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BOOKS
Heart
of Lightness
A diasporic
novel comes to terms with duality, ancestry and memory
By
Rukmini Bhaya Nair
 |
The
Professor of Light
By Marina Budhos
IndiaInk
Pages: 254
price: Rs 250 |
It
seems appropriate to be reviewing a book entitled The Professor of
Light in a week when fireworks flare and diyas illuminate homes across
the country. Yet, by the time this piece appears, our shared festivities
will have turned into memory, recoverable only through retelling. This,
in effect, is the central theme of Marina Budhos' charming novel about
growing up and away. How do we hold on to a shadowy past, peopled with
ghostly ancestors from India and Guyana and an incandescent present, marked
by exciting discoveries in suburban England, when time never holds still?
Millennia
after it was formulated, Heraclitus' conundrum about a world in flux continues
to trouble Megan, the youthful heroine of this 21st century novel, not
to mention her father, Warren Singh, the philosopher. Quantum mechanics
(QM) may have added enormous sophistication to current debates about the
nature of "reality" but the basic puzzles remain. Light behaves,
paradoxically, both like particle and wave. In doing so, it challenges
the established foundations of Cartesian dualism and entices Singh to
embark on a quest that finally robs him of the single most important route
to communicating his theories-speech: "My father's book was both
a wish to understand us and an inquiry into particle and wave ... the
stream of old stories passing through".
I am reminded
here of T.S. Eliot's line in The Wasteland: "looking into
the heart of light, the silence". Indeed, one might suggest that
this wasting silence is the binary opposite of the wondrous "stream
of stories" to which Megan refers. The idea of applying a popular
understanding of QM to cultural exchanges is hardly new and allusions
to streaming tales recall the Kathasaritsagara metaphor that Rushdie introduced
so compellingly into "the Indian Novel in English".
Like many
diasporic ventures, the sources of Budhos' novel are eclectic. Apart from
the regulation gurus Woolfe, Kundera, Naipaul et al, "Caribbean"
classics such as Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica contribute
to its making, while contemporary "family resemblances" include
Alan Lightman's exquisite Einstein's Dreams.
Jostein Gaarder's
Sophie's World about a little girl being introduced to fundamental
philosophy also appears to foreshadow The Professor of Light. What
precisely does such a bibliography illustrate? Well, my argument would
be that the fictional lineage of this work parallels the migrant's complex
journey which drives an impoverished Bharat Singh from the fields of Bihar
to the sugarcane plantations of Guyana and then forces his clever son
Warren to flee to prosperous America. For such an analogy in turn prompts
that irresistible, if slightly unfair, speculation: is not the "multicultural"
English novel today also an ambitious migrant seeking a secure place within
a dollar economy but unable to quite shake off its avenging past?
The remarkable
thing about The Professor of Light is how gracefully it manages
to propitiate its ancestors. Its materials may be familiar but they are
handled with style — the prose pared until images take flight. Worth
mentioning, too, is the integral fashion in which the book's design (by
Itu Chaudhuri) fits its text, making this one of those rare productions
that-while not qualifying as "family entertainment", thank God!
— will appeal across generations.
In this bildungsroman,
Schroedinger's cat, poised in a neither-dead-nor-alive "superposition"
meets, so to speak, the disembodied cheshire cat of Alice, as well as
the exemplary "mother cat" of visishta-advaita who, despite
her alarming method of grabbing her kittens by the scruffs of their necks,
always transports them unharmed! Childhood thus successfully irradiates
the adult abstractions of physics and philosophy in Budhos' "cat-scan".
A novel assured enough to light us through from this Diwali to the next.
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