Next Door Stories and Jahnavi Barua

I discovered Jahnavi Barua quite by accident. It was a description of the River Brahmaputra that I saw attributed to her on a website that made me want to read her writing. It described everything I had felt about that river when I visited Assam, almost 30 years ago.

Then as now, the North-East of India remains submerged in the Indian memory.  Riots, unrest, floods and stories of strife often draw our attention to the region. But we forget it soon enough. And remember it only when notice the girls with the slightly Chinese features who work in our beauty parlours or the students at our colleges, who look alien and surely, feel so.

The North-East is so unlike the rest of India. When we visited there many years ago, it felt as if I was visiting a foreign country,so little did I know or had cared to know about this place. Yet the landscape had a more mellow, sunlit quality about it and the Brahmaputra which flows swiftly along, is different from any other river I have ever seen. .It is clean, swift, strong,...... unsullied unlike the more talked about Ganges, which in its bathing ghats, can be the colour of slush and equally disgusting...And unlike others it is a male river as Barua tells us in 'River of Life'. Brahma-putra - the son of Brahma...

I did not find long paeans to the Brahmaputra in these short stories. The river though is an ever present thing. It does not dominate the thread of the narrative, it glistens and glimmers in the distance...it is the stuff of nostalgia..it smells of home and home coming to the characters that people these stories. There is always a river....sometimes it is called by a different name - and it adds a constant backdrop to the drama.

Barua's writing style is simple and straightforward. It is the characters she brings to her stories that form its artistic core. We are introduced to a range of them - Anupam Kalita in 'Honeybees' who becomes a Home Guard so that he may eventually buy a piece of land in his villages and dies in the attempt; Buri, the stoic maid in 'A Fire in Winter,' who marries a man 20 years younger to start a family of her own and then kills the husband and his mistress before killing herself  or Uma the mother in 'Awakening'. The stories evoke an incident or a scene. Only, the scenes and incidents are sad ones.They are centred around loss and often, mourning. And the protagonists are lonely individuals, who stand apart.

I do not know whether lonely individuals are more common to the North-East. I guess not, but this is the form and content that Barua has chosen to deal with; this is her canvas...the reality that she has chosen to work with. And she does fill a need...the North-East has found another voice and one which writes in English to project the experiences of its people.

I was a little surprised to learn that Barua is a qualified medical doctor.  None of these stories can be related to her profession and in this, she is different from other doctors like A.J. Cronin in the last century or Abraham Varghese in this day and age, for whom their experiences in the profession have been the starting point of fiction. Barua's writing is a thing apart from her profession.

The cover visual is just adequate. Chitra Lekha Banerjee Divakaruni, Shashi Despande and Anjum Hasan recommend the book, in words which do not convey much. Barua is surely among the better crop of new writers. She even made it to the long list of the Man Asia Booker Prize, which as many of us may have noticed has been won mostly by Chinese writers or those of Chinese origin up until now! Perhaps they should change its name to the Man Asia-Pacific Booker Prize....and our writers may then contest for a Man South Asia Booker! I must add that Barua is very easy on the eye - a big plus for the Marketing lot at Penguin, for sure.

I made slow progress with the book, but that is because I do not like to be saddened much. But don't let that put you off. After all, your tastes could be completely different from mine.

Siddhartha Mukerjee's The Emperor of all Maladies

 I came to this book, fresh from losing a loved one to cancer. I expected to be depressed by it, as I had been by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, which I had read in my teen years, and had reacted to with an intensity that only one at that stage of life can muster!

I was wrong...

It is a big book - 571 pages in the paperback version I read. But don't let the size put you off. Since it is connected by stories within stories, you can put it down and take it up whenever the mood strikes you, without losing too much by way of the thread of the story.

I was hooked right from page 15, where Mukherjee differentiates between 'hyperplasia' and 'hypertrophy'! "In hypertrophy, the number of cells did not change; instead, each individual cell merely grew in size....Hyperplasia, in contrast, was growth by virtue of cells increasing in number" , he explains. The book abounds in such explanations - false positives and false negatives is another example; there is also plenty of information about the manner in which studies are devised. Only a man of science, of medicine, could have made it so simple and easy to understand for the lay person...And I am glad that Mukherjee found the time to write it.

