Monday, Mar 20, 2006
The Subtle Essence of Self!
- 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 last year.
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Book and Author Name: Brahma’s Dream by Shree Ghatage
Publisher: IndiaInk
Price: Rs. 495
The great God Brahma had a dream. He dreamt of a world peopled by strange beings who were neither happy nor unhappy. They were not gods or demons but stranded somewhere in between. And yet the world in which they struggled and loved was a beautiful one with golden sunrises and blooming lotuses.
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However because the people in the dream were so engrossed with their joys and sorrows they failed to notice how beautiful the world really was. Not that it mattered in any case, because when the god awoke from his sleep the dream world was gone. It had never existed. Hindu philosophy uses the story of Brahma’s dream to explain that both joy and sorrow are illusions since they exist in a world that was only a dream and through this explanation is intended to help people survive grief. ‘Brahma’s dream is based on the premise that things cannot exist independently of the perceiver’s mind’.
Shree Ghatage uses this metaphor to give her first novel a name and a theme.
Set in pre-independence India, Brahma’s Dream ends just after the assassination of Gandhiji. The period is deliberately chosen because it chronicles a nation’s limping progress into freedom and so parallels the life of Mohini, on whom the book centers. Mohini is handicapped from birth by a rare disease, Cooley’s anemia that cripples her with headaches and fevers and countless weaknesses. Much of the book consists of Mohini’s visits to the doctor, her headaches, her mother anxieties. However Ghatage does not attempt to make Mohini pathetic. This, she says in her spare prose, is the way life is.
Around the still vortex of Mohini’s suffering spins the every day world, a world that Mohini sometimes thinks that she dreamt, with its gaggle of relationships, her parents, her friends, her uncles and aunts. People get married, or quarrel, or are heartbroken. Marriage and estrangement spin a thread throughout the book. Mohini’s best friend, Hansa, gifts her a stone that is supposed to sparkle when held up against the sun. In spite of being periodically rubbed by the two girls, the stone refuses to yield its secret. It is only at the end of the novel that Mohini discovers that the scarlet veins which thread the pink stone turn to sparks of light when held up against the sun.
The stone becomes a symbol of the novel’s central theme — that the true meaning and beauty of life emerges only through suffering. Mohini’s handicap turns into a blessing in disguise, since it gives her a keen insight into the meaning of bondage and conversely of freedom. Mohini seems to be in chains but is actually freer than those around her because of her sharpened intellect. While her family members who seem to be healthy and free find themselves in spiritual bondage.
Set in the inner world of women, Brahma's Dream focuses on marriage, on who can and cannot speak English, clothes and beauty. Mohini, in the role of an observer, wonders between her headaches why the world is as it is and realizes that she has set a barrier in her parents' marriage. Her mother Jamuna is too worried about her health to spend time with her husband and, in the end Mohini comes to understand just how great a barrier she has been.
If Mohini's life is intended to be a metaphor for the handicapped Indian republic, the end of the novel certainly dispels that illusion. What makes Ghatage's task difficult is the fact that Brahma's Dream could have been set in any context and kept its relevance. By choosing the time of Indian independence she is committed to using certain events that then have to be brought into her story without disturbing Mohini's fragile existence. The result is a struggle for the author which she manages to cover with aplomb. What eventually sets Brahma’s Dream apart is its delicacy of touch and the deft handling of potentially difficult subject matter.
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