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BOOKS
Diasporic Daydreams
This tale of displacement is too transparent and
loud to seduce
By Namita Gokhale
The Seduction of
Silence is an inappropriate title for a book that suffers more from the
vulnerabilities of verbosity. This is the latest in the stream of easy
Indian exotica which seems to have become a cottage industry in the outposts
of Inde. Bem Le Hunte, we are told, was born in Calcutta in 1964 to an
Indian mother and British father. She left India as a young girl and was
schooled in London. Le Hunte currently lives in Australia with her husband.
It comes as no surprise to find the central narrative voice of a rather
obvious character named Saakshi following a parallel life-script.
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THE SEDUCTION OF SILENCE
By Bem Le Hunte
Penguin
Pages: 433
Price:
Rs 295
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Page 1 of the prologue begins with a description
of a stuffy room in the Spiritualist Church of Great Britain, Belgrave
Square, where the disembodied voice of Aakash (more on him later) consoles
the assembled congregation with the reassurance that life without the
body is not an empty one. This is followed by some rather startling prose.
"Around her", Le Hunte writes, "Rohini heard the shuffling
of bums, searching out their ideal sitting postures. Coughs, whispers
and other noises that interludes make." Amid this agrammatical shuffling
of bums and other-worldly static,
Aakash announces his intention to seek rebirth.
The second coming is conveyed to his granddaughter
Rohini, a septuagenarian midwife who haunts seances. We then progress
in rapid flashback through the lives of several generations, returning
full circle to a contraction-by-contraction account of Saakshi's labour
pains.
 The
story in brief: Aakash is a holy man from the Himalayas who at the turn
of the last century runs an ayurvedic farm called Prakriti, in what by
some mystic time acceleration has already become the state of Himachal
Pradesh. He is married off to the ugly and bad tempered Jyoti Ma by a
trick of fate and the duplicity of her father. Aakash and Jyoti Ma beget
Ram, the same name, we are informed breathlessly, as that borne by the
hero of the famous Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Aakash and Jyoti Ma also
begat Tulsi Devi, who begat Rohini, who begat Saakshi. Many twists and
turns of destiny later, Aakash is about to be reborn to Saakshi and her
Australian husband Jason, who is in Delhi to redesign its sewage system.
The search for roots is a natural subject for
much serious literature, and the family saga is a natural structural choice
for emigrant writers. There was always enormous potential in themes of
displacement and new beginnings. This is the central theme of Salman Rushdie's
work. This book is lazy, clumsy, inexperienced and transparent. The stratagems
of fiction are noticeably absent from these diasporic daydreams. Oscar
Wilde once said that "all bad poetry is sincere". Sincerity
is an epithet I can use with conviction while describing The Seduction
of Silence, but sincerity alone can redeem nothing. The instant-karma
genre generates only New-Age nausea; 433 pages down Le Hunte's breathless
prose, I wondered if Jason did finally manage to work on Delhi's sewage
system. It would have been appropriate if he had.
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