Unmanageable Pages

The signs were bad: a screaming orange cover embossed with a purple-blue butterfly and shiny copper lettering, a dedication to "caterpillars everywhere, and the butterflies within them", and 500-odd pages followed by (oh no) a glossary of vernacular terms. The back cover confirmed it: `exotic', `romantic', `vivid'. And `big'. Heart in mouth, I waded into Sharon Maas's first and vast novel of three intertwined strands.

It opens in 1947 at a Christian orphanage in Tamil Nadu, where an English doctor adopts a little boy named Paul, renames him Nataraj, and raises him in a village. In the first few pages we learn both about the orphanage and about why the novel is so long: "Teacher was nice. If you had to do a poo-poo she gave you a cup of water to wash your bam-bam with, and a little spade to cover it -- with sand. You had to be careful not to step on the poo-poos of the other children. But the poo-poos were mostly behind the bushes and the rocks." One imagines that this kind of detail is fascinating to a non-Indian target audience. Gorgeous Nataraj will later study medicine in London, suffer pricks of conscience at his dissipated sexual life, and return to help his father.

 

Cut to nine years later, in Georgetown, British Guiana, South America. We meet a rebellious little Indian girl named Saroj whose father whips her for playing with the African kids next door, and is threatening to marry her off to some suitable boy, according to custom back home. The father-daughter feud is symptomatic of a core plot element to be revealed many, many hundreds of pages later. Saroj revolts and runs off to London.

The third thread of the novel begins in Madras, 1921. Six year old Savitri is the daughter of the Iyer cook who serves the Lindsay family at their Fairwinds estate in Madras. Savitri is the life of the place -- a beautiful tomboy, natural healer, and playmate to little David Lindsay. These childhood sweethearts are destined to be sundered by the strictures of class and caste, briefly reunited in later years, sundered again by war, and finally glued together by the flesh and blood conceived of their passion.

Maas follows these three parallel stories, cutting from tale to tale and through time, finally weaving them into their common history. Everything hinges on the identities of Nataraj and Saroj, and whether they can marry without committing incest. Savitri, the only person in a position to clear things up, inconveniently checks out on page 328, causing everyone to have to spend another 200 pages figuring it out for themselves.

Blood, however, turns out to be nowhere nearly as thick as the plot. Never before were such a lot of devious twists and amazing coincidences bound into a single spine; never has such a tangle of chromosomes plagued a love story.

Guyana-born journalist Maas seems to have put down everything she knows about India in painful detail. The writing itself is best ignored (e.g.: "Her laughter began as a deep chuckle down in her belly, and bubbled out in a rippling fountain that spiralled up into a pealing crescendo, sparkling like champagne"). What really hurts, if you happen to be an Indian reader, are the long swathes of the local colour: "...the girls could draw the wonderful kolam pictures in the damp earth before their doors, their wrists twirling and swirling to let the chalk powder flow out...it was important to have one because it gave you good thoughts before you entered the house or left it. Doctor gave Radha one rupee every day for drawing the kolam, which she would accept between the palms of ther hands and raise to her forehead in thanks..."

Of Marriageable Age should be half its present size, and it needs a cliches editor. If you have absolutely nothing else to do, though, you might find yourself, in the manner of a rabbit caught in the headlights, reading to the bitter end.