Monday, Dec 27, 1999
Sunetra Gupta's-'A Sin of Colour'
Man From Matunga"Man from Matunga" lives in Mumbai, India and expresses his angst and pleasures through words |
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Sunetra Gupta's 'A Sin of Colour' took me some time to read. Not because it was a difficult read, but because I kept going back and forth to savor the words and language, something that very few books have made me do, for some time now.
'A Sin of Colour' is about the choices made by its two main protagonists, Debendranath Roy and his niece Niharika during two different time periods, when both are in their late youth. The book oscillates between Calcutta, rural Bengal, Oxford and the US, with most of the action occurring in Calcutta and Oxford. Both are the victims of unrequited love; this colors their lives profoundly, eventually leading them to their sins. Debendranath Roy with Reba, married to his brother, famous, an artiste, musician and actress and Niharika with Daniel Faraday, married, friend of Morgan and the last man to have seen Debendranath alive.
Sections of the book are named after different colors, starting with amethyst and progressing through indigo, azure, jade, saffron, ochre and ending with crimson. Multiple sins of color, all revolving around the one sin which forms the basis of the book; Debendranath's retirement from this world, his ultimate freedom from the clutches of relationships and demands that are foisted upon most of us by the very fact that we live in the society that we do, a retirement that starts when he is assumed drowned in the waters of a river in Oxford. The sin of wanting true freedom, away from all bindings, social or otherwise; the ability to do what you want, when you want, the way you want to. The sin of 'sanyas'.
The book keeps jumping back and forth in time, sketching the lives and times of three generations of the Roy family and the house of Mandalay. There is a lot of repetition, yet it does not affect the book's intent. So, though we know of Debendranath's love for Reba in the first ten pages or so and of Niharika and Daniel midway through the book, each repeated paragraph throughout the book unveils a new vignette, a new facet that further enhances our understanding of the relationships and keeps our interest alive. Almost like a Lego building block, to be built a little at a time, slowly and suspensefully.
Sunetra Gupta's use of words is brilliant. The words play with each other, falling and tumbling, in long, uneven sentences, describing people, events and thoughts with the same verve as a film scene capturing the delicate nuances between the protagonists using gestures and mood-lighting with a minimum of action. For example, "The earnestness of their exchange is tinged with the candour of lovemaking, the desperate need to lay bare the soul before divesting the body of its wrappings, the need to delight in common goals and to rake out the differences of opinion before entering into a concourse where nothing of that sort is likely to matter, the need to establish faith and hope before progressing to love." Each character also evolves over time, a paint stroke at a time, such that even near the end of the book, there is still some new aspect that we delightfully discover. So Reba at the beginning of the book is "a beautiful woman who decorated her rooms nicely, baked excellent cakes, played exceptionally well on the esraj, and could scorn a person's indelicacy of manner with the faintest tilt of her eyebrows." Towards the end, "A formidable hush seemed to descend upon the forests of pine and cedar as she walked in stately silence through them with her daughter, and when upon the seashore she burst into song, the waves would foam in awe at her feet. She was still as aloof to strangers, but now she seemed more distracted than dismissive..."
Gupta's sentence constructions are interesting. Long sentences, some going on for almost half a page, filled with adjectives, descriptions, double metaphors, meandering through different thought processes and coming to a halt only when she seems to have run out of breath. The narrative unfolds in the nature of a conversational story-telling, picking one thread and jumping back and forth into the past and future, sometimes taking off on tangents and then coming back to the present to start another thread which also unfolds similarly. The dialogues interestingly, are all without quotes, and just blend in as part of the general narrative.
This is a book that has to be savored, like the last few licks of a honey nut crunch ice-cream swirling through our mouths, making us want more and more. There are three earlier books of hers, just waiting to be read
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