Astral - Rajat Chaudhuri (Chutney Post): Book reviews: Saikat Majumdar's Silverfish

Forgotten Little People

There is something about Andrew Marvell’s poem, To His Coy Mistress that strikes the fancy of writers. Hemingway used two lines from this poem in that important scene from A Farewell to Arms when the hero Frederic Henry, is leaving his beloved again, to fight a war.

``But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”

And time surely, as we would see, was not on their side. Saikat Majumdar, in the final pages of Silverfish writes, `There will never be world enough, and time, something inside told her …’ This sentence too reminds us of the beginning of Marvell’s poem,

``Had we but world enough, and time,’’

Time is important in Marvell’s poem as it is in Majumdar’s delicately written novel about two people separated by more than two-hundred years of history but bound to each other by a tale of neglect and forgetting. There is at least one other contemporary writer I can think of, who has put this metaphysical poet’s lines in his narrative.

Silverfish is a story about a woman in 19^th century Bengal and a school-teacher in present-day Calcutta living out starkly different lives. But as the reader slowly discovers, these two lives have similarities, nuances, shades that bring them gradually closer to each other, both figuratively and also within the narrative through the device of a forgotten manuscript found in an old trunk.

The woman, Kamal, is living a life of material plenty in her rich-husband’s house in 19^th century Calcutta, where a thousand customs suffocate her free spirit. She wants to read and write, the world outside attracts her. But she is not allowed to step outside. Kamal’s story, always told in the first person, begins with a tinge of sadness and a shade of the lyrical:

``I can see the streets through the windows, the red-hued streets I haven’t stepped out in ten years, maybe fifteen, maybe more.

I lose count of time.

They say the wives of this family pass the marble lions of the main gate only twice. They enter as pre-pubescent girls – tiny, shy new brides, eyes red and swollen from crying, drowned by the shower of flowers and music and wedding chants. They leave in the dusk of their lives, through the hushed fragrance of sandalwood and white tuberoses, the name of God sung again …’’

The other protagonist Milan, a school-teacher in present-day (the early nineties, I should say) Calcutta, is fighting a losing battle against the bureaucracy and a corrupt system that is withholding his meager pension. Milan is an idealist and so his battles continue.

These individual battles, of Kamal and Milan, draws along the intertwined narratives of the novel till the time, they begin to flow into one another. This is the structure of Silverfish, a slow-moving river of a novel that unhurriedly coaxes the reader to accompany it on its journey.

While the battles of Milan and Kamal are vastly different – because of two centuries that separate them, because of the social milieu that they come from, because of several other factors – yet in their relentless struggle against customs and soulless traditions (in Kamal’s case) bureaucratic intransigence and political crime (in case of Milan), these two characters seem to tell the story of the `little man’ fighting powerful, unknown enemies. Silverfish is in fact the story of this struggle that common people have been engaged in for ages.

Their stories – forgotten, lost or silverfish-ridden however constitute important yet neglected passages in the history of this nation. Yet nobody seems to care. At least not those at the centre of this story. Even those who do care, do not have the energy to carry on bravely against the formidable forces of forgetting, the armies of neglect, amassed against them. Some of them like the old bookseller Moidul, commits suicide. Only the young Shireen, who is a professor in the United States (like Majumdar himself) in the final pages of this book, hold out a glimmer of hope. A hope that these forgotten histories will not be lost after all. But Shireen herself is also unsure and so – `There will never be world enough, and time, something inside told her …’

The parallel narratives of Silverfish are written in markedly different styles. I personally was more attracted to the spare and delicately shaded narrative of the present, as perhaps being a fellow Calcuttan, I could identify easily with the setting. The narrative of the past is lyrical and appropriately antiquated but sometimes I felt it was slowing down the pace of the story. Yet nowhere does Majumdar’s prose strike one as overwrought, nowhere is it burdened by the spirit of exoticising that has struck the fancy of many Indian writers today.

A reading of Kamal’s narrative reveals the author’s indebtedness to Bengali literature and in fact he has mentioned in interviews that the task of re-creating 19^th century Bengal was facilitated by his reading of Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay among others. To delve a bit deeper, one would perhaps have liked Silverfish even more if Kamal’s narrative was written in Bengali while Milan’s was in English. In fact the story of Kamal, sometimes seems to be a translation of a Bengali original while Milan’s does not. Perhaps this was the author’s intention. In any case as experiments of such bi-lingual texts are too far fetched and impractical we would not discuss any more of it here.

There are some moving passages near the end of the book where past time and present time mingle in a touching scene surrounding Milan’s heart-attack. The narrator’s voice is appropriately somber; it has the saltiness of hidden tears, the pain of a life and a time about to vanish for ever:

``Rainwater, cooking water, wasted soup and gravy down rust-iron kitchen pipes, faecal water from leaking, bursting drainpipes, holy water from the mythic Ganga river sprinkled daily around the house, on the shrines that nestled Shiva and Krishna and Lakshmi.

Desire rose from all, smoky, gasping fumes of it.

What did the red earth of this back alley speak of, what had it been a hundred, two hundred years back? The sad bundle of moth-eaten papers now lay in peace, inside the loose Shantiniketan bag slung from his shoulders, but they had been somewhere else, a long, long time ago. The red earth might have been the inner courtyard that lived, drenched with love and disgust and the power of the real in the pages with the gaping holes, the courtyard that allowed the one slice of sky they saw for the most part of their lives, the blisters of the read earth he had trodden with dusty slippers a little girl had once hidden away, aeons ago, the smell of freshly chopped vegetables and red dye applied on women’s toes, the vermilion on the partings of their hair.’’

And finally, when Shireen is flying away to New York with Kamal’s silverfish-ridden manuscript safely in her bag, the novel achieves something close to the sublime. Sublime or what pseudo-Longinus had called hupsos. Those last few pages have a transcendental quality about them, they remain with you and they grow in your mind, long after the book has been put away.

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