I like the book for the insight  it offers into the way the world of science and its denizens work. The pulls and counter pulls, the depth of interest that binds a scientist to his/her profession are as difficult to understand; the scientific temperament like the more-written about artistic/creative temperament is clearly a thing apart!

I liked the book for the many stories of scientists that it presents. However, Roentgen's accidental discovery of the x-ray, when he whisks his wife Anna into the lab and gets the world's first x-ray pales in comparison with the efforts of Marie Curie who distilled pitchblende into a millionth part in her hunt for purer radium; in the process, the skin of her hand began to peel off in blackened layers, 'as if the tissue had been burnt from the inside'. Such love for one's work is a rare thing, but more common in that world it seems....She later died of leukemia in 1934.

I was also enthralled by the story of George Papanicolaou, a Greek cytologist who arrived penniless in New York in 1913, worked selling carpets initially before finding a research position at Cornell. He studied normal smears for a DECADE, before turning his attention to cancer cells and worked on these smears from 1928 to 1950; he gave us the 'Pap smear', which detects pre-malignant cells in cervical cancer.Perhaps there are others, slaving away, unhonored and unsung...maybe they have made a remarkable contribution to science, but we know them not!

Then, there is 'Yella' or Yellapragada Subbarao, who too had arrived penniless in Boston in 1923. I love the presence of this man from 'Madras' in the narrative. Only because, it is often hard to find Indians mentioned and acknowledged, unless they have won the Nobel Prize! Yella performed biochemical 'autopsies' on cells and later at Lederle, where he went to work, made synthetic versions of the natural chemicals that he found within cells. Along with another chemist, Harriet Kiltie, he created variants of folate antagonists which were later tried on patients by Sidney Farber, an oncologist.

The fight against cancer does not take a linear path - one discovery does not lead to another. Achievements in one area are not necessarily known in another. Sometimes the answer is right there in front of their eyes but the scientists do not make the connection! So there is the account of a postdoc scientist from Bombay, Lakshmi Charon Padhy who reported the isolation of an oncogene - a gene that in certain circumstances transforms into a tumour cell - from a rat tumour called a neuroblastoma in 1982 and named it neu. His discovery was published in a high profile scientific journal.. He created an antibody to the neu protein.  If the neu antibody had been added to the neuroblastoma cells, the result would have been an anti-cancer drug right there - that went unnoticed as more were felled by the disease.

 There are other instances of lack of communication. No attempt was made the clinicians and cancer biologists to come together and synthesize the knowledge that each had - So, Ray Erikson won an award for identifying the function of a critical oncogene. At the same function, Tom Frei was was honoured for his advancement of the cure for leukemia. But there was still no coming together....  "The two halves of cancer, cause and cure, having feasted and been feted together, sped off in separate taxis into the night," observes Mukherjee.

"Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways," notes Mukherjee, a quote that is reminiscent of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina about happy families and unhappy ones! So every cancer patient is unique as every cancer genome is unique.

So too are the stories of the victims and the survivors. The story of Carla and her battle with leukemia connects the beginning and the end of the book. It is supposed to provide the human element, the 'now' factor. Had this been a smaller book, Carla's story may have been one of the main threads. Here, the mention is not substantial. More about an  individual case is hardly possible in a book with such a large canvas.

Mukherjee's foray into the rural reaches of America to meet the survivor of extensive treatment with a cocktail of drugs, his revelation that the boy "Jimmy" used in "The Jimmy Fund," Sidney Farber's effort to garner monetary support for cancer research had actually survived comes as a surprise.

I do not like to think of this as a 'biography' of science. I think some clever editor must have thought that to promote it as a biography would increase sales. I do not see cancer appear like an almost human being....malevolent though it is! It does not acquire a persona, with an initial, middle and late stage of development...the disease has remained the same as it always has. Only our understanding of it has changed, based on research over the ages...as have treatment regimens.

On a personal note, I must add that I have been to Framingham, but never knew that it is the "American epidemiologist's English village," where a cohort of some 5000 men and women have been studied since 1948, throwing up data for hundreds of epidemiological studies!

