topics: |  fiction | malaysia

preeta samaresan's style is engaging - mixing in the history of colonialism into the lives of her protagonists. she is at her best dealing with the antics of distant relatives, like the elderly lady, somewhat deranged, who never leaves the puja room the entire day - "a fresh whiff of excrement-spiced air" moves with her. one senses that these may be the stories that she has been engaged on for some time.

on the whole a very talented writer, but the style does not carry through its high standard. the plot is also a bit slow - at times the story doesn't move as well as the telling.

Excerpts

1: The Ignominious Departure of Chellamservant

There is, stretching delicate as a bird's head from the thin neck of the Kra Isthmus, a land that makes up half of the country called Malaysia. Where it dips its beak into the South China Sea, Singapore hovers like a bubble escaped from its throat. [opening lines]

A year from today, Chellam will be dead. 4

Chellam the ex-servant girl, once beloved (but hated) and hated (but beloved) by Suresh and Aasha, now in ex-ile in her faraway village of red earth and tin roofs. 15

2. Big House Beginnings

In 1899, Appa's grandfather sailed across the Bay of Bengal to seek his
fortune under familiar masters in a strange land...

To Appa's father Tata: "Study hard. Study hard and you won't have to be a
coolie like me. 17


---
somewhere in all that hoping and studying and preparing, something else
changed: India ceased to be home.

Sometimes it glimmered green and gold in Tata's father's tales of riverbank
games and ten-day weddings and unbreakable blood bonds. At other times it
was a threat, a nightmare, a morass in which those who hadn't been lucky
enough to escape still failed.

... This, this flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot place to which they had found
their way almost by accident, this was his country now. 18

By the time Tata retired, in 1956, he owned a shipping company that rivaled
his old employer's. A wry sun was setting with a vengeance on the British
Empire.

When a dockyard coolie could send his son to Oxford, thought Mr. McDougall as he signed [the] smudgily cyclostyled contract, that's when you knew it was time to cut your losses and flee.

[He buys an old colonial house] from Mr. McDougall, a dyspeptic Scotsman who had owned two of the scores of mines that had sprouted up in and around Ipoh in the 1850s to tap the Kinta Valley's rich veins of tin. He had already sold the mines to a Chinese towkay; now he had only to get rid of his house. 18

fascinating mixed-metaphor description of India's independence

It had been nine years since King George VI had relinquished the cherished
jewel of his crown. To be more precise: he'd dropped it as if it were a hot
potato, towards the outstretched hands of a little brown man in a loincloth
and granny glasses; a taller, hook-nosed chap in a still-unnamed jacket;
and three hundred and fifty million anonymous Natives who'd fiercely stayed
up until, by midnight, they'd been watery-eyed, delirious with exhaustion,
and willing to see nearly anything as a precious gift from His Majesty.

Down, down, down it had fallen, this crown jewel, this hot potato, this
quivering, unhatched egg, none of them knowing what would emerge from it
and yet most of them sure-oh blessed, blissful certainty!-that it was just
what they wanted. Alas, the rest, too, is history: in their hand-clapping
delight they'd dropped it, and it had broken in two, and out of the two
halves had scurried not the propitious golden chick they'd imagined, but a
thousand bloodthirsty monsters multiplying before their eyes, and scrabble
as they might to unscramble the mess, it was too late, all too late even
for them to make a last-minute omelet with their broken egg. 20


---

He'd sold the house at a loss, but he didn't care, not even when he saw the
self-satisfied glint in the eyes of the wog who bought it. This man was a
walking symptom of the softening of the empire. When a dockyard coolie
could send his son to Oxford, thought Mr. McDougall as he signed his half
of the unevenly typewritten, smudgily cyclostyled contract, that's when you
knew it was time to cut your losses and flee. 22

[Hints at Paati having an Englishman ?admirer?] whose name she did not
speak, even to herself.  p.23

[Chellam's broken suitcase goes thud thud down the stairs]
   Amma flinches and shudders. "Look, look," she whispers urgently to
Suresh and Aasha without taking her eyes off Chellam. "Purposely she's
doing it. She is taking revenge on us it seems. For sending her home. As if
after all she's done we’re supposed to keep her here and feed her it
seems."
   Suresh and Aasha, wide-eyed, say nothing.

[At Ammachi's house, her dysfunctional mother lives locked up in the puja
room]
A fresh whiff of excrement-spiced air wafter out of the folds of her
saree and draped itself around Amma like an octopus tentacle. 64

[Appa's singapore girlfriend:]
slipped off her panties and peed in front of him as he stood talking to her
in the doorway...
Wooden blinds, the kind that usually hung outside Chinese shophouses, covered
her windows. A ceiling fan grey with dust stirred the webs of two spiders....

