Monday, Feb 25, 2008
Cassandra by the River
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Harmony and Travel Plus. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few. Harper Collins India brought out her novel Curses In Ivory and IndiaInk brought out Black Tongue, her second novel, last year.
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Book and Author Name:The Burden of Foreknowledge by Jawahara Saidullah
Pages 178
price: Rs 295 (INR)
Publisher: Roli Books Pvt Ltd.
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Nadee is both a girl and a river, fluid and flexible. Her life is ruled by rivers, not only in terms of water and fertility but elsewhere on a more personal level. Rivers are her companions, her intimate friends. Sitting next to them she whispers all her joys and sorrows.
However, the first river, the Ganga betrays her as she sets foot into her 18th year. Even as she awaits her bridegroom with plaits and pearls, the river overflows and drowns Nadee’s village, sweeping her with it so that she alone is saved. She is washed up on the banks of another river in Varanasi at the feet of the Dom Raja, the king of the dead. Despite herself, Nadee becomes the Dom Raja’s secret lover in the dark. Obsessed by the memory of what has happened to her past she cannot allow herself to relax into the relationship. Instead she carves the story again and again into her naked flesh with a knife. The river whispers that it is her fate to destroy the Dom Raja. Listening to the whispers she kills the Raja believing that he wishes to be freed from the cycle of life in the same way that he and his men supervise the burning of the dead on the banks of the river.
According to the author, Nadee is ‘mentally unstable’ though that is perhaps adding a note of unnecessary realism into a story that is treading in legendary footsteps. Nadee is in one sense reliving the Cassandra story with her burden of foreknowledge. According to the legend, Cassandra received the power to foretell the future from the god Apollo who was in love with this most beautiful of Trojan princesses. Cassandra accepted Apollo as a teacher, but not as a lover. Insulted by this refusal, the god punished Cassandra. Apollo caused the gift that he gave Cassandra to be twisted, making everyone who heard her accurate foretelling of future events believe that they were hearing lies, therefore turning an intended blessing into a terrible curse.
Nadee’s mental instability is substituted for Apollo’s curse. Escaping from Varanasi she becomes the maid of a courtesan in Agra and predicts the courtesan’s doom. However, like Cassandra she is fated not to be listened to, with inevitably catastrophic results. Except on one occasion when her prophecy to an Emperor comes dramatically true and a woman with skin of ‘marble and alabaster’ is washed up the shores of a lake. Cassandra meets her death at the hands of Agamemnon’s jealous wife, foretelling her doom at every step. Pursued by the voices of the rivers that whisper prophecies into her ears, Nadee gives birth to an illusion but can accept neither that nor the reality of her life.
Jawahara Saidullah attributes her inspiration for the story to the ones she heard while living in Allahabad. Certainly The Burden of Foreknowledge has an age old quality about it and is told in poetic prose. As a setting, the Mughul Court works its spell.
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