Books: Dark Worlds

Savage, Swiftian and with humour so black that what little laughter it provokes is painful, Manjula Padmanabhan's award-winning play is really an allegory about relationships. The unequal ones with more than a touch of necrophilic symbiosis about them, whether between the First World and the Third, the rich and the poor, husband and wife and lovers, or between a mother and her sons. The three-act play is set, like a few of Padmanabhan's earlier stories, in some grey, almost anaesthesised near-future. And the future is used as a magnifying lens to look at a greedy and dead-end present -- a soulless world without exits.

Ostensibly, Harvest is about the sale of human organs: poor Indians selling various parts of their anatomy to rich Americans shopping for spare parts to replace theirs in a cannibalistic quest to hang on to youth. But Padmanabhan has taken it much further to look at our derailed society. The story revolves round a family of four: Om Prakash, who has made the Faustian deal, his mother (Mrs Praycash as the Americans call her), his wife and brother. The other main character is the module in the room which seems to have materialised from some futuristic thriller; Ginni (genie), the American lady, appears on it now and then like some Big Sister to see whether the Prakash family is following the rules. They lead antiseptic lives, eating multicoloured pills instead of food, not mixing with others, and God forbid, getting a cold. Being fattened like the proverbial lamb before the slaughter, Om Prakash has to lead a sterile life in more ways than one: he has to pretend he is his wife's brother. Padmanabhan's visceral satire also takes on the post-satellite Indian society in which the tube is like a dialysis machine.
The play is as darkly satirical as O.V. Vijayan's later novels, but on this side of excess. A bitter harvest indeed.

AUTHORSPEAK: M G VASSANJI
Mapping Memories
The doctor of physics completes his trilogy

M G Vassanji Over tea, Feroz, an old student of Pius Fernandes, the narrator of The Book of Secrets, asks him: "You taught history, sir. Can you write it?" The question haunts M.G. Vassanji, author of The Book of Secrets, and his literary corpus is an attempt to answer it. Vassanji's world is part fiction-part memory, a history of the people who left Indian shores in search of a dream for eastern Africa, and from there on to the US and Canada. Vassanji's yet-to-be-named novel -- his fourth -- is part of a trilogy that includes The Gunny Sack (Viking, 1989) and The Book of Secrets (Penguin, 1994). The first two novels told of the birth and evolution of immigrant communities in eastern Africa, while the recently-completed novel documents their movement to the West. "They look at the people -- those who went from India to colonial settlements (in Africa), built communities and then headed to the heart of the West. And that is why the new book is set in the US. It is about a character who, in a way, represents the culmination of this journey," says Vassanji.

Despite being a chronicler of the great journey, he fumes at his works being labelled as immigrant fiction. "It is a convenient label to put you in place, especially when you are in a majority-minority situation." He knows it well. When he began writing in the '80s, few magazines would publish literary articles by immigrant writers. "They could not understand us," he says. Certainly a creative mind rich with "folk tales and stories, reported tales and remembered half events" and loaded with the cultural memory of three continents would have been too much for them.

The world of memories has always been the germ of Vassanji's fiction. Groomed in science -- he came to the US (to mit) from Tanzania to do his doctorate in theoretical physics and moved to Canada for post-doctoral studies -- he knows the importance of observation and research. And so he goes back to Africa, finds old relatives, traces the old town -- Kibwezi -- where his great grandfather settled in the 1880s and writes The Book of Secrets. But don't the contradictions bother him -- a Kutchi born and brought up in Nairobi and Dar es Salam, living in Toronto, mapping the histories of people as they search for a promised land? "I cannot imagine a life without contradictions. I thrive on them." That is a true immigrant speaking.

-Amrith Lal