Book review: Once It Flowers

Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages: 329
Prices: Rs 350

Of all the literary forms, the novel is the newest in India. Despite having a flourishing literary tradition, no Indian language had a novel until it emerged in the subcontinent in the late 19th century, during British rule. Even then, Indian writers adopted the Western model with its formal devices.

The veteran Hindi author Vinod Kumar Shukla is among the few who went on to introduce a completely new idiom to the novel and mastered it over three works, featuring similar characters living in villages and small towns of Chhattisgarh. There is a complete absence of plot or even story in his novels, just quotidian incidents which propel the narrative.

In Once It Flowers, the English translation of his second novel Khilega To Dekhenge, a teacher arrives to live in an abandoned police station outside a village, after his school is blown away in a gale. His children dream of touching the Tropic of Cancer that passes not far from their home. The village watchman believes that his toy gun could kill if he took aim and said, “Bang!” There is also a shopkeeper in search of his beautiful wife who, he suspects, has eloped. There are no reminiscences or ruminations over the larger questions of life and death and no confrontations with the interior world, or the one at large.

On the surface, this hardly appears to be material for a novel. But Shukla’s novel is one of possibilities, not actualities. The characters live through each day without hope, complaint or anticipation, and in their ordinariness is revealed the vast, unrealised cosmos they carry within. This cosmos is created by linguistic devices. Shukla ruptures the syntax of prose, twists verbs and introduces unexpected metaphors: “The nightingale sang while the sparrow was visible. Using playback technology, the sparrow sang the nightingale’s song,” he writes. If art is essentially a product of human suffering, a crucial way to ascertain a novel’s worth is through its response to sorrow.

Shukla’s guileless characters form a jovial bond with grief and laugh away their penury. “To douse the fire of hunger, it was necessary to eat down to the last bite. One could not take the first bite today and the last bite four days later.”

Before his first novel Naukar Ki Kameez (The Servant’s Shirt) appeared in the late 1970s (it was later made into a feature film by Mani Kaul), Shukla was already an accomplished poet. His novels are peppered with poetry and his prose is the most poetic among his contemporaries’s work. “We are a society of poets. Our epics and scriptures are in verse. We deliberated in poetry. It’s innate to me,” he had said in an interview. Rendering such poetic prose with undulating syntax into English is not easy, but Satti Khanna has done well. He takes some liberties, but retains the crucial lyricism of the original.

Shukla has termed Once It Flowers the “most incompletely finished” of his novels. “I don’t find much difference between a story and a novel. You end a story at some point. Take it further, and it will become a novel,” he once said. This novel, like his other two, can be read from any page, paragraph or sentence. It is like an endless journey — a traveler can enter and be part of it at any juncture.

His literary craft too is unique. His endings are not logical conclusions arrived at through the working of the plot. Instead, he says, “When I feel that I have written enough, I get up.” This disregard for form and critical theory has made him among the most baffling of Hindi writers since Independence. Critics have largely remained unable to decode this reticent writer, who lives away from the literary centre, never participates in literary debates and, despite several volumes of poetry and novels that introduced a syntax immediately adopted by generations, has not written a single essay on his craft. The clue lies in the novel: “One had to practice seeing things other than the familiar”.

Once It Flowers floats like a breeze so mild that you almost don’t notice its caress.