The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy

The subtitle of this book ‘Chasing the History, Mystery and Lore of the Persian Carpet’ is a fair summary of its contents. Murphy, a foreign correspondent, journeys to Afghanistan and Iran to discover the roots of the Persian carpet tradition. At the heart of this journey is the rubia tinctorum, the madder plant, whose roots produce a red dye used to create the colour which often dominates Persian carpets. Apparently, when madder is fed to animals from a young age; it dyes their bones red. It permanently stains the teeth and skin of the dyers who pound the roots to produce the dye. The imagery of the permanence of madder relates well to the status and significance of carpets within the cultures of the region. However, Murphy’s focus is not on the social and historical role of carpets in historical and contemporary Iran. He is more interested in the carpets themselves, their styles and the tug of war between machine-made and hand woven as well as natural dyes vs. artificial colours. He investigates these topics by speaking with carpet merchants, middlemen, dyers and weavers. His interest is often in individual carpets and he indicates this in the book, “Every carpet carries its own distinctive voice. Suddenly I wanted to hear them.”

His approach to the subject and people he encounters is one that is marked by humility. At the very beginning of the book, he declares that he knows next to nothing about carpets. His unassuming nature allows him to have revealing conversations with people. In a small Afghan village, he asks a carpet weaver what she thinks about people who feel that there is something sacred about carpets. Here’s an excerpt: 

“If you mean do I think I am special in God’s eyes, then no. That is not right,” she cut me off, clearly becoming tired of my odd questions. “If you mean do I sometimes sense God while I am working, then the answer is yes. There are times when I finish a difficult border or gul and must stop just to look at it. It is like a small world all alone and separate: perfect and peaceful. God must be guiding our hands, I think. This is how he gets us to look beyond this world. This is what I feel sometimes.” I was stunned. This girl, illiterate and unexposed to any culture beyond her village-was mulling the very questions of metaphysics and theology that have occupied such seekers as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidiger.”

Unfortunately, on the chord that rings as Murphy’s strongest, is also the mistune that derails The Root of Wild Madder. The author tries too hard to place the carpet within spiritual and philosophical contexts. The constant attempts to relate facts and incidents to the poetry of Hafez, becomes increasingly tiring. These deviations into the spiritual are thankfully tolerable because they are couched within the prose of a travel writer. From the perspective of a travelogue, I found Murphy’s descriptions of lesser know cities of the region such as Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Balkh and Mashad, interesting and well written. On the whole, given the nature of the subject, The Root of Wild Madder is an easy and fairly enjoyable read, albeit lacking depth.  

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

When a novelist situates his fictional narration within real and/or historical space and time, he strikes a special and unwritten covenant with his reader. The clauses of this agreement dictate that these places and events which may be unknown to readers ought to be represented as factually as possible without overwhelming the narration. Fiction and fact combined together like gin and tonic; one acknowledges the presence of both ingredients without the certitude of where one starts and the other ends.

A Bend in the River traces the story of Salim who comes from an old trading community on the east coast of Africa, which has its roots in India. Naipaul rarely mentions places by their actual names in this book. So, we assume that Salim’s hometown is Mombasa in Kenya or perhaps further south in Tanzania. Likewise, we can only guess that the country Salim moves to is the newly independent Belgian Congo, soon to be rechristened Zaire. The reason for his move is a hunger to create his own life independent to the preordained ones of his family members. The excuse to move away is the acquisition of a shop in a small provincial Congolese town from Nazruddin, a family friend, who’s cut his losses and moved to greener pastures in Uganda. The town where Salim would come to live is located on a bend on the river. Observably, with its passenger ferries, dugouts and rapids, the rivers must be the mighty Congo. I deduce that the town is probably Kisangani, known for its concrete blocks rising surreally amidst the thick of the Central African jungle.

