I bought this book on a whim while I was in Delhi for a
conference. I wandered into BariSons Booksellers and came out with this, and a few
other books. I bought it hoping I was going to read some fiction that drew from
the real-life events of India’s brutal Partition, that occurred in 1947. I was
expecting some fascinating insights into a topic that I had never heard or
thought about before—the question of what happened to patients of mental
hospitals during the great swap of humanity that occurred during Partition. The
first couple of chapters were promising. I was intrigued and appalled. I learnt about
terrible things that happened; I was drawn in by characters and interesting plots:
all hallmarks of a good book. But soon I started to become frustrated and
somewhat confused. At first I thought it was because there was too much assumed
knowledge in the stories—about Indian geography and place names etc. One story
was set in Shimla and I was secretly chuffed because I had just returned from a
trip there so I could picture the regions where the story took place. This was
not the case for other stories. But I soon realised that it wasn’t simply my
lack of geographical and historical knowledge that was turning the read into a
chore. I was frustrated with the confusing and confused narrative arc and the
seemingly endless stream of characters. This was supposed to be a book of short
stories, but it wasn’t. The same characters appeared in multiple different
stories at different points in time so it felt like there was supposed to be narrative
arc. And yet it certainly wasn’t a novel either.
I read until the beginning of the last chapter and then just
gave up. I was sick of meeting characters, beginning to get to know them and
their stories, and then having them taken away from me so I could meet yet
another character, who I would never really get to know, and I was tired of
being confused.
Partition is ripe for stories and has been mined pretty successfully
by some authors (for example, Partition riot stories appear in Rohinton Mistry’s
A Fine Balance, and post- Partition
conflicts appear in his Such a Long
Journey; part of the narrative in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day takes place during Partition, etc.) The stories of what happened to the patients
in mental hospitals should be told, so Anirudh Kala was definitely on to a good idea.
Shame he didn’t pull it off.