Finally, I would like to conclude that this is a book that you should read. You can carry it around, read it between other books. It took me about two months to read. And an equal amount of time to write this review!!!It has been my most ambitious attempt at reviewing to date!

I too would like to quote Thomas Wolfe as does Mukherjee, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close". Says Mukherjee, "...it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from that strange country - to see them so very close, clambering back." Surely, it is good to know what this is all about.
 

Kanchana Ugbabe's Soulmates

I came to Kanchana Ugbabe's collection of short stories - 'Soulmates' -  with the words of the Hindu's reviewer, Vijay Nambisan, ringing in my head: "Kanchana Ugbabe's story of a Nigerian conman is nice, but leaves you missing something, like the point", he said in his rather scathing review of "First Proof: The Penguin Book of New Writing", in which the story appeared. He kind of spoiled it for us and sowed the seed of dissatisfaction in at least some of us.It was not easy to fight that off..

To begin at the beginning, Kanchana is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Jos in Nigeria. Born in Madras, she went to Australia to study. It was there that she met and married her Nigerian husband. The present collection consists of 13 very short, short stories, some of which have been published in well-known literary magazines in the West.

Soulmates, the first story does seem to end rather abruptly. And yet all of us have met charmers like Uncle Wahab, been fascinated by tall tales which become repetitive and begin to pall after a while, watched as they became bolder, taking more and more advantage of our goodness!!. Kanchana is good at delineating character. This is her strong point as a writer. The men and women she portrays acquire flesh and form and become real.

I like the view that this collection afforded me of life in Nigeria. I knew nothing of the country, except that Lagos was not the safest place in the world, the country has large reserves of petroleum, but the average citizen did not benefit from this in any way, it was also linked with Biafra, in my mind."Soulmates' gave me an idea of how things look, feel and work in that country.

I also like the way she did not make this an Indian take on Nigeria, glad that she has not done a Jhumpa Lahiri on Africa. She has distanced herself from her own national identity. She really is the outsider looking in...not judgmental at all...just giving us vignettes of moments, events...not all of which have a beginning middle and an end. In 'Legacies' for instance, which is an account of a patriarch's funeral, it is like having a camera panning over the scene and then leaving with the image of one of the 'in-laws' dipping his fingers into the yam...

My own favourite was 'The White Rooster', there is some mention of Indian roots, and the anguish of the wife living in the knowledge that her husband mourns another woman is powerful. This tale is closer to conventional expectations of the short story..

I also liked the "Exile", the faux pas committed by the foreign wife gives the whole episode a funny twist...So too "Golden Opportunities" where another con woman, Kemi, walks off with the protagonist's savings. I also liked "Rescue-remedy' with its clash of cultures.

The story from which the book takes its name - 'Soulmates'- was the one I liked the least. I really do not understand who the soulmates are in this case, and the story does end rather abruptly.  Which brings me to Vijay Nagaswami's comment. This story does seem as if it has no plot..It is as if the writer was in a rush and wanted to finish it off.

So too 'Blessing in disguise', an account of the older white woman attending the wedding festivities of her husband, partaking in it and finally deciding to leave him. Here too, the end could do with some tweaking is my view.

The plot needs thickening in some of them. Perhaps we are not so ready to read stories that present 'a slice of life" and just that. We want definite endings, not ones that make us wonder what the writer could have meant. Our sensibilities are not so tuned to such conjecture.

Perhaps Kanchana should explain what she is trying to do with the short story in a Preface, instead of adding a few short lines in the Acknowledgements, lines which get repeated in every review or advertisement for the book! I would also suggest adding a short glossary to explain terms from the native language. I, for one, do not know what an agbada is, obviously it is a piece of clothing, but I have no precise idea.

The cover with a pomegranate spilling out its jewel like insides is enticing, but does not spell Nigeria to me. The paper is of passable quality, I am not a lover of the font - Sabon MT.

I did curl up with it over a wet weekend and it grew on me slowly. It might also fit the bill if you want something to read on a longish train journey! Priced at Rs 199, it is available for less through online bookstores which deliver at your doorstep!