She admitted she had been incurious about my novel as she was incurious about most Indians who wrote novels in English, but that it had been recommended to her by a writer she respected and she was pleasantly surprised on reading it. I was, similarly, incurious about her work as I was about the work of other Indians who wrote novels in English. This incuriosity — not about an author’s biography or trajectory, but what their work constitutes in terms of temperament, style, or, in time, achievement — still defines the field. In India, we — I mean not only the reading public, but writers themselves — may know that a writer writes novels; I might know what another novelist’s best-known book is, or what their latest is called; I may also have heard (or even claim, after having read them) that a particular book by them is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But I wouldn’t know why it’s good or bad. The question, for me, would essentially be irrelevant. This is the incuriosity — an unwillingness to reconsider at every moment what it is that comprises literary or artistic pleasure when one encounters it afresh; to leave that question alone; to not argue for it — that Sunetra and I would have found ourselves a part of and which, by the early 1990s, would already have been a decade old. It accompanied the preamble to, and arrival of, globalisation, and the rise of English as a way of experiencing the global. Writing novels, for the ‘serious’ Anglophone Indian, had become a social accomplishment. Each writer (and this is still largely true) existed in a void in which they were convinced that they were surely the most accomplished among those who inhabited their circle. If one’s ambition is to be the ‘best’ — a social, not a writerly, ambition — then disengaging from one’s contemporaries on anything but the grounds of superficial commonalities and from the problem of literature itself is the best way to go about it. A lifetime might go by, in this way, in preparation of something. The idea of networking-the act of reading each other in a kind of public chorus in a performance of mutual benefit, where everyone is the ‘best’ — was still years from becoming the principal substitute for a cultural fabric.
I took a while to read Memories of Rain. This is partly because of the incuriosity I have described as a condition of being an Indian novelist in English — a social being defined by class for whom ignoring, ignoring, ignoring, carries the frisson of self-definition. The post-globalisation Anglophone Indian upper class constantly performs a class action on itself — perhaps even more reflexively than it does on those it sees to be outside its universe. ‘Are you really one of us?’ This kind of class-inflected interrogation and distancing is translated by writers into their own terms, and in their own domain; it’s the mimicking of a certain kind of class awareness in relation to each other that leads to the intrinsic self-satisfaction that’s part of the experience of being an Indian writer in English. (I’m not speaking here of the pre-globalisation educated middle class in India, who expressed their thoughts and agenda largely in their mother tongue besides formulating them in English. I’m not even speaking of Indian poets who wrote in English prior to globalisation, for whom their class was an open-ended cultural milieu before being an unconscious means of exclusion.)
I was also unsure of what I’d encounter in Sunetra’s novel. We may not have become close friends, but I respected her. She was a scientist, a reader, and — it seemed — a writer. I didn’t want to be in the position that the poet and editor Ian Hamilton, in his conversation with the novelist Dan Jacobson, had said it might be best for a writer to avoid being in: “Very few friendships can survive your saying: ‘I like you but I don’t like your poems.’ Much better to say: ‘I don’t like you but I like your poems.’ Yes, that would have been OK.”
So I kept her work out of any conversations we had, and discussed generalities — her next project; her agent and publisher — in a way that’s perfectly possible to do, for eternity probably, where novelists are concerned. I had heard very good things about Memories of Rain: it had been noticed in Britain, and I think it had admirers in India. I had also heard — as was to be expected — not so positive things, mainly to do with overwriting and ornateness. It was too soon to say in what way her work would fit in with the expectations to do with either the postcolonial or the realist ‘Indian novel’ (Midnight’s Children had been out for 11 years when her book appeared; A Suitable Boy was published around when we met), expectations that she and I found ourselves without any affinity for, or comprehension of.
I bought a copy of Memories of Rain in India, intending to read it but never getting round to it. A few times, I flicked through its pages, as if a portal would open and I’d find my way in. One looks for a point of entry into a work; that point of entry can come anywhere. Starting at the beginning is one way of proceeding, but reading from the start is absolutely no guarantee that an imaginative work will give up its meaning and lead to the moment of recognition that only occurs in, and through, language. One day, I noticed a word that made me pause:
‘She watched the heavy hips of her aunt as she bent down to mop up the rainwater and she wondered how it was to know that these bones would never hold the growing warmth of a child, on her wedding day she had watched her kneel upon the chipped red cement floor of the rented house and decorate it with a milky solution of ground rice that dried hard and white in large spirals of flowers and sea shells, she had watched the heavy hips shift as she moved round the circle, her fingers configured into a stylus for the murky fluid in her palm, she had looked upon her and wondered that one sad morning many years ago, it was she that had watched the preparations for her wedding, her young limbs smeared with turmeric, and her tender hopes had been shattered by the cold eyes that pierced her veil, the stranger that was to be her husband.’
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The word was ‘stylus’. It expressed, with an alienating exactitude, the shape of the hand — always a woman’s hand on these occasions — when it creates, from a thick white rice paste, the alpana of Bengali festivals and weddings. The aunt’s hand has forsaken its ordinary shape and function; its fingers are ‘configured’ (not a word you’d think would ordinarily lead to a narrowing, but working here with the patient logic of perception) into a needle-like shape that we, and presumably the narrator, must associate with the music of a modernity that’s already passed — the stylus descending on the record on a gramophone turntable. The aunt is at once aunt, carrying the history and sorrows of her life in her body, and vanishing point, a conduit for the emergence of something transient and arresting: an epoch and form that ‘dried hard’ on the ‘chipped red cement floor of the rented house’ (everything, including the house in which the aunt lives, is provisional), ‘white in large spirals of flowers and sea shells’.