Ali, a family servant from the coast, follows Salim to the Congo. With his mixed race background, Ali earns the sobriquet Metty from the French word métis meaning half-caste. The contrast between master and servant is of one who lives in Africa and yet lives apart from it and the other who is quickly absorbed into environment. This device is simple as it is powerful in reducing the themes of Africa and rootlessness to a relationship between master and servant. This technique is repeatedly used throughout the book including Salim’s interactions with Ferdinand, the son of a marchand, a trader who purchases goods from him. Salim’s friendship with an Indian couple, Mahesh and Shoba, is a source of solace in a foreign land; their devotion to each other supplies comfort about his own future. But increasingly, Salim feels disconnected from the pettiness of Mahesh and Shoba’s life and their dissonance from the world they live in. In their lives, he sees a reflection of his own transient existence in the town; an existence marked by the accumulation of wealth (stored in a hold under the stairs) and a refusal to engage with the African world outside his flat and shop. Malin (evil in French) is the word Mahesh uses when he refers to the local people and Salim’s tenuous hold in Africa is marked by these metaphorical malins who await him outside his contrived bubble of an existence.

In the background to the happenings in this small town is president who has seized power in a coup. From his capital downriver, he rolls out directives that impact everyone down to the lowliest river fisherman. Again, Naipaul never refers to him by name, but you can easily identify le president as Mobutu, the king of cleptocrats. In Salim’s town, with the monetary support of his Western backers, the president ordains the opening of a university in a former colonial suburb. The opening of this institution gives new direction to Salim who has thus far slipped into the monotony of routine with constant pangs of being destined for more than the mundane life that he is resigned to. Inder, a guest lecturer who joins the university, happens to be Salim’s childhood friend from the coast. The two parted ways, one for the prospect of a more enriched life in England and the other towards the dark heart of Africa. But to Salim’s surprise, he finds his friend cynical and disenchanted with his life in England, a sentiment that has causes him to travel and eventually find himself in a bush university in the Congo. Through Inder, Salim meets Yvette, a young and lithesome French woman married to a much older academic, Raymond. Raymond who once had the ear of the president is widely discredited in the west and his career is effectively limited to the Congo. Even here, he is exiled to a provincial town after falling out with Mobutu. Salim’s relationship with Yvette begins tentatively and develops into something more fervent. But, he soon realises that Yvette’s link to him is like his own to Africa; tenuous, opportunistic and with no probable future.

As the president’s rule becomes increasingly deviant and erratic, everyone’s future is in doubt, even Ferdinand who has risen from a student in the local lycée to a high ranking government official. When things get really out of hand, Salim is compelled to leave Africa forever, leaving a distraught Metty behind. The otherwise confident Metty, despite his philandering and street smart ways about town, in reality knows little beyond the security of the relationship of master and servant. His assurance of being rooted in Africa is derived from the safety hatch offered by Salim through his rootlessness. “I thought you knew what you were doing, Salim” says Metty. “I didn’t. I don’t know now” is Salim’s reply, which in turn alludes to the uncertainty of existence in the heart of Africa.

A Bend in the River is a subtle and intelligent work which captures a span of recent history, situates in a geographic context and presents it as the rendition of one’s man life led on the glimmer of a dream.

The City of Love by Rimi B. Chatterjee

I have been pretty preoccupied with work of late and I haven’t had time to type up my thoughts on the three books I have read since the beginning of the year. Two of them, namely A Bend in the River and How to Talk About Books that You Haven’t Read were really enjoyable but the third was a completely different kettle of fish. Rarely, if ever, does a book really cheese me off. But, Rimi B. Chatterjee’s The City of Love belongs to that special genus of books, one whose consistency in annoying the reader on almost every bloody page deserves to be applauded. It took me forever to breach the seventy-five percent mark. With the strain of work leaking over into my evenings and Sundays, I just couldn’t summon the determination to finish it. 

