The Folded Earth
Author: Anuradha Roy
Publisher: Maclehose
Pages: 368
Anuradha Roy, an editor at Permanent Black, is a graduate from Cambridge University. She wrote her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, which was published in 16 countries and translated into 13 languages across the world. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize. She also won the Picador-Outlook Non-fiction Award in 2004. The Folded Earth is her second novel.
In a remote town of Ranikhet, a hill station in the Himalayas, Maya, a young Hindu woman, disinherited by her orthodox industrialist father for marrying a Christian, Micheal, tries to put behind her a time of great sorrow after the death of her husband in a mountaineering expedition. It is a simple life in Ranikhet but she is lonely. To find peace, she visits Micheal’s grave regularly, despite being reminded of the truth of life. “Why have graves. The man’s dead and you hold onto his bones. It’s all molecules. Throw the ashes into a fast-flowing river. Or scatter them in the air. Much more poetic.”
By day, Maya teaches in a Christian school, oversees shifts at a pickle factory and at night, types up drafts of a magnum opus by her eccentric, old, gin-sipping, aristocratic landlord, Diwan Sahib — a ‘relic’ of princely India. She forges a bond that to some extent replaces her lost relationship with her parents. When Diwan Sahib’s nephew Veer arrives to set up his trekking company on their estate, she is drawn to him. What we see in the novel is a moral dilemma faced by Maya who, missing her husband, enters into a relationship in taboo-infested surroundings, where widows are not supposed to express their inner feelings of love and passion.
The other memorable character in the novel is Charu, a semi-literate cowherd peasant girl who falls in love with a young cook in the neighbourhood. Maya develops a bond with Charu and her grandmother and when the cook goes back to Delhi with his employers, Maya reads his illicit letters to Charu. This love affair brings back the flashes from her own past and the painful memories. “Once I ended up at the ruins of Golconda Fort where, by some miracle of acoustics, the sound of hands clapping at the gateway can be heard after a few moments pause. What if I clapped my hands and the next second, dropped dead? You would still hear the echo of that clapping.” However, Anuradha Roy also brings to the picture certain light moments to make the readers smile. “We found a small, dead bird on our path. I mourned for the loneliness of its mate. Michael had had a smile in his eyes when he said, ‘the mate is happy mating with a newer, bluer, larger bird. If I died, I had said, you would find a newer, bluer, larger bird within a week, men are like that.’”
Powerful outsiders who believe in dividing people hijack the impending elections. The political situation becomes tense when the candidate stirs up trouble using the Christian school as a scapegoat. The story deals with political and religious unrest and its fallout in the form of the destruction of the tranquillity of this small town, endangered by the town’s new administration.
It is even haunted by the ghosts of Lord Mountbatten, the former Viceroy of British-ruled India, and the love letters that purportedly passed between his wife, Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. Diwan Sahib owns and guards a trove of these letters and refuses to show them to anyone. When Maya asks him the reason for not writing a book about them, his reply is that it is “because of Edwina’s dog”. Edwina had a dog named Mizzen. When the time to leave India came, she did not know what to do with it because of England’s strict quarantine rules. Edwina consulted Nehru and they agreed it was better to put it down than make the dog suffer in quarantine. Diwan sahib’s anger towards this inhumane act on the part of Nehru is manifested in these lines: “All those gardens at his prime-ministerial doorstep and the man didn’t offer to adopt it and let it live out its remaining years in peace.”
The novel, written in gentle perfection, is poetic, elegiac and comic. It is a story about love and hate, continuity and change, loss and grief, told in poetic prose. Writing about mountains as “fingers” or calling the sky a “fluid blue” is captivating and beautifully written. Utterly enrapturing with incredibly touching lines (“What is real in this world?”), the novel culminates in a gripping climax with a touch of Saadat Hassan Manto’s writings.
The reviewer is a social activist. He can be reached at [email protected]