Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers)

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: A House of Rain and Snow

Author: Srijato, translated from the Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty

Publisher: Penguin Random House

“I believe I would want nothing else if I am allowed to just think. If it were a real job, I would be the first to get it. The only problem then would be that I would have to think on someone else’s command. Now I am free to think whatever I want.”

A quiet tenderness beckons the reader to A House of Rain and Snow. The title suggests everything generous and hospitable. Once inside the cosy house of this novel set in days before the internet revolution, there is, indeed, no disappointment. A translation of Srijato’s[1] Prothom Mudran, Bhalobasha [2]from the original Bengali into English by Maharghya Chakraborty[3], the novel offers, on the face of it, a simple coming-of-age story but such simplicity is only deceptive. Churning within the novel’s agonised romantic spirit are vital interrogations of the relationship between life, living, and livelihood, art and the market, the value and significance of art to life, and the question of integrity in both.

A Künstlerroman[4] that primarily focuses on Pushkar’s journey from an aspiring poet to a published artist, the novel frames more narratives than one. There is the story of Pushkar’s parents – Abanish and Ishita, of his friends, Abhijit and Asmita, and that of his mentor, Gunjan (and Parama), each constituting a mirror of the narrative prism in which Pushkar, the reflected subject, kaleidoscopically understands himself and his journey better. But Pushkar is not alone. Journeying with him in spirit are Nirban and his circle of poet-friends, the girl he is in love with – Saheli, and his most cherished friend and ‘confession box’, the milkwood tree.

Where does art come from? For Srijato, art is not extraneous to life but intrinsic to the very fabric of living. Every character in the world of the novel needs art, in one form or another, to survive. Not everyone, however, can become an artist. This privilege and responsibility is offered to the chosen few — those who can step out of their self-obsessed private worlds to establish a sincere relationship with the wider currents of life. Pushkar, for instance, tells the milkwood tree:

“…solitude is entirely a relative thing, silence too. I cannot understand myself without the immense tumult of this city, that’s where my silence lies. Unless I am standing in this swiftly moving crowd, I cannot find any solitude.”

Art, as the novel seems to assert, cannot be born except within life’s chaotic womb. A house of rain and snow can only be a nursery, a protected locale to nurture vision and aspiration. For the artist to grow, an engagement with the wider world would be mandatory.

But how does one engage with the world? Would the world even be worth engaging with? Is art a means of engagement or retreat, activism or escapism? No clear-cut answers to these questions are possible but A House of Rain and Snow attempts, as all worthy stories do, to shine its own light upon them. The novel’s world is divided into two kinds of people — those who view art as an existential end and those who, like Parama or Sumit Dastidar, view it only as a means or an avenue to something else. Those who see art as an end in itself understand that commitment in art does not necessarily guarantee accomplishment. Neither does accomplishment guarantee material success. As an aspiring artist, one can only bring all of one’s life and living to art without expecting anything in return, the fact of journeying being the artist’s only receipt.

There is very little physical action here. The journeys in A House of Rain and Snow, as the reader will observe, are all psychological. Place and time are important coordinates in this movement. The city of Kolkata emerges evocatively as inspiration and muse, its descriptions exuding a clear eye for detail, a deep sense of cultural nostalgia, a delineation of not just place but of spirit, and a documentation of the city’s multifarious, shapeshifting life — its strength, tenacity, and bustling beauty. Concrete yet shapeless, definite yet blurred, prosaic yet poetic, the city firmly anchors this novel as both stage and ship, contouring its artists’ perspectives on life and art.

The idea of time, in the novel, is as fluid as that of space. There is the constant sense, awareness, and reminder of its passage and yet, in Srijato’s fictional world, time refuses to be linear with the past, present, and future merging frequently through hallucination, dream and memory:

“Today, Gunjan notices the newspaper, he has never seen one in the moonlight. He bends over to pick it up from the mosaic floor gleaming under the light of the moon and, instead of the paper, comes back up with a tiny doll that had fallen on the ground a little while ago. A little more than seven years, to be precise.”

