Herculess Labours

There is a deliciously slow,rambling,sureness about the way in which Manohar Shyam Joshi wheels his hero around on the Hercules cycle of the title. It takes you back to a time when,as the narrator notes,people had the time to ponder on matters such as the one which perplexes the slow-witted hero Harihar Datt Tiwari or Hariya Hercules.

The story has a fabulous quality about it,even as it begins with the scatological problems that Hariya,the only remaining son of Girvan Datt Tiwari,a former pillar of his community,faces as he manually evacuates his Fathers bowels every morning. Its not just the constipation that is the problem. Soon,the Father dies,leaving behind a trunk filled with the secrets of his past and Hariya has to prise out one anecdote at a time,even as others in the family try to get to the secret in the trunk. A chance meeting with an overtly precocious schoolboy Atul alerts Hariya to the word Goomalling that inextricably gets caught in the sequence of events that follow. From that moment onwards,Hariya is a man obsessed with seeking his destiny with Goomalling. The manner in which Joshi piles on absurdities,while taking sly swipes at the way in which others respond to Hariyas existential questions on his quest to Goomalling,which he intuits is a state of mind as well as a remote place in the Himalayas,reveals him to be a master of the genre.

Joshi has the ability to pick up a small thread,a totally absurd and inconsequential event,around which a very ordinary person such as Hariya may get entwined,and un-spool it into a magical web of associations that illuminates a whole way of life and a period that eventually seems timeless. Though Joshi was well known in his lifetime as the creator of the Hindi television melodramas Hum Log and Buniyaad,it is in translation into English that his fiction is now being rediscovered. An earlier book,TTa Professor,won this years Vodaphone-Crossword Book Award for translation.

One must commend Robert A. Hueckstedt,the translator of Hariya Hercules…,for the seamless quality of his translation. It conveys the laconic humour as well as the pitiless observations on human frailty,though whether he needed to stress so heavily on the soft sibilant consonants of the garrulous aunt Hemuli Boju might be questioned. It does get tedious after a time. Such quibbling aside,if you havent done it yet,let Goomalling be your guide.