At 81, when most people would be happy to live their sunset years watching soaps and tending house plants, Srikumar Sen has sprung a surprise: he has written a novel and won a prize outright. That’s quite an achievement for a first-time author, who took to creative writing only after retiring in 1999 after decades as a sports journalist in London, and deserves a special cheering.
Last year was the first year of the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize, meant for unpublished manuscripts by authors unrepresented by a literary agent. Mr Sen shared it with Rohit Manchanda, a bioscience professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, who was awarded for his novel, A Place in the Mind, about a Punjabi family trying to make it big in Delhi. Winners of the prize get to be represented internationally by Tibor Jones & Associates, a leading London-based literary agency, which should be a big stepping stone for unrecognised new authors.
Mr Sen’s debut, however, while it establishes his ability as a storyteller, doesn’t quite prove his talent as a novelist. He writes well, has an admirable eye for detail, is a perceptive observer of people and matters, but his narrative reads too much like a film script: a flat unfolding of plot, very straightforward and exposed, almost like a documentary, with little left to imagination. There are no great sweeps of emotions, no deep portrayals of characters, no sharp plays of light and shadow, of melodies heard and unheard, that we expect from a novel.
Perhaps Mr Sen simply wanted to tell a story from his own past, one, he recently told an interviewer, which had been weighing on him for over 43 years. Maybe he just wanted to put it down on paper and get it off his mind. It’s the story of a child named Surojit Sarkar, alias Sabby, who lived in an imaginary world of his own at his grandmother’s house in Calcutta during the Second World War, where heavy green blinds covered the verandas and ladies spent time playing bridge and having high tea; until his parents, fearful, like many at the time, of a Japanese invasion of the city, decided to send him off to a Catholic boarding school up among the hills in Rajasthan.
There, among mostly British schoolmates and subjected to a strict regime of discipline imposed by whip-happy Brothers and Sisters, Sabby’s imaginary world began to fall away, till he became one of the real boys in a real world for whom robbing birds’ nests, squishing flies between fingers, killing birds and small animals, and throwing their skinned bodies into a thorny cactus, known as the Skinning Tree, was great fun.
The starkness of the transformation is perhaps the point that Mr Sen is trying to make in the book and it hits the reader in its very opening paragraph, where Sabby, in a first-person flashback, says: “Murder was the plaything of us kids. We fooled with the idea of killing like some kids fool with fire. We stood around in free time on the far side of the pitch, leaning against the wall or sitting on it, kicking our boot heels against it, talking — talking about killing, killing someone, someone we didn’t like, how we would do it, killing was easy, no one would tell on you, because they wouldn’t, talking and bragging.”
Most of the book is taken up by elaborate accounts of Sabby’s preparations for school and what happens there over the next nine months. Some of those accounts, almost photographic in their details, are interesting as a recall of life in a Christian boarding school in British India, but are too prosaic for a novel. The only dramatic moments in the book come towards its end when, one day, before the end of term, a Sister, supervising mango picking from a tree next to the compound wall, slips to her death, down a rocky drop, on to a thorn tree with sharp, inch-long spines, while Sabby, in spite of witnessing her predicament, chooses not to help since he would be late for refectory and flogging always awaited latecomers.
Sabby returned to Calcutta, never to go back. But his world had changed forever in the nine months he had been away. His grandmother was no more and his parents had moved out of grandmother’s old mansion to a modern flat on Chowringhee. Home as he had known it no longer existed. Only a feeling of guilt remained to deepen his sense of loss.
That’s the story, simple and not uncommon. I’m sure anyone who has ever passed through a boarding school would have similar stories to tell. But Mr Sen tells his beautifully, in a language that’s polished and elegant, at times even poetic, and in a style that keeps one going even through patches of unnecessary details. If his purpose has been to skin a boyhood memory so he can throw it finally away, one has to admit he has done a good job. He has shown his promise. He should now be ready to take his skills to higher levels of sophistication.
THE SKINNING TREE
Srikumar Sen
Picador India
217 pages; Rs 499