Pontianak ghosts

Chellam suddenly turned into a pontianak ghost from an Indonesian horror film. 69

[
Pontianak ghosts or kunti are a terrifying vampire-like horror creature
from Indonesian/Malaysia.  With a fearful cry they kill and capture the
soul of the victim.  When you hang your clothes outside at night, it comes
and sniffs your clothes to suck your blood.  They kill by digging their
sharp nails into the stomach of the victim.

The phrase "Pontianak" is believed to come from "Perempuan Mati Beranak",
woman death by childbirth.  The ghost is thought to originate from a
still-born child, or a woman dying in childbirth, or others killed by the
pontianak.

After such deaths, precautions are taken - e.g.
glass beads are put in the corpse's mouth so that they can’t shriek, and eggs
are placed under the armpits so that they can’t fly.

The Pontianak's cry sounds like a babies.  It often appears as a beautiful
young lady, with an aroma of champa (kemboja) flower, but there is an
awful stench afterwards.
see http://horrorstories.anthonet.com/archives/what-is-pontianak for more.
or this wikipedia page.
]

[Chellam's] very farts and toilet flushings, these days, are afraid, ashamed,
damaged. 69

Chellam has a thunderous, volcanic attack of diarrhea. 82

At the crematorium, under the hawk eyes of three old men who are somehow,
surely, related to him, Appa sprinkles water and milk on Paati's ashes and
gingerly picks out seven unburned bones: big-toe bone, bit-of-kneecap, hip
scraps number one and two, fourth rib, collarbone tips.  84

She waits, her faith undented, although a day has passed since the funeral, and
even now Appa is gathering Paati's ashes and her unburned bones into two clay
pots; Aasha suspects Paati will show up first either in her chair,

as soon as he lays the big-toe bone down, Paati rises from her remains.
Of course neither Appa nor his three spavined sidekicks recognize her, but rise
she does, the scrappiest of vapors, buffeting the fringes of one old man's
tonsure, lifting the other's dhoti. "Very windy today," one of them says as he
holds his dhoti down girlishly. 88

Not until Appa arranges her seven unburned bones in their original
configuration on a layer of raw rice on the beach in Lumut is Paati's spirit
resurrected. Appa is willfully unaware of his role in this metaphysical
transaction; 87

title quote

The sun goes down and the sky reddens, pain grows sharp,
light dwindles. Then is evening
when jasmine flowers open, the deluded say.
But evening is the great brightening dawn
when crested cocks crow all through the tall city
and evening is the whole day
for those without their lovers.
		- Hank Heifetz and George L. Hart, from
		  The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom


	தலைவி கூற்று சுடர்செல் வானஞ் சேப்பப் படர்கூர்ந்
	தெல்லறு பொழுதின் முல்லை மலரும்
	மாலை என்மனார் மயங்கி யோரே
	குடுமிக் கோழி நெடுநக ரியம்பும்
	பெரும்புலர் விடியலு மாலை
	பகலும் மாலை துணையி லோர்க்கே. -மிளைப்பெருங் கந்தனார்
	    			- Milaipperun Kantan (Kuruntokai 234)


On an aside, I daresay that this is one of the few poems where someone has
bested a translation by Ramanujan.  This version is a collaboration between
the poet Hank Heifetz with Tamil scholar George Hart, and I feel that it
conveys the pathos of the evening more powerfully than Ramanujan's stanza:

But even the tufted cock
     calls in the long city
     and the long night
     breaks into dawn
     it is evening:
     	            even noon
     is evening,
     to one who has no one.
		(from A.K. Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War)

But of course it is possible that Ramanujan is more faithful.




[interesting chapter titles...]

Chapter titles

 1. The Ignominious Departure of Chellamservant Daughter-of-Muniandy   1
 2. Big House Beginnings 					       17
 3. The Necessary Sacrifice of the Burdensome Relic 		       29
 4. An Old-Fashioned Courtship 				       	       44
 5. The Recondite Return of Paati the Dissatisfied 		       67
 6. After Great Expectations 					       91
 7. Power Struggles 						       110
 8. What Aasha Saw 						       136
 9. The Futile Incident of the Sapphire Pendant 		       175
10. The God of Gossip Conquers the Garden Temple 		       199
11. The Final Visit of the Fleet-footed Uncle 		       	       224
12. The Unlucky Revelation of Chellam Newservant 		       249
13. What Uncle Ballroom Saw 					       273
14. The Golden Descent of Chellam, the Bringer of Succor 	       312
15. The Glorious Ascent of Uma the Oldest-Eldest 		       327

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