The City of Love commences with the seventeenth century Portuguese siege of Malacca where an erstwhile Castilian merchant named Fernando is captured by the city’s sultan. Fernando, accused of heresy, has fled his native Florence after the arrest and execution of the Jewish mystic leader of his Cabbalist group. Off the coast of Calicut, he’s coerced into the participating in the attack on Malacca where’s he captured and incarcerated. Fernando is then kidnapped by Daud Suleiman who heads a pirate gang headquartered in Chittagong. These are no ordinary pirates; they are a multicultural bunch of mystics and intellectuals. They give Fernando the choice between joining them or death; after which the story & Fernando shift to Bengal for the remainder of the book. 

In Chittagong, we are introduced to Bhairavdas, the Shaivaite priest of a small village temple who’s obsessed with his tantric rituals. After pining for a son for many years, Bhairavdas’ wife gives birth to Chandu. The midwife who assists in the delivery is Bajja, a tribal girl from a nearby forest. Along comes a medley of other characters including a tantric yogini, a tribal queen, a wandering sufi, itinerant Vaishnav minstrels, a catholic priest and many more about whom my memory fails me. However, the plot is principally concerned with Fernando, Bajja and Chandu. I feel so bored merely contemplating the story that I think I’ll pass up summarising any more of it and cut to the part where I express my derision. 

It annoys me that Chatterjee has taken a fairly original idea and pureed it into an impenetrable mess. The metaphor of the city of love is ostensibly derived from Vaishnav ideology about prem-nagar (the city of love). The epoch in which the book is set is that of Chaitanya Mahaprabu – the great Vaishnav reformer. Brahmanism is under attack. The rulers are Muslim and their faith is making inroads into the muggy lands of the delta. The Tantrics and Buddhists are on their last legs. The political context of Chittagong is particularly interesting, located at the edge of Muslim-ruled Bengal, Hindu Tripura and Buddhist Arakan. Then, there are the Portuguese who will occupy Chittagong for the next two centuries.

Chatterjee touches on all these elements but unfortunately her writing is prone to stilted wanderings into deviations of the pseudo-spiritual variety. She seems to want to convey a sense of individuals lost in a meaningless maze of reality where the void in their souls seeks out the city of love at the centre of this maze. Two chapters in and we have already descended on to the thin ice that separates lyricism from lunacy. The most exasperating sections pertain to Chandu’s lessons with Bhairavdas which form a part of his initiation into Tantric priesthood. Each of these lessons comprises painfully drawn out and assiduously boring recitations of Shaivaite and Tantric mythology. I tolerated these asides initially but as they increased in length and frequency, I felt like doing a little cosmic dance trampling the idiocy of Chatterjee’s work underfoot á la Nataraj.

 

I am not really familiar with the period or the geographic context but I really wonder if this historical fiction is as well researched as the author would like us to believe. When describing the progress of Portuguese conquest in Asia, she talks about how they wrested Goa from the Maratha Peshwas. Goa was annexed for Portugal by Alfonso de Albuquerque in 1510, from the Sultanate of Bijapur for whom Goa was a second capital. The Peshwas (erstwhile prime ministers of the Maratha Empire who would later become rulers) wouldn’t come into existence until the late 1600s. In fact, the era of the Peshwa doesn’t begin until well into the 18th century. I wonder if this is merely the tip of iceberg. It can’t be too difficult to pass off anachronisms as factual when you are dealing with the obscure history of the back of beyond.