There is a strong visual quality about Srijato’s writing, intricately woven cinematographic effects which, had they been of any significance to the plot, might have amounted to magic realism. But being strictly organisational and descriptive in function, this cinematic quality is instrumental to the novel in other ways — it insulates the narrative from realism, liberates it from answerability to everyday logic, defamiliarises the familiar, and renders the strange intimate. Most importantly, it creates a surrealist impression, reminding us of all that remains constant in our consciousness in the most bizarre of circumstances, and manifests itself in the novel as an artist’s specialised and idiosyncratic way of relating to the world. Examine the windows of rain and snow, for instance:

“No one other than Pushkar knows about this, neither does he wish to tell anyone. There are two windows in his room, side by side, one almost touching the other. Outside one of them it rains the entire day and snows throughout outside the other. On the days this happens, Pushkar finds himself unable to leave the house.”

It is worth noting that it is not Pushkar alone who has such experiences. Other characters like Abanish and Gunjan also experience such strange reconfigurations of time and space — expansion, compression, repetition, alternation, all of which can be interpreted at a symbolic level.

Surcharged with intense lyrical passages, A House of Rain and Snow is quintessentially an exploration of the aching need for art in life. Life, in the pages of the novel, is almost unliveable without the solace of art. Art, in turn, can be born only out of love, the kind of love that Pushkar can extend to the milkwood tree and the world around him:

“He, Pushkar, is in love. A little too much, with everything. …Why, he is not sure. How, he is not sure either. All he knows is that at this very moment, it is love that is becoming his language, his constant recourse. Love. Not just for the people close to him or his writings or his own life. Love for everything. Everything happening around him at this moment, the moving earth, every incident everywhere in the world, the forests, the oceans, the mountains, the plains, the cities, the sky, even the vast outer space beyond earth.”

The translation wonderfully captures the linguistic nuances of Bengali in the English language, its semantic eccentricities, syntactic pace, and its lush images, making the novel a rich and rewarding read. A number of images linger steadily in the reader’s mind long after the book has been read – a tall, wet milkwood tree, an idol-maker shaping a goddess out of clay, and a young boy lifting his exhausted father on his palm.

Click here to read an excerpt.

[1] Srijato, one of the most celebrated Bengali poet-lyricists of our times, is the recipient of Ananda Puroskar in 2004 for his book Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers).

[2] Literal translation from Bengali: First Gesture of Love

[3] Maharghya Chakraborty is a well-known translator. He teaches at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata.

[4] A coming-of-age novel about an artists

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Title: A House of Rain and Snow

Author: Srijato

Translator: Maharghya Chakraborty

Publisher: Penguin, Vintage Imprint

It rains outside one of the windows, snows outside the other. This happens in Pushkar’s house. Well, not their house exactly, they are tenants, but this does happen there. Not every day, only from time to time. No one other than Pushkar knows about this, neither does he wish to tell anyone. There are two windows in his room, side by side, one almost touching the other. Outside one of them it rains the entire day and snows throughout outside the other. On the days this happens, Pushkar finds himself unable to leave the house.

The light in rented houses has a pallor of its own, a unique dimness, as if it never wishes to fully brighten. As if it knows it has been confined within the walls of a leased property. So every evening it flickers into life in a blurry, understated manner. Like it lacks self-confidence, lacks the courage to be loud. Thus the walls of the rented property, the calendar hanging on it, the door that refuses to shut properly and the ancient curtain sticking to it—they all look a bit pale in that low, dim light.

