Behind Closed Doors

Pages: 224

Aruni Kashyap’s storytelling in his debut novel is gentle and credible. The House with a Thousand Stories teems with tales,

rumours,secrets and the capacity of the past to invade with malignant force. The narrator Pablo finds himself at this address thrice in the novel and it is by this means that the story moves forward. After his father’s first cousin and close friend,Bolen bortta’s death,this house with “seventeen windows and no ventilators” (a phrase repeated once too often,without any apparent metaphorical significance) starts bending,clammy with hidden histories. Pablo casts this conflict in terms of a mouldy tradition meeting its nemesis in the forces of hate and gore that envelop the larger social space.

Oholya jethai,an elderly spinster and Bolen bortta’s sister,is a formidable sentinel of conventions in this family that lives in the village of Hatimura in Mayong,Assam. Forsaken by a young doctor in her youth,she nurses an anxiety against love and lovers. Her younger brother Prosanto’s affair with a dark-skinned divorcee and her nephew Mridul’s passionate dalliance with the daughter of a Nepali wine-brewer are dark knights of anomie. Pablo says: “A radical love story is the only device that makes the time chariot of a village,a city,a country gallop faster. Such a love story pulls the wheels of that chariot from a murky,regressive past,towards a spotlessly clean road under autumn blue skies.” Pablo’s search may be for a powerful tale that can whisk the sterile somnolence of Mayong but in sentences such as these Kashyap errs on the side of garrulity. Phrases such as “vanish like camphor exposed to air” or the coconut trees shaking their heads saying “no,no,no” fail to waltz to the tunes of life in an

Assamese hamlet that Kashyap quite deftly renders.

The resistance that tradition offers to individual desires crumbles when faced with enemies untamed by filial ties. Fear of the Army,the ULFA and the surrendered ULFA faction (of whom all speak but none dare to write,says Kashyap) secret killings,abduction and massacres of the unfaithful are forms of public peril. These present occasions of collective grieving in the village,for instance when the surrendered militant Hiren’s family is gunned down,or Pablo’s friend Birodkar’s sister disappears after being raped by the Army. Such mourning cannot compensate for the more private,unshared pain suffered due to the shame of

family secrets. When Pablo arrives in the village from Guwahati in 2002 for Moina pehi’s wedding,the story that began in 1993 during his first visit is looking for closure. The house with a thousand stories is more than a little ravaged now,by its own inhabitants and by a politics forged without the people’s consent. The climax descends in the form of the bride’s suicide that rides a rumour,his own night of lust with tragic consequences,Mridul’s failed elopement and Prosanto’s defiance of Oholya jethai when he brings his lover home to be blessed by his dying mother. In the end Pablo talks about “a story that looks like a foot” and a story that leads to five other stories. Again,a brief moment of readerly discomfort with stating the obvious.

On Pablo’s second visit in 1998 when Bolen bortta dies,he encounters an Army convoy as he watches the sun set by the Brahmaputra,and he wonders,in a moment of epiphany: “I wondered what they must be thinking about our river,our sunset,our village,our skies,our songs,our chatter,our walls,the sound of our looms,our birds,our dust”. Aruni Kashyap’s story is clearly one of belonging. The language does not regard the material at a distance and the tension reads like the experience of an insider. Pablo lives in the city,speaks English with his parents and might even leave for America soon. His and Kashyap’s critique,however,is rooted. It blends well with the ordinariness,the wounds and songs that he writes of. Surely,an achievement for a first novel.

Chaity Das teaches English literature at Kalindi College,Delhi