So, Who Are We?

In this unsettling novel, an accident survivor accuses his sister of being an imposter

In a bare synopsis it would read like a thriller. A 27-year-old man, Mark Schluter, lies comatose in hospital after his truck overturns one cold winter night in rural Nebraska. His sister, Karin, his only remaining family, rushes back from her public relations job to care for him. Investigators wonder that his truck’s were just one of three pair of tracks veering off the road. On his bedside, she finds a paper with these words, the writing like “immigrant crawl from a century ago”: “A am No One/ but Tonight on North Line Road/ GOD led me to you/ so You could Live/ and bring back someone else.”

As Mark slowly recovers, Karin cannot avert the reappraisal imposed by her old home. Focussing on Mark brings back memories of a difficult and fraught childhood. Worries that he’s suffered brain damage lead her to medical texts and quick study of cognition and memory. With Mark’s recovery bound to be long, she leaves her job, bringing on the disconcerting realisation of how imperceptibly she allowed dashed opportunities to curb her ambition. It is like seeing herself afresh, almost as a stranger.

This feeling of being a stranger to herself is accentuated when Mark regains consciousness. She looks like his older sister, he concedes, but he cannot believe it is her. She is, he contends, an imposter. Doctors say it’s a case of Capgras Syndrome, whereby a person loses his emotional memory. The unusual manifestation of this amnesia brings a well-known neurologist to his bedside. Dr Weber, a bestselling Oliver Sacks kind of figure, is himself suffering a lack of credibility after critical articles in the national press.

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If that were all to Powers’s unsettling novel, the narrative would still be compelling. What’s the mystery of the note? Is Karin who she says she is? What’s Weber all about? And that note?

But The Echo Maker is a grander narrative. The story of the Schluter siblings is laid over the seasonal migration of sandhill cranes to Nebraska. By now, as America adds to the invasion of Afghanistan at novel’s beginning with another in Iraq, the cranes are a major tourist attraction. Poetically overwriting this timeless migration, Powers uses their longer, instinctive memory to highlight the shorter term and personalised memories humans must constantly take stock of in their daily struggle for meaningful survival.

With technology, memory and identity are in any case beginning to be seen as constructible entities. Mark, in a loser job, is a regular at online chatrooms, using assumed identities to fill the loneliness he is personally inclined towards.

It is easy to compare the events of this patch of Nebraska with evolutionary patterns and governmental decision-making. Karin, so long in flight from her past, is drawn to the insight that it is natural to put oneself through little tests. How she tackles them will define how she sees herself. America in the winter of 2002 is going through the process in a most muscular way, in contrast to the migratory birds’ nonconfrontational, almost instinctive responses to ecological changes. Powers’s achievement in the end is to give prominence to the backdrop without in any way diminishing the stature and mystery of the Schluter siblings.

Police personnel seen to control the situation during a massive protest over the statehood demand and the inclusion of Ladakh under the Sixth Schedule, in Leh on Wednesday. (ANI Video Grab)

Statehood protest takes violent turn in Ladakh, BJP office set ablaze in Leh

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Protests in Ladakh turned violent as students and youth organisations demanded statehood and Sixth Schedule status. Two elderly protesters fainted, prompting a shutdown call. A BJP office and security vehicle were set on fire. Activist Sonam Wangchuk urged for a peaceful approach. The demand for Sixth Schedule status is due to Ladakh's tribal-majority population and direct central administration.

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