A crossover Shakespearean tale on a distant Indian shore. A midsummer night’s dream with tainted revelry, a threatening tempest. In this literary reinvention, retelling and metamorphoses, Eastwords becomes a vast canvas of dark interpretation.Real and imagined characters flit across the boundaries of East and West. Shakespeare is the Bardshah and the narrator here is Sheikh Piru, the omniscient voice in the tradition of the Mahabharata where Vyas is both character and narrator. The tale is epic in its scale, pitting the colonisers against the colonised, the masters against the slave. In Ray’s book, Puck is not a merry wanderer, no blithe spirit of the night. He is born Pakhee, a brown boy with the gift of flying. Weaned away by his mother Sukumari’s lover Oberon, he’s promised higher things but is thrown among the lowest. A slave in Oberon’s galaxy of slaves with a name that’s not even his. Pakhee becomes Puck. Meanwhile, the abandoned Sukumari gives birth to Obeon’s son. A boy called Kalyan who Titania, the red haired queen of fairies, possessively looks over, refusing to give him over to Oberon when he returns. But Oberon wants his son, a child he hopes can fly. Fly or die is his diktat; but as he prepares to fling the child down, Sukumari, somewhat like an angry devi, kills Oberon. Fittingly, she then invokes Kali. It is on a desolate island that Sukumari brings up Kalyan. Years later, the day she gets lost in the sea is the day that Prospero or Pandey (as he is called by Kalyan) and his daughter Miranda set foot on the island. Prospero, incidentally, has also rescued Puck from a book of incantations where Oberon had embedded him into a page ‘‘within the confining crook’’ of a P. The born again Puck, now called Ariel, escapes only to become Prospero’s slave. On the island, the power equation changes slowly. Once it was Kalyan who showed Prospero the island, showed him where to get food, fed his daughter Miranda or Meera. It is Kalyan who calls Prospero Pandey. Once Prospero learns the ropes, the roles reverse. Now he calls Kalyan Caliban. And in his stories he turns Caliban ‘‘a creature of dirt in his own eyes’’. In his rantings, the beautiful brown Sukumari becomes Sycorax (the witch in Tempest who imprisons Ariel). ‘‘He spoke of the witch’s dark complexion as if it were an axiom of wickedness.’’ The tales of Prospero make Kalyan feel he ‘‘too was fallen, a brute’’. His slavery is complete and ends only when Prospero leaves and Sukumari returns. Ariel, meanwhile, floats in uneasy freedom, joining Robert Clive in the Battle of Plassey as Harilal. The last the narrator heard was of him living in Calcutta in ‘‘an abandoned office of the defunct Indian National Congress Party.’’ ‘‘They call him Hari the blind now.’’ Kalyan and Sukumari continue living on the island, joined one day by Sheikh Piru, the lonely storyteller. As Sheikh Piru settles to tell a tale from an Arabian seer, Sukumari stops him. ‘‘We must tell our own tales,’’ she says. So borrowed words are returned, old ones return and new ones will be found. But in doing so, Ray stretches the literary exchange a bit too far. Eastwords is crowded with mythical and Shakespearean characters, dense with literary allusions and in all this ambitious cross-referencing, Ray occasionally overreaches.
