Naipaul reflects upon the books and experiences that shaped his imagination and persona and brought him closer to his childhood ambition -- at as young as 11 -- to become a writer. Much more than a peep into the library of the author's mind, it reveals not only how he became a writer but why he did so. Both reading and writing offered an escape route from home, which he refers to as a "plantation colony". It was the smallness of the place, its lack of history and his own lack of ancestry beyond grandparents that pushed him into the world of letters and history. A bit like a lonely boy out in the cold, with his nose pressed against the window pane of the world that matters. "As a child trying to read," he writes, "I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city." Fiction leads Naipaul to his subjects. It also allows him to deal with his experiences on the island and self-contained worlds. But after a while, it is no longer enough. He can't use it to capture India, the leviathan he needs to come to terms with. The "greater hurt", as he describes India, is too abstract and an unlived experience. He has to go beyond fiction. Interestingly, it's not just the world of letters that he inhabited while young -- even though it was his father who passed on his writing ambition to him. It was cinema: "I don't overstate when I say that without the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s I would have been spiritually quite destitute." Revealing though the book may be, there are no epiphanies. Naipaul is a writer of quiet conclusions. Memory
Magic Manthri and Nelum form the female line of descent in If the Moon Smiled. Manthri, repository of both a luminous, magical Past and a pain-filled, shredded Present, gives way in the course of a meandering (nuclear) family saga to Nelum, Future personified. A Future not necessarily all smart and savvy, Nelum is in fact sensitive, talented and difficult -- but she has courage and determination and the will to forge her own reckless new way through that bewildering maze that is the migrant's lot. If Manthri represents the sheer and utter desolation of a spirit that always hankers for what it cannot find -- a home to belong to, a marriage that works, a phantom lover and a sexual desire that is fulfilled, children who bring happiness, a religion that truly heals -- Nelum warms our hearts with hope because she fights ceaselessly to be herself, against all odds, including her mother. Lokuge's novel brings no shattering revelations, and yet it manages so often to strum just the right raw nerve. The rich yet fluid prose throbs as much with the beauty of its locale as it does with the weight of an almost unbearable, wanton searching for a fuller existence that Manthri pursues so relentlessly. The novel's elegiac tone gives away the secret of Manthri's unhappy end well before we turn its last pages, but its deeper secret abides: "May it go on, life after life, birth after birth. This moment, this dream: this memory." The memory of a migrant, whispers Lokuge, is forever tainted with the wrenching pain that comes with a re-birthing, and the loss can be as monumental as life itself. |
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Reading
this slim, elegantly-produced little book is like listening to Sir
Vidiadhar talking to himself, about himself. You can almost picture him by
a fireside in his country home in England, a glass of good wine in hand,
rolling back the years to retrace his singleminded quest to become a
writer. And you can almost hear his autumnal prose -- ever precise, pared
down and resonant -- as he recounts his search for a voice, an identity.
And, perhaps, a pose.