Haribol Acharya
Tomb of Sand is the English version of Ret Samadhi, a Hindi novel by Geetanjali Shree translated by Daisy Rockwell. It is a bulky book that runs seven hundred thirty three pages demanding of readers a lot of patience and concentration. The novel is not an easy read at all, and the reader gets lost in its meandering tales, and becomes unable to synchronize one part with the other. We are accustomed to finding sequences, successions and sequels, but the writer goes forward unconventionally piecing together fragments and disjoints and the reader finds no organic wholeness in the novel. But there is organic wholeness, since the plot pivots on the odyssey of Ma who after the demise of her husband set herself on a journey to find her ex-husband, in fact to find her freedom from the trauma the partition and to efface the scars deep down in her psyche.
The novel commences with the writer’s exclusive and inimitable prose like “ A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please….Women are stories in themselves.” The first paragraph is arrestingly proceeding.
All that a translator does is reinterpret or retell the story in her own words. Or else a work of translation becomes threadbare, and the cadence of the original gets lost in the course of translation in many a time. The translator in this book has done justice to the original text, though some sentences become untranslatable which can be revealed to the reader if she checks with the original, the Hindi version of the novel.
The novel loses the connection in between and the narratives full of subplots that are sandwiched in a serpentine manner the reader feels while leafing through pages and some readers failing to take patience are likely to stop anywhere after ten to thirty pages. The average reader expects since he feels at home with the usual romantic form. The writer has skipped that orthodox trend making a lot of breakthroughs in the order of writing. And at times she switches to the kind of narratives that slot in stream of consciousness and magic realism in some other instances.
Popularity of the book commences when the book won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first Hindi novel translated into English.
The novel is about border and how life becomes dismayed when it has to face a border, and traversing borders, since the other side is always overriding and poses challenges.
The story advances with the trailblazing journey taken by an eighty year old, the central figure in the story, called Ma upon the demise of her husband. She has survived the partition riots. The partition depressed people across all generations and genres and Ma was one of them, a dupe during the partition. After going through deep depression she reemerges and bounces back to life. There were a number of breakthroughs Ma makes, and one of them is choosing a transgender person for a friend to the dismay of her bohemian daughter who feels she is steps ahead of her mother in modernity.
It seems prizes are measures of creative writings, for prior to the award Geetanjali Shree was an unknown name in her and with the prize she has been a household name, though she has been unrelentingly writing for the last 30 years. The main theme gaining currency in her work is the subservient role of women as if they are commodities and as such they become invisible, and what make the writer visible is the Booker Prize, and men always advance to take precedence over women in every walk of life. A line “A woman so small she could slip through anywhere” speaks a lot about Ma who seems nearly invisible for some time in the novel, remains unnoticed or unnoticeable in civil servants’ bungalow in north India. But she takes a tall decision to set herself on a mission to go to Pakistan with her daughter in order to look for her ex-husband, Anwar.
The writer commutes to the insides of women, and Ma, along with her forward-looking daughter take a journey that is not only theirs but the one millions have taken before them. She is through these women telling the story of women that remain untold for over millennia.
A narrative of a boy kissing his girlfriend depicts a kind of derision: “A long string of saliva fell from his mouth into her face.” What a mockery in this line, and only a writer perfecting her art of telling and retelling stories can writer like this kind.
The exclusivity and marvel Geetanjali Shree has in her prose is found in the translation as well, “You could say, what a horrible time this is! And then it will go ahead and make things even more horrible. And no one will say, but these are good days, achchhe din! Except for the government, that is.”
The marvel of her style of storytelling is that she can take the reader to feel the vibes of a mother who is on a journey throughout the novel along with her two children, Bade and Beti and at times some other minor characters intervene.
Breaking with the convention that comes from generations of customs and mores she listens to her interiors, bonding with a transgender woman named Rosie demands of her a lot of resolve and doggedness or else she would have stagnated alongside the rest of Indian women accepting their plights in men’s world. She listens to her innermost voice that remained unheeded over the years. This odyssey emboldens her to standout and proceed in life, to the dismay and confusion of not only Bade and Bety, to the rest of her acquaintances, relatives who know her well. This journey ignites a fire within her to love life. She suffers, no doubt when she sets herself on that audacious journey but this reappearance or rise gives her a profuse vitality in life in defiance of the dictates she has to listen to in society. And this journey to Pakistan is the dire need that is likely to heal the scars she got throughout her teenage life to survive the partition riots.
In fact this novel is not the kind one can easily move along without stopping. It demands a lot of concentration and patience, since most of what the author says is packed with potent meanings, as she says: “Border, Ma says. Do you know what a border is? What is a border? It’s something that surrounds an existence, it is a person’s perimeter.” Who can say more marvelously, the simple thing one experiences in every walk of life?
The novel takes us through difficult passages, and the reader becomes trackless and feels he should stop, but the objective of the writer is not to tell the story to romanticize the mind of the reader but to tell stories that necessitate a lot of contemplations in the course of reading. And that feature, ability and power of telling stories make the book a timeless classic in literature.
The reader must explore the rest, since reviews are reviews that can never replace the original.
