Home Is Elsewhere

Babu, zigzagging through memories 8212; some real, some fictionalised in an attempt towards coherence 8212; of a fearful, abruptly termina...

Babu, zigzagging through memories 8212; some real, some fictionalised in an attempt towards coherence 8212; of a fearful, abruptly terminated childhood in the Northeast, remembers his grandfather. He remembers that the old man would refer to the land of his birth, his home until the upheaval of 1947, as 8220;East Pakistan8221; long after the 1971 war, long long after everyone else began calling it Bangladesh.

In that consistent, outdated reference, Babu senses a certitude that he8217;ll never be able to lay claim to, a comfort that could have made his own father8217;s life whole. 8220;It showed,8221; he writes, 8220;that the landscape of his past would for ever be permanent and unchanging, not something that was historical and therefore open to perpetual revision but a place beyond the vagaries of time.8221;

The Point of Return
By Siddhartha Deb
Picador India
Price: Rs 395

In this lyrical meditation on the fading deg-

rees of belonging, however, denial is never really an option for Babu and his father, Dr Dam. For Dr Dam, a veterinary surgeon, it is a slow, inexorable process of exclusion. Tossed out of his native village by Radcliffe8217;s squiggles, home is initially not distant. As he tours through Assam, then encompassing most of the hill regions of the Northeast, development is a realisable grail and ethnic divisions non-existent, tribal and plainspeople equal partners.

But fragmentation seems to be written into the history of his family and young nation. His new home town, a thinly disguised Shillong, is suddenly the capital only of a newly created tribal state. As the years pass, his ethnicity becomes a daily taunt. 8220;Bengali,8221; they hiss in the bazaars and streets. At first it means merely relinquishing the dream to own a home in this hilly town. But the connotations keep multiplying. Tribal assertiveness soon means shifting residence to 8220;Bengali8221; enclaves, making little changes in his daily schedule to avoid the darkness and lonely stretches.

As old age creeps in, as retirement concludes earnest plans for a dairy revolution, he tries to construct home in distant Silchar, in another Bengali enclave. It all 8212; his work in government, his house plans 8212; appears futile, it breaks him.

This is what Babu inherits and what he must come to terms with. Now a journalist in Delhi, he begins with a narrative inching backwards in time, the persistent rain of his hilly town providing him a canvas and perhaps the only certainty. But the bare bones of his story are not enough. Halfway through, the book forks into tiny essays and a travelogue.

Still, resolution remains elusive. As Babu goes back to the streets and corners of his childhood, he feels that during all those years he was simply reacting to the violence yet to come. If his father reacted to history by silently receding into his meticulous calculations first for development, then for a house in Silchar, Babu responds with more confidence, with anger, and with resignation. 8220;I could have taken the side of the people here,8221; he says of the tribals so summarily excluded by the mainland, their environs so comprehensively ignored in elementary school geography, 8220;agreed with them that they had for too long been treated as exotic props in their own land, had I not been denied that possibility by being who I was.8221;

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That is how the personal and the political coincide in Siddhartha Deb8217;s immensely disturbing, and impressive, debut novel.