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.