What troubles me the most about this book is the way characters and events are jumbled together with little thought about the overall Gestalt of things. How dense does Chatterjee think her potential readers are? Do some research on the spice trade, add in some pirates, tantric sex rituals and sufi singing and lo behold you have the basic plot of a masterpiece. Now, to increase girth; step one, read up on the bizarre and tedious theology and mythology of the Tantrics, step 2, summarise as thickly as possible and add it to the book. To increase receptivity and celebrate syncretism since it’s so highly regarded in India, make sure you have a medley of characters: a Brahmin boy (let’s have him sodomised by a Muslim bandit to spice things up); a Tantric priest (let’s make him a sexually repressed bigot to balance out the portrayal of Hindu-Muslim barbarism); a handsome tanned Florentine escaping religious persecution, possessing clandestine knowledge of the sect that Madonna was briefly enamoured of (after all where would we be without those darn Europeans); a dusky liberal-minded tribal girl (Chatterjee’s alter-ego?); a Sufi itinerant (when in doubt about the history of Hindu-Muslim interaction, call in a Sufi, they’ll sing a couple of yarns and soothe everyone’s souls); and finally a female Tantric version of Yoda (let’s have the readers admire her hedonism and then reel in shock when she performs a child sacrifice).  

If Chatterjee were a better writer, she may have got away with this journey into the nonsensical. If perhaps, she had spent more time narrating the story instead of forcing her pseudo-spiritual message, the book may have been passable. Unfortunately, Chatterjee errs on both counts. A friend who has also read the book told me that I was being harsh on her considering that The City of Love was written by the author when she was sequestered in her parent’s house recovering from chemotherapy. I extend my admiration to Chatterjee for productively engaging herself at a time that must been challenging both physically and emotionally. But, this context, unfortunate though it may be, doesn’t detract from the book’s myriad faults.

 

And what do the not so dense readers of India think of The City of Love. Why, they have nominated it for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award! Sadly, it would seem that there is ample room in the Indian literary space for both mediocrity and idiocy in equal parts.  

In the Kitchen by Monica Ali

I haven’t read Monica Ali’s much acclaimed Brick Lane and unfortunately after In the Kitchen, I may never pick up anything written by her again. The story or should I say non-story is about Gabriel Lightfoot, the head chef of a hotel restaurant in London. The book begins with the discovery of a dead man in the restaurant’s cellar. The body formerly belonged to a Ukrainian illegal immigrant named Yuri in the restaurant’s employ as a night porter, just one of the myriad nations represented in the restaurant’s kitchen, both legal and illegal. If Ali had the good sense to focus on their stories (which are caressed at the periphery of her plot); perhaps the book would have turned out as something more palatable. Regrettably, Ali’s focus is wholly on the thoroughly tepid Gabriel and his obsession with another illegal immigrant, a Belorussian named Lena. Gabriel discovers that Lena’s been living in the cellar with Yuri and decides to offer her refuge in his flat. Despite her laconic responses, we learn that she has been a victim of human trafficking and forced prostitution. But, her story doesn’t really check out. Meanwhile, Gabriel’s father who lives in the north of England is dying of cancer. A lot of prose is idled on his visits to his father and memories of childhood including his somewhat addled mother. To add to this utterly fascinating storyline, Gabriel is also sleeping with the terse and anorexic Lena, of which he duly informs his girlfriend Charlie, about a little while after he asks her to marry him. There is of course more, but it’s so inconsequential that the less said, the better.  

Ali focuses on the minutiae to the extent that the plot is completely lost in non-essential detailing. The author touches on so many themes ranging from the world of a restaurant kitchen to illegal immigrants to multiculturalism to the British economy and it’s so poorly executed that it all becomes one big asinine jumble. The characters are scarcely believable. Nicholai, one of the lowly cooks in the kitchen, was apparently a doctor in the Soviet Union. His dialogue is completely incongruous and improbable. Suleiman, a cook from Madras, is hewn from the stone of stereotypes about Indians. It’s disappointing to note that Ali who comes from a South Asian background isn’t above dishing clichéd characters from her neck of the woods. Benny, a kitchen employee from Liberia has perhaps the most interesting story and just as you start become absorbed; it’s back to boredom with Gabriel Lightfoot. After three hundred pages of sluggishness, the plot suddenly plunges into a hundred page marathon of madness. But, that’s hardly adequate to save the book from being boring and insipid.