The writing of such a passage requires a special kind of concentration. What I have quoted above is a single sentence. It could have ended at ‘child’ and made a fresh start — a plausible beginning in the manner of the narrative aside — with ‘On her wedding day’. But it veers from ‘watching’ the aunt in the present moment to a memory of watching her in the past without explanation or grammatical adjustment, creating a little bump at the comma. The prose is full of such fresh starts and reconsiderations that haven’t been smoothed out in the way they would have been in a Victorian sentence or even by Woolf. These bumps constitute the agitation and peculiarity of Gupta’s style, its refusal to abandon what’s individual and even troublesome in us for the impersonality and beauty of art-language, even while entering a concentration — as in ‘her fingers configured into a stylus for the murky fluid in her palm’ — that is to be found only in art. To inhabit Gupta’s world is to enter-on the level not so much of the sentence but of syntax, of the way a comma might bring disparate planes of experience together — both the consciousness that nags at us and won’t leave us alone as well as the serene otherness of the world we live in.
And this is why, I suppose, it is possible to experience constant torment, serenity, anger, humour and wonder in her work, but not separately: her style won’t psychologise in the manner of the realist novel, but neither will it be completely distant and equanimous — it won’t give up on the cumbersome agitation of what it means to be a human, to be a woman, to be a Bengali woman in love; but this agitation won’t be separated from the laughter of youth, the quixotic daydreams of the Bengali middle class, languor, and the serenity and joy with which art receives the world and gives it a home. Describing the creative process, TS Eliot made a distinction between the ‘man who suffers’ and the ‘mind which creates’: ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’. Gupta doesn’t think being a great artist is necessarily to be a ‘perfect’ artist. The woman who suffers and the woman who creates — and, in the process, creates joy — can’t be disentangled in her work from each other. The personal and the impersonal are, in her writing, conjoined like Siamese twins; to leave one out would be to lose the other.
The story of Memories of Rain is straightforward enough, although, even thematically, it was new at the time: a young middle-class Bengali woman falls in love with her brother’s friend, an Englishman, who is spending time in Calcutta — this ‘time’, to begin with, is a period of poetic abeyance such as is familiar to Bengalis during the monsoons. Waterlogging, wading through the streets to go from one place to another to shop or make visits, the comedy of this paralysis, the indistinguishability of salvaging what’s left of the day from recreation, and the possibility of discovery, of encountering the faraway, in the midst of this stasis — all this becomes, in the first section of the novel, part of an extraordinary exploration of subject— matter and form. The discovery is romantic with both a small and big ‘r’, but it is also located in Calcutta’s waterlogging, gutter-water sometimes entering domestic spaces, and is, as a result, also comic and quotidian: ‘… he had just waded through knee-deep water, he and her brother, all the way from the Academy of Fine Arts to their house in Ballygunge. He had rolled up his jeans revealing his alabaster calves which dripped the sewage of Calcutta onto the floor of their veranda, and that was what caused her to tremble in excitement and loathing as she pushed aside the curtain with a tray of tea and toast, his large, corpse-white, muck-rinded toes pushed against the bamboo table, soiling the mats she had crocheted in school. She set down the tea, her brother did not bother to introduce her, but Anthony asked, is this your sister? And she had nodded vaguely and smiled, picked up the book that she had been reading all afternoon, there on the veranda, all afternoon, watching the rain.’
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We see how good Gupta is, by any conventions of storytelling, at setting the scene-this obstreperous young man, unmindful of his impact on the furniture but aware of the impact he might have on the visitor; the ‘Is this your sister?’ given no more weight than any other detail in the sentence; the narrator noticing the visitor’s mix of certitude and obliviousness; her own cultural finickiness and her openness to the stranger captured swiftly in ‘excitement and loathing’ (as if he were a kind of taboo food which awaited tasting); the artificial, dramatic, and neoclassical brought together irresistibly, in a characteristic phrase, with the beloved texture of modernity: ‘his alabaster calves which dripped the sewage of Calcutta onto the floor of their veranda’.
She moves to England with him. He is having an affair. She returns to Calcutta when she decides she can take no more of his infidelity. This skeletal summary accommodates a great expansiveness to do with being in the world, and between worlds-ostensibly, Bengal and England, but other worlds too. The power of the novel comes not from its triumphalism, but its vision. In a lesser writer, there would be an either/or: I reject this for that. That kind of move, that rejection, is enacted in Memories of Rain, certainly: it’s an important part of the story and the structure. But the vision itself is a kind of embrace. It enters all kinds of crevasses: from Calcutta to Cornwall, sometimes, in a single sentence; from the space of the bathroom in which a young woman can experience solitude (a room of one’s own) in a Calcutta apartment to the excitement of darkened rooms where you come upon the strangeness of art-house cinema: the nooks and crannies which pre-globalisation society was made of-the narrative leaves nothing of these out. Rather than choose between one value system, country, and person or another, Memories of Rain remains mesmerised by, and faithful to, multiple registers of life.
It has been 33 years since it first appeared, and it continues to surprise.
This essay is the introduction to a new edition of Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain, reissued 33 years after its original publication by Literary Activism, an imprint edited by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Westland Books and the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University
The word was ‘stylus’. It expressed, with an alienating exactitude, the shape of the hand — always a woman’s hand on these occasions — when it creates, from a thick white rice paste, the alpana of Bengali festivals and weddings (Illustration by Suvajit Dey)
