Back to the Future

Anita Desai’s novels can be very deceptive. They are inhabited by men and women who could have been living next door, her fiction is dr...

Anita Desai’s novels can be very deceptive. They are inhabited by men and women who could have been living next door, her fiction is driven by lifestories that in their bare telling would invite no surprise. Her characters drift along on a seemingly forkless path. Yet, in their almost everyday narratives there exist fulcrums for civilisational inquiries. In her last novel — Fasting, Feasting (1999), the third of her novels to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize — the idea of nutrition and nourishment was used to examine gender relations in India, and the certitudes and ambiguities that bind social contracts in the East and the West. In In Custody, adapted for the big screen by the Merchant-Ivory team, language illumined fading aristocracies and changing notions of culture and heritage.

In her new book, a young American scholar’s writer’s block is a metaphor for willful forgetting. In his travels and distractions to find that inspiring insight to get him going on his intended book on immigration patterns in Boston around 1900, he finds himself confronting dark secrets about his family and his continent. Comprehending his separateness from his jovial Maine fish-ing family and anchoring his thesis on immigration in emotion and in context require not just a journey to a neighbouring land, it involves slipping through the decades and making acquaintance with forgotten ancestors.

What begins as a rather formulaic travel in Mexico — familiar descriptions of lushly pillared inns and striking cactii, of colourful capes in dusty ghost towns — transcends to a less cinematic, disconcertingly dreamy terrain.

Story continues below this ad

Em, Eric’s more organised partner, is off to the Yucatan for fieldwork. Eric offers to accompany her, weakly hoping that change of location will jolt him into purposeful work. In the days before they separate to undertake different journeys — Em with professional focus and Eric with simmering dread — her impatience with his tendency to explore the touristy sights and to simply drift along — that is, his “capacity for enjoying idleness” — foreshadows a bigger break.

As Eric strays into a book function in honour of an anthropologist specialising in the ways of the Huichol Indians, his study acquires sudden momentum. But even the first, faint stirrings of his agitation bemuse her.

The talk brings back hazy memories of a childhood trip to Cornwall, to his paternal grandfather and mentions of a mining life in the Sierra Madre. He is drawn to the anthropologist’s unwelcoming hacienda, to serendipitous and eerie retreading of his ancestors’ itineraries. Family history collides with cultural invasions, and that earlier idle drift is imbued with meaning. To unlock his writer’s block, he clearly has to first break free of generations of forgetting. Predictably, but masterfully, Desai draws a parallel between Eric’s journey in time and the need to look beyond the narrative edifices new inhabitants construct to bury their guilt.

The Zigzag Way is a slim book, weighing in at just 179 pages. But it is a misleading slimness. Continents are traversed, movements and peoples are taken stock of, civilising missions are questioned, and 21st century ennui is situated in a spectacularly common historical frame.

UP police links Sambhal violence to Dubai gangster, issues lookout circular

Cities20 min ago

An LOC has been issued against gangster Shariq Satha, accused of being the main conspirator in the violence in Sambhal last year. He is allegedly operating his gang from Dubai and has been booked on charges of criminal conspiracy in five cases.

View all shorts

Live Blog