This is not a lie, Pushkar is well aware of that. It is hardly possible to know how one’s house looks from within. Like one has to be in space to truly understand how the earth looks, one has to step out of one’s house to see it, from afar. Pushkar has never really managed to do it that much. There’s a narrow lane just outside their house and rows and rows of walls and houses of the tiny neighbourhood beyond it. He has never managed to examine his house from a distance. So one must wonder how he figured out the matter of the paleness of the lights. It was quite easy. Whenever he had to take the local train back from a friend’s distant house in the evening, he witnessed the lights of the houses coming on one after the other. Various kinds of lights coming on behind big and small windows—a scene he watched many a time from the moving train. Such scenes immediately made him aware of the houses where families were living on rent, the ones where the lights were yellowish, slightly oil-stained and diffident. He used to count them on his way back and arrive at the conclusion that there were more tenants than landlords in this world. Or else the world at night would have been far more luminous every day.

Such was their house too. The only consolation being theirs was visible from aeroplanes. He has never seen it himself, but many a time he has seen the planes up close from the roof during their descent en route to Dum Dum Airport. If any passenger were to look down from the plane window that very instant, they would be able to spot Pushkar’s house and tell it was a rented one. That was nothing to be ashamed of, at least not for Pushkar. Many people don’t even have a roof over their heads, those who are barely discernible as human beings from planes and trains.

Although, in his own sliver of a room, he hardly switches on the lights most evenings even after it’s dark. Not because he is embarrassed or anything. Rather, he is fond of watching the light die out slowly and darkness descend all of a sudden. To wrap that feeling around himself—as if the only reason the day had dawned was to bring him this cover. Thus, many an evening he spends in the darkness of his small, square room. Just above the study table is a light on the oil-stained walls, one that he does not switch on every day. Like he will not today, he thinks.

It’s still early afternoon though, he just finished lunch a while back. Baba is on a day shift today, he will be late. Ma is getting some shut-eye, for soon she will have her singing classes in the adjacent room. This is what he is used to since childhood—his father’s job as a journalist in the newspaper office and his mother singing at local concerts and teaching music at home. This is how things have been for them, how they still remain. So, the days don’t really change for them, they mostly remain the same and Pushkar, too, can predict what will come to pass and when. Like today, like how he was not going to switch on the lights this evening.

Most days, he gets held back in his room, does not get to go out. His first-year classes have just begun. Geography. An excellent subject and it’s taught very well at their college. Yet, he is absent more than half the days. It’s not that he does not want to go, it’s just that he cannot bring himself to do so, always getting stuck. Mornings roll into afternoons and afternoons into evenings; he shuts the shaky doors of his room and sits alone on the far end of his bed, unable to leave. Perhaps because of the windows divided by the rain and snow. He cannot seem to fathom what he needs to do to go out, how he must prepare so he can walk down the narrow lane of their locality towards the main road, where the evening gathers together streams of light that split and disperse all around again.

About the Book:

Pushkar, an offspring of the most incredible of times, has next to nothing to call his own. Except for a seasoned but out-of-work and disheartened father, and a defiant, uncompromising mother with a truly astounding gift for music. It is only in the gradually widening chasm between his parents that he discovers his world of poems, which he desperately tries to hide from everyone.

Everyone else except Saheli, that is, only she gets to read his poems. Saheli, his school friend who he is in love with. Abhijit, another friend from school, is unwilling to leave it all up to fate and insists on dragging Pushkar to meet Nirban and their independent publishing house—at least to ensure that Pushkar’s poems manage to see the light of day.

In this entirely strange, magical and leisurely course of life swirling all around Pushkar, there is but one entity with whom he shares all his secrets. A milkwood tree, a chatim is privy to everything in his life. And so time moves on, leading him to eventually confront a truly secret equation of life—the change made possible by the transformative power of love.

A House of Rain and Snow is a testament to an era, a witness to an astounding journey of a young poet.

About the Author

Srijato, one of the most celebrated Bengali poet-lyricists of our times, is the recipient of Ananda Puroskar in 2004 for his book Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers).

About the Translator

Maharghya Chakraborty is a well-known translator. He teaches at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL