Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova

This is a true story that caught the national media by storm. No pun intended! 

 I have diverged from my usual blog posts as Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova is not a literary work. Ty Gagne is not a writer by profession. It is the story that is more intriguing than the writing. It is a gripping human interest story. It hits close to home in many ways and I needed to write about it to process my own emotions.

On the 15th of February, in the year 2015, 32 year old Kate Matrosova of NYC attempted a solo traverse of the summits of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Her plan was to undertake a light and fast traverse through several peaks in the Presidential Range. In other words, she intended to pack lightly but move quickly on the trails and begin her descent back the same day instead of camping overnight. She had a satellite phone, a GPS device and a personal locator beacon. Her husband was going to pick her up that very evening on the other side of the range. Kate Matrosova was an experienced hiker and physically fit. She had previously summited four of the seven highest peaks on each continent and was targeting Mount Everest next. She would have successfully scaled the summits on any other day. It just so happened that she chose the worst possible day to hike. 

A Nor’easter storm veered off its predicted course making it an extremely dangerous day to hike. Kate was mentally prepared for setting off in cold weather. Perhaps she was seeking a day with frigid temperatures and snow to train herself for Mount Everest. But she was unaware that the storm in the forecast was going to hit sooner than predicted. She had checked the weather the evening before but had embarked on the hike in the pre-dawn hours before the morning forecast was issued by the Mount Washington Observatory on what turned out to be the worst winter blizzard day that season: 

In the clouds with snow and blowing snow. White out conditions. High temps dropping to -20F. Winds NE shifting NW 45-60mph rapidly increasing mid-morning to 80-100mph with gusts up to 125 mph. Wind chills 65-75 below zero.

The following day rescuers found her frozen body. She was blown off a peak by the wind and had died of exposure.

Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova is a detailed account of the ill-fated winter hike written by Ty Gagne, a corporate risk management executive and a certified wilderness responder. With data retrieved from her GPS and with the aid of photos, maps and venn diagrams, he meticulously pieces together the events leading up to the discovery of her frozen body the following day. He retraces her route and imagines her thought processes. He also follows the trajectory of two other guided hiking groups that set off on that day and unlike Matrosova, decided to turn back. The second half of the book describes the rescue and ultimately the recovery operation by brave and dedicated individuals who were risking their lives too in the treacherous weather and who grappled with the same decisions that Kate Matrosova had to face.

Gagne explores the psychology of risk. What makes us take the decisions we do? Gagne uses Matrosova’s story to analyze risk in the workplace. He tries to understand what could have gone wrong in her decision making. He withholds judgement though he points out her errors. He starts the book by giving an example of a hike he went on where he himself made mistakes. 

Above is a map from the book of Kate Matrosova’s projected route through the White Mountains.

Kate was dropped off at the Appalachia parking lot in the wee hours of the morning by her husband, Charles Farhoodi. She started up the Valley Way Trail and got up above treeline in tough conditions taking more time than usually required. She took a left off the main trail to climb up to the top of Mount Madison and then descended back down to join the main path and took a left on to the Star Lake Trail to tackle the next summit. She was already far behind schedule. She was hiking against 85 miles per hour winds but instead of abandoning her hike and turning back, she started climbing Mount Adams.

But less than 150 feet from the summit, ‘An impenetrable wall of wind’ finally prompted her to turn back and abandon the rest of the hike. Unfortunately it was too late. She would have become hypothermic by that point and unable to keep up with the winds which by then were approaching over 90 miles an hour and the temperature with wind chills were reaching close to -100F. At some point, in desperation, she activated her personal locator beacon but to no avail. It seems like she was hurled off the peak by the strong winds and probably hurt or unable to walk any more. I can’t even imagine how panic-stricken she must have been while waiting for help!

As her PLB erroneously reported multiple locations, the initial rescue team went looking for her on the wrong side of Madison and returned at 3 a.m. with no luck. The search resumed on Monday morning with a larger rescue team including the New Hampshire Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter and a civil Air Patrol Cessna airplane. The rescue teams on the planes had to call off the search because of poor visibility. Her body was finally found by a ground rescue team 150 feet downslope off the Star Lake trail, close to the location indicated by the first signal from the beacon. It is likely she would not have made it even if the initial coordinates had been correct.

Matrosova had a solid plan with ways to opt out if she needed as is apparent in the map above. But why did she go solo in the dead of winter? Why did she not have sufficient gear? She had no sleeping bag or bivy sack and not even snow shoes with her and though she carried crampons, she does not seem to have used them. And why did the weather forecast not deter her in the first place? But having set out, when there was a point where she could have decided to turn back, what made her continue to scale the next peak despite the deteriorating conditions? She had done a winter climb to Madison Col a month earlier with her husband and they had camped up overnight in the mountains but they had to abandon going on Mount Adams as her husband could not keep up with her. Could it be that she did not want to miss the summit a second time having come all the way? Gagne delves into all these questions as he tries to analyze Kate Matrosova’s mindset.

Although Gagne was not among the team of rescuers, he pieces together the events that led up to the tragedy to analyze if it could have been prevented if other choices had been made. I wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that he uses her personal story to discuss risk management in the workplace. Yet it was a very engaging read and I was on edge the entire time even though I knew how this would end. The last chapter has a different tone from the rest of the work which is more factual. On the anniversary of her death, Gagne goes on the same hike that Matrosova had attempted and feels her ghostly presence in the mountains.

Kate Matrosova’s story affected me deeply. I am from New Hampshire and I know these mountains. I’ve hiked on some of the trails albeit in more forgiving weather. A friend from out of town who has hiked to Everest base camp remarked that scaling Mount Washington was even more challenging. The trails look deceptively simple because the mountains are at a much lower altitude. You don’t have to deal with the oxygen shortage that you encounter on a Himalayan trek but the terrain is still treacherous because the weather patterns are unpredictable in these mountains.

Kate’s story made me think about the power of Mother Nature, a force so formidable that it is still beyond human control in spite of the technological advances we’ve made, and it also brought many questions to mind:

What causes people to pontificate and pass judgements on others without understanding or compassion? The story went viral and invited a lot of vitriol. People were making conjectures about Matrosova’s behavior and character accusing her of being stupid, overly ambitious, and even of suffering from hubris as if she were a character from a Greek tragedy. She is not here to defend herself. These mistakes could have been made by anyone. She probably underestimated the changing weather conditions in the mountains. And who knows if hypothermia had clouded her judgement?

When there are so many similar stories, why do some stand out and capture the world’s attention? There have been close to 200 known fatalities within the Presidential Range. Most recently on Jan 19, 2024, an experienced hiker died on a solo hike in brutal conditions succumbing to frigid temperatures and harsh winds. His story died down with him and with the storm. Kate Matrosova was an accomplished young immigrant from Siberia who lived the American dream by getting a great education and achieving corporate success. She was an investment banker in NYC who was not only rich but very pretty too. Are these the reasons that made her story more noteworthy? 

And last but not the least, how to do you balance risk versus reward? Do we not have to be willing to take some amount of risk in order to live our dreams? Where do we draw the line between living a fulfilling life and recognizing our limits? Kate Matrosova’s story haunted me from the beginning. I found myself thinking about her for weeks after reading the book. Would I have ventured out in those conditions? I am a cautious person by nature and even I know that all it takes is a split second decision for things to go awry. I view this incident as a cautionary tale and I would recommend this book to outdoor adventure enthusiasts.

Ty Gagne brings up important points like developing soft skills and knowing when to make alterations to your original plan to avert a tragedy of this nature. He also talks about the advantages and disadvantages of going with a group as opposed to going by yourself. Kate never had to think on her own before as her previous hikes were guided trips. All these lessons apply not only to decisions taken on adventures but also when you you are faced with quandaries in life wondering whether to turn right or left and risk it all or play it safe. Kate undoubtedly made mistakes but she was also unlucky. Don’t we all struggle with similar decisions from time to time which make us exclaim, ‘But for the grace of God go I”?

Isn’t there a bit of Kate Matrosova in all of us?

The Bell Jar

Trigger Warning: Depression, Self-harm, Suicide, Suicide Ideation, Rape Attempt

I had been avoiding reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, although it has been lying on my book shelf at home for decades. Who wants to read about a young woman’s mental breakdown especially when you are aware of the heartbreaking outcome in the life of the author she parallels? I remember being intrigued enough to read reviews about the book but they only strengthened my resolve to avoid it. A reviewer on Goodreads wrote that she preferred childbirth to reading this novel. I don’t know what made me finally muster the courage to read it but I am glad I did for it spoke to me as a woman and also educated me about mental illness. Besides, it wasn’t all doom and gloom as I expected it to be. Apart from being an insight into mental illness, it is also a commentary peppered with humor and satire on the American society of the time.

The Bell Jar describes the slow unraveling of the mind of its narrator-protagonist. Unlike her friends who come from wealthy families, Esther Greenwood is a brilliant student from a modest background who excels in high school and college by winning several awards and scholarships. At the age of nineteen, she was one of twelve young women selected to intern for a month at a New York fashion magazine. One would think that she would be thrilled to party and live the glamorous life of the rich and famous but she feels a sense of disconnection with her peers and a general disenchantment with life .

Esther Greenwood has a non conformist attitude towards marriage and motherhood and is ahead of her time for a woman living in the 1950s. She is in a relationship with Buddy Willard, a young medical student, but hates that she is expected to be pure while he has had sex with a waitress. She finds the double standard revolting and is eager to lose her virginity which “weighed like a millstone” around her neck, partly out of curiosity but mostly to get even with her boyfriend. To achieve that goal, she goes to any length even putting herself in dangerous situations with men she barely knows.

She is expected to marry Buddy but that would mean she would have to relinquish her ambitions of being a poet. She hates the thought of being tied down to the drudgery of domestic duties which would surely be “a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s…” She wants to break free from these constraints and forge her own identity in a male dominated world. There are so many opportunities dangling in front of her but she is paralyzed by indecision for if she picks a path, she will have to forgo others.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

More than sixty years later, the fig tree metaphor still resonates with women. It has struck a chord with Gen Z women who grapple with the same feelings of isolation and existential angst and cite the passage frequently on Tiktok. Although women have come a long way since Plath’s time and are able to pursue many options, they still struggle with their choices wondering if one decision will rule out other opportunities.

Esther’s behavior starts becoming erratic as she feels more and more alienated from Buddy and from her friends. She is rejected from a summer writing course which is a tremendous blow to her ego as she has always been an outstanding student with many academic laurels. She slowly stops eating and refuses to wash her hair and change her clothes. She has trouble reading for words seem to jump off the page. She takes sleeping pills as she is unable to fall sleep. She starts hearing her own voice. She has obsessive thoughts about suicide and before long is admitted to a psychiatric clinic. It is terrifying to see how quickly Esther spirals down and is pushed over the edge.

She is institutionalized in an asylum near Boston where she undergoes electric shock therapy without anesthesia and is given insulin injections for treatment. The book highlights the stigma attached to mental illness and the limited scientific understanding of the condition at the time. Her mother, although well meaning, thinks of her depression as a passing phase. Esther’s doctor is arrogant and condescending. It is only when the sponsor of Esther’s college scholarship pays for Esther to go to a private hospital that she starts receiving state of the art care under a more compassionate lady doctor.

 Esther constantly thinks about how to kill herself. She is almost rational and methodical in her approach thinking of different scenarios that would work. The bell jar is the metaphor for the depression that traps her. It also symbolizes the suffocation experienced by women restricted by patriarchal expectations. There is no doubt that Esther Greenwood is Sylvia’s alter ego and her life parallels Plath’s own struggles with mental illness and societal expectations. There is a scene where Esther decides to write a novel and states:

“My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.”

Plath’s heroine Esther wants to write a book about a character who is modeled after her, and Esther, in turn, mirrors her author. Interestingly, the name Sylvia is also composed of six letters.

The Bell Jar is an eye-opening read about a certain time in American society raising interesting issues about feminism and mental illness and its treatment. Despite the feminist leanings, I have to point out that there are racist and sexist undertones which are problematic and which would be considered offensive today. There is a passage where the way Esther treats a black male attendant in the hospital made me quite uncomfortable. Of course Esther is a fictional character but I can’t shake the feeling that along with her mental illness, she shares some of the prejudices of her creator.

Sylvia Path was essentially a poet. The Bell Jar was the only novel written by her. In my opinion, she was a far superior poet to a novelist. The reason the work was groundbreaking and is still relevant today is for its raw and authentic description of a girl suffering from a depressive episode and for opening the door for a more open dialogue on mental health which was a taboo subject. Esther Greenwood is a woman who resembles her creator and who could very well be the same person except for this one little harrowing detail- she survived her suicide attempt while Plath succumbed to her demons.

And although Esther recovers in the end, you are still left with the doubt if she is going to be okay. The bell jar has lifted but is hovering above her and can still descend on her.  

“How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” 

The first edition of The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

The Bell Jar was published in England on January 14, 1963, under a pseudonym and just a few months before Plath took her life. It would be published seven years later in the US under her own name. Sylvia Plath would have been 91 years old today had she still been alive. How much more would she have accomplished in the remaining years if only she hadn’t plucked herself out prematurely from the fig tree of her own life?

P.S. I am writing this blog post after a long hiatus; I have been under a sort of bell jar of my own though thankfully not of the serious kind suffered by the author. Hopefully the New Year will see me posting more frequently!

Istanbul: Memories and the City

I am continuing in the vein of my previous blog post and writing about a book I read in the place it was set. I picked up Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, in anticipation of a trip to Istanbul and finished reading it while I was in the city. I haven’t read any of Pamuk’s novels and I thought this would be a good introduction to his writing. It didn’t turn out to be quite the book I was looking forward to reading during my stay. The city I visited was colorful and bustling, a far cry from the dismal picture painted by the writer. Although the book was published in 2005, Pamuk is describing the city of his childhood and young adulthood, the Istanbul of the fifties and the sixties. He depicts a city that no longer exists, a city in memory. The Istanbul I visited has been rebuilt for the most part and has a vibrancy and vitality that the memoir fails to capture. That being said, I am well aware that an outsider’s temporary experience of the city is remarkably different from that of a person born and brought up there.

Pamuk bemoans the decline of a city that was once a glorious Empire. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and its first President introduced sweeping reforms in the twenties and thirties to westernize and secularize society within a short span of time. He got rid of the harems and the janissaries and the dress codes of the past. The Arabic alphabet was abandoned for a Romanized one. Old Pasha mansions along the Bosphorus burned down symbolic of a civilization going up in flames. The feeling of decay and loss affects the inhabitants who experience a melancholy, which, according to Pamuk is best described by the Turkish word ‘ huzun’: it is the collective melancholy that weighs on the city like a shroud when you see the evidence of the ruins around you:

“If I am to convey the intensity of the huzun that Istanbul caused me to feel as a child, I must describe the history of the city following the destruction of Ottoman Empire, and – even more important – the way this history is reflected in the city’s ‘beautiful’ landscape and its people. The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only in a spiritual state, but a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating.”

“Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past.” 

This is a society in transition where the residents live literally and symbolically among the ruins of a great empire, Pamuk does not describe the famous touristic sites of the city. We get the perspective of a local flâneur who takes us to the back alleys and streets through decaying neighborhoods where stray dogs roam and wooden buildings burn down. Interspersed throughout the memoir are black and white photographs ( unfortunately without captions), captured mostly through the lens of the award winning photographer Ara Güler. The monochromatic photographs add to the wistful tone and convey the ‘huzun’ of the city shrouded in fog and soot.

Nightfall in the district of Zeyrek, Istanbul

The Suleiman Mosque in the winter seen from the Galata Bridge, 1955

The Ship on the Golden Horn

  And amid all the changes, the beautiful Bosphorus continues flowing while it has witnessed the ebb and flow of the tides of civilisation – the rise and fall of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The strait is the focal point of the city and dear to Pamuk. He would count the number of ferries passing through the Bosphorus from his window and witness the explosions of ships or the dramatic fires that would on occasion engulf the yalis (the houses of the pashas of the Ottoman era) lining its shores.

“If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness. Instanbul draws its strength from Bosphorus.”

He bemoans the lack of a literary tradition in Turkey. He describes the impressions of western writers like Nerval, Flaubert, Gautier and Apollinaire on the Istanbul of the 19th century. Among the few Turkish writers he admires are Yahya Kemal, Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar and Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar but even these authors followed the footsteps of the French writers in evoking the ‘huzun’ of the city. How could they create a unique voice while still under the spell of European literary traditions?

He dwells at length on the unfinished “Istanbul Ansiklopedisi”, that was put together by Reşat Ekrem Koçu over many years and which recounts, between its pages, fascinating entries of the day to day life of Istanbullus, reflecting the spirit and atmosphere of the Ottoman period There is also a delightful chapter dedicated to humor in newspapers and journals-… ‘a random sampling of some of the …advice, warnings, pearls of wisdom, and invective… from Istanbul columnists… over the past 130 years.”

Along with describing the city that struggles to come on its own, the memoir recounts the coming of age story of the author. Just like the city, Pamuk grapples with his own identity. Once wealthy, the Pamuks are suffering business losses and the extended family is squabbling. Three generations live in one apartment building, each family on a different floor, His grandfather was wealthy but his father and uncle were not financially savvy.  Besides, his parents are unhappy in the marriage. The dwindling fortunes of his family and the philandering nature of his father made them move several times. A sensitive soul, he found refuge in a world of make believe and games. He had strange morbid dreams and a vivid imagination so much so that he conjured up his own double living somewhere in the city. 

The memoir also describes his experiences of sibling rivalry with his brother, the adolescent angst of first love and his struggle with career decisions. He goes to architecture school but would rather be an artist, a profession frowned upon in Turkey. He is interested in painting but eventually decides to take up writing as a career.

Just as Istanbul is caught between two worlds, so is the author. His family is westernized and are not practicing Muslims. In fact they frown upon religion believing that fasting for Ramadan was something that only backward people would do. The lack of spirituality leaves a void in the family and similarly the city with its increasing modernization has no anchor. Of course, the pendulum has swung the other way in Erdogan’s present day Turkey and this sentiment of the author has no longer the same relevance. I also found it interesting that whenever Pamuk talks about God, he imagines her as a woman which is something completely contrary to his faith.

Pamuk is not as popular in Turkey as he is in the West because of his westernized depictions and his observations from his privileged ivory tower. This book was a mixed bag for me. The structure is rambling and not well organized. His candor is extreme and unnecessary. For instance, his masturbatory inclinations and sadistic thoughts are completely irrelevant to the narrative. I also felt that he describes the melancholy of the place instead of capturing it. He distances himself from his subject matter and has an almost clinical approach. But I do have a better understanding of the city, of all its shades monochromatic and otherwise, and of all its states, happiness and ‘huzun’, through the distorted foggy lens of memory. It is important to understand that this is not a love letter to a city but a bittersweet and complex relationship with Istanbul that like the author is caught between the east and west, between tradition and modernity, and which makes him cry out in frustration:”I’ve never wholly belonged to this city, and maybe that’s been a problem all along.”

A House in Pondicherry

I enjoy reading books where they are set and look forward to picking a riveting read relevant to my travels. It gives me a better insight into the country or region I am visiting. The sights, sounds and smells come alive and I am just not living vicariously through the experience, I am immersed in it.

Colonial Legacy

A recent trip to India included a visit to Puducherry, a picturesque coastal town on the Coromandel Coast, formerly a French colony known as Pondicherry. When we think of colonial India, we automatically think of British rule. The British did have control over most of the subcontinent and were the most successful among the European colonizers. By contrast, French India comprised of only five geographically separate enclaves which, area wise, were the smallest of the possessions of European colonizers, but nevertheless left their own distinct legacy.

Street signs in Tamil and French

There are countless books written on the British Raj. I was looking specifically for a book set in Pondicherry which would give me a flavor of French colonial rule. My search took me to a book entitled A House in Pondicherry by Lee Langley. I had never heard of the author before but the summary of the book seemed to fit with what I was looking for. Lee Langley is a British author, born in Calcutta in the late thirties. She spent her childhood in India during the rule of the British. Later she moved to England and wrote a loose trilogy of novels set in India, A House in Pondicherry being the third in the series.

In the author statement, Langley writes:

Perhaps because I was born in India and spent my early childhood there, I grew up with a sense of loss, of being exiled from a place I loved. But for a writer, exile can be a sort of freedom: deprived of the comfort of belonging to one particular place or society, you can perhaps enter more easily the hearts and minds and skins of others.

Looking back over my books I see a preoccupation with outsiders – of enclaves of otherness within larger cultures. This sense of otherness, of not belonging, has always been there – sometimes without my realising it at the time – like a shadowy reef lying beneath the surface. The characters are often people who don’t fit in. 

Oriane de l’Esprit, the French protagonist of A House in Pondicherry, named after a Proust heroine, experiences this same sense of alienation. The novel traces her story from childhood to old age. Her parents are the proprietors of the Grand Hotel de France in Pondicherry. Her mother is constantly inviting eligible French bachelors to dinner hoping to make a suitable match for her daughter and send her off to France, a country she has not visited. She grows old and inherits the hotel but never marries and never visits the mother country. Her only connection to it is through the letters she receives from her Pondicherry lycée friend, Marie-Hélène, who moved back to France.

Meanwhile she develops a friendship with a Brahmin man named Guruvappa The two have intellectual conversations on every subject from politics to French literature and work together on translating ancient Tamil poems into French. There are undercurrents of romantic tension but their feelings remain unexpressed. Despite his education, he is bound by tradition and has an arranged marriage with a woman of his caste. They continue their friendship through the decades with all the unresolved emotions lurking beneath the surface. Their relationship epitomizes Oriane’s own relationship with India. Guru, in spite of the close connection they share, cannot belong to her completely just as this country can never belong to her wholly even though she was born and brought up here. Indian but not Indian, French but not French, she is not fully part of either community.

Parallel to Oriane’s fictional story is the story of the establishment of the Aurobindo Ashram and the experimental township of Auroville, a place for men and women of all nations to live together in peace and harmony. Sri Aurobindo was a yogi, a philosopher and an Indian nationalist who founded the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry based on his yoga philosophy. He worked in collaboration with Mirra Alfassa, a French woman who came to be known as ‘The Mother’. Lang weaves in fiction with fact when she shows young Oriane deeply affected by Aurobindo’s trial in the courtroom at Alipore after he was arrested for treason. He had mystical and spiritual experiences in jail and on his release left politics for a spiritual life in Pondicherry at the same time that Oriane’s family undertook the journey by sea from Calcutta to Pondicherry.

Hugging Trees, Auroville

Auroville is a big part of the story as years later Marie-Hélène’s grandson Raymond who is an architect, comes to Pondicherry to help build the utopian township. He impregnates a fellow European he meets in the ashram. She returns to England on discovering that she is pregnant. Meanwhile he rescues a local woman who intends to die with her child and takes them into his home. Outwardly he is of an amiable and easy going nature but years later when his daughter visits from Europe, she says: “The smile lit up his face, offering warmth, intimacy. But she saw now that the smile, like a trompe-l’oeil doorway painted on a stone wall, led nowhere.” There is a sadness, at times unbearable, that permeates through the novel. Here is a man who nobly offers his home and heart to a poor local woman and her child but treats his biological daughter who is seeing him for the first time with a casualness bordering on cruelty. There is also the wistfulness of thwarted love. Oriane has repeatedly spurned the advances of an Englishman and continues to yearn for the unattainable. Years later when Guru and she have a chance to be together, it is almost too late.

As the years pass by, the Grand Hotel de France becomes more and more dilapidated and loses its charm. Similarly Oriane grows old and frail. She has witnessed the French clashing with the British over Pondicherry, World Wars 1 and 2, the Indian Independence movement and eventually Pondicherry’s independence. Pondicherry itself undergoes as much growth and change as any character does in a changing India that eventually casts off the imperial yoke.

There are many minor characters introduced towards the end of the novel and they are not well fleshed out. The plot is not that well developed either. Yet, A House in Pondicherry is an interesting book as it explores colonialism and postcolonialism, sexism, racism, class, caste and privilege. British or French, substitute one colonizer for the other, the experience is the same. I found the book to be a lush and dreamy read that beautifully evokes a certain time in history. Besides, I was literally transported to the setting of the book. Being in Pondicherry and taking a walk on the Promenade and passing the sights mentioned in the book, definitely enhanced the reading experience for me.

Does reading give you wanderlust? Has a book ever taken you places? Or has a place made you reach for a particular book? If you could vacation in a place where a book is set, where would you go and what would you read?

I’ll end the blog post with a long passage from the book, which, in my opinion, powerfully encapsulates the colonial perception, often erroneous, of the exotic:

Between the settlements and the coconut groves lay the villagers’ cashew plantations, the trees shimmering in the sunlight, bushy as hawthorn and starred with pink and yellow blossom. Their scent drifted across the fields, warm, spicy, exotic. ‘ Anarcadium Occidentale’, Arjuna informed Judith when he came upon her admiring the cashew blossom for the first time. ‘ Pretty, but do not attempt to pick the nuts off the tree, or you will regret the action.’

  She thought it must be some local custom. some taboo he was warning her off, but there was a simpler, more practical explanation: the shell of the fruit was hard; breaking it to reach the little kidney-shaped nut at the base, the village women got the juice on their hands, bitter black juice that burned like acid and went on burning. The cashew harvesters’ hands blistered and peeled, the skin shiny and horribly pink, like plastic gloves- or bright new scar tissue, which is what it was. Their hands were skinned, flayed by the cashew acid.

  ‘ Can nothing be done to avoid this?’Judith asked, horrified.

  ‘ Rubbing wood-ash over their hands would protect them, to an extent, but no one has the time, the fruit is waiting.’

  And later, when she thought back to Auroville, that was what Judith remembered most sharply: the scent of cashew blossom was the smell of Auroville. It combined the sweetness of first sight with the burning bitterness of experience.

View of Pondicherry from the Lighthouse- (Wikimedia Commons, Karthik Easvur)

P.S. I just got a notification from WordPress that this is my 100th blog post!

Leaving Time- The Pain and Pangs of People and Pachyderms

“I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room – but eventually, you learn to live with it.“

I live in New Hampshire and Leaving Time is the first book I’ve read by Jodi Picoult, a prolific author from our state. Interestingly, my brother who lives in India has read each and every book written by her. I read the book with my book club and my brother warned me that it is not the book you choose to introduce yourself to her work. And of course, he turned out to be right! 

 The ending which took me by complete surprise ruined the story for me. Picoult is famous for her unpredictable twist endings. This book too had a twist ending but it seemed far fetched to me. It called for a total suspension of disbelief. I actually found the story gripping; I couldn’t put it down. And that’s why I felt cheated after being hooked for so long. I almost threw the book across the room in exasperation.

Thirteen year old Jenna is on a quest to find her mother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was only three. Her parents Alice and Thomas Metcalf were research scientists who ran an elephant sanctuary in gasp …NH of all places! (According to the book, elephants can survive cold temperatures, although keeping elephants in the cold is a subject of heated debate in current times.) Alice was last seen at the elephant sanctuary on the day her co-worker Nevvie was found dead. No one knows if Nevvie was trampled by an elephant or if she was murdered. Alice is found injured and unconscious not too far away from Nevvie’s body and taken to the hospital but she runs away from there on regaining consciousness. She does not contact Jenna and a missing person report has never been filed for her.

As Jenna grows up, she is curious to find out what happened to her mother and to reunite with her. She is on the internet trying to get any information she can and studies her mother’s research journals hoping to find some clue there. She does not believe her mother has abandoned her. Her grandmother is quiet about the whole affair and her father has been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the incident took place. She is on her own and ends up enlisting help from two dubious characters; Serenity who was once a celebrity psychic with the ability to talk to spirits but whose skills are rusty now as her two spirit guides seem to have have forsaken her, and Virgil Stanhope, an ex-cop turned private investigator who was on her mother’s case but missed some of the clues and who is now a miserable alcoholic on account of the botched investigation.

The book is narrated in the first person from the four alternating perspectives of Jenna, Serenity,Virgil and Alice and switches back and forth between the past and the present. The transitions were seamless but it could be because I felt that the voice of the four characters was practically the same. Alice details events that led up to the fatal day. She was a scientist who was doing field work at a reserve in Botswana to study grief among elephants and met Thomas Metcalf on his brief visit there. A romantic tryst and an unexpected pregnancy forces her to leave Africa and to marry Thomas and move to an elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire where he works. It does not take her long to discover that her husband is severely mentally ill. Meanwhile she develops a closeness with a co-worker Gideon who is married to Grace, daughter of Nevvie. Oh the tangled web we weave!

Alice was a research scientist who studied the behavior of elephants. As someone who adores elephants, I loved reading about them. I was moved by their capacity to love and grieve. The term given to the way members of elephant herds take care of each other’s offspring is ‘allomothering’. Elephants are intelligent, sensitive and compassionate creatures who never forget. Some of the research information on the pachyderms could seem too factual but Picoult inserts fact with fiction to raise awareness about the plight of elephants worldwide in captivity who experience great psychological trauma when separated from their babies. She also wants to illustrate the parallel between elephant behavior towards their calves and Alice’s relationship with Jenna. I wasn’t too moved by this analogy as in spite of being a caring mother, Alice was also careless and irresponsible in some ways.

A herd of wild Asian elephants in Bandipur National Park, India

At first I was confused by the title of the book which didn’t seem relevant to the plot. It refers to how Jenna felt when her mother Alice would put her down for a nap. It was literally ‘leaving time’ as her mother was temporarily leaving her. The duration of the nap is also when Jenna left time from existence. So if we have left time when asleep, couldn’t the same be said for when we are dead? To avoid spoilers, I will not elaborate further on this theme but the book does raise interesting questions about the concept of time.

Alice remarks that ninety-eight percent of science is quantifiable but there still remains that two percent of behavior or phenomena that cannot be explained by science. The issue I had with the book is that Picoult allows the two percent to dominate the narrative making the ending seem ridiculous. Is Alice dead or alive? Was she responsible for Nevvie’s death? Will mother and daughter reunite? All the answers come together in an absurd ending that I didn’t see coming.

How did I miss the elephant in the room?

Have you read Jodi Picoult? Which book of hers would you recommend I read next?

  

 

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart is a raw and brutal account about salvaging a relationship with your dying mother and grappling with your mixed race identity with food bridging the gap to help you both cope with your loss and and straddle two cultures. Michelle Zauner is an indie rock musician of a band called Japanese Breakfast and this searing memoir is an extended version of an essay she wrote for The New Yorker in August 2018.

Michelle was brought up in Eugene, Oregon by her Korean mother and white American father. She had a troubled relationship with her mother Chongmi and it only became worse during her teenage years of rebellion. Everything changes when Chongmi is diagnosed, when she is fifty six years old, with stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma in her stomach. Michelle, who is twenty five at the time, realizes how much her mother means to her and suddenly the roles are reversed. She is her mother’s caretaker and through all the pain and suffering, she finds comfort in Korean cooking and bonds with her mother through food.

I recently lost my mother and I could relate to Michelle’s loss. I could see myself in Michelle- in the eagerness to please and also in the pain of seeing someone wilt before your eyes. She feels guilty about not appreciating her mother until it is almost too late. She tries to be more Korean than ever to make amends and to assuage the guilt, for a connection to her Korean heritage is by extension a connection to her mother.

Chongmi was far from perfect. She was critical, a perfectionist, a shallow woman who only cared about appearances. But yet when Michelle learns that her mother is dying, she transforms overnight from a rebellious youngster into a dutiful and loving daughter. She finds healing through food and specifically by exploring her Korean heritage through food. H Mart is a Korean grocery store chain. The book starts with her breaking down in the store as the aisles remind her of her mother’s cooking.  

“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.” 

She wants to make it up to her mother before it is too late. I found it heartbreaking to see this young woman try so hard to win her mother’s approval. Interestingly, I discussed this book at a book club where there were many women of Asian origin. We were from China, Taiwan and India and we could all relate to the mother-daughter relationship. And all of us women unanimously declared that our emotionally distant mothers showed their love through cooking and feeding us. It seemed like there was some common cultural conditioning that resulted in our mothers’ attitudes and behaviors.

There are such vivid descriptions of Korean food in the book that if you are someone who enjoys the cuisine, it will leave you salivating. I think this memoir would have been perfect as a cookbook with personal anecdotes and stories accompanying each recipe instead of just an outpouring of grief. The writing is lyrical on the whole. One passage where Michelle Zauner compares the process of fermentation to stored memories, stood out in particular to me:

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.
The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.” 

Michelle captures the challenges of being a bi-racial kid who desperately wants to fit in with her American peers. She is the only Korean -American in her small rural town. One can sense the internalized self-loathing and shame about her race that she experiences during her teen years. She does not speak Korean well and is removed from her culture other than the annual summer trips to Korea where she spends time with her relatives. She moves to the East Coast for college and as a struggling musician in NYC blends in with her white peers and has a white boyfriend. Immigrants and their children know this feeling only too well- of belonging and yet not fully belonging.

“I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone whole.”   

With her mother’s impending death, it dawns on her that she risks losing the tenuous link she has to her culture. She scrambles to learn the language and learns to cook following a YouTube blogger.

Michelle had a lot of resentment and anger towards her mother but now that she is dying, she sweeps everything under the rug and is filled with love and tenderness for her. I have to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t suffered from cancer! It was painful for me to see her experience her grief but it was even more painful for me to see her idealize a mother who was flawed in many ways. To make her mother happy, she even guilt- trips her boyfriend into marrying her just because she wants her mother to attend her wedding before she dies. She even admits in the acknowledgements that she tricked her husband into marrying her.

Writing a memoir is tricky. It requires vulnerability, honesty and courage. And sometimes that means that you cannot refrain from airing your dirty laundry in public. I couldn’t help feeling that Michelle treated her father unfairly. He was an alcoholic and had many shortcomings but he had some redeeming traits too – he was the sole provider of the family who took care of their financial needs and he nursed his wife during her illness and loved her in his own broken way. Michelle reveals that her father had an affair and it makes me wonder if her mother would have liked this in the open. The dead are not there to defend themselves. And not unsurprisingly, she is now estranged from her father.

The book hit close to home for me. It appealed to me as I could relate to the perspectives of both the mother and the daughter. I could identify with Michelle’s grief and the realization that our mothers love us in their own imperfect ways and with Chongmi’s situation as an immigrant parent raising first generation American children caught between two cultures. Making peace with your parents is a wonderful thing but if only Michelle had acknowledged her mother’s flaws and recognized the emotional abuse and yet felt compassion for the woman withering before her, it would have been a much more introspective and nuanced perspective of their relationship!

Death as a Suitor

Death and the Maiden by Egon Schiele, 1915

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don’t know. These opening lines from Camus’ L’Étranger (The Stranger) have been playing and replaying in my own mind at this time. I lost my mother a few months ago and I have lost track of time. I wonder what day of the week it is or what the date is on the calendar. These words of Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger could reveal his indifference or sense of detachment or just the fact that death is meaningless. On the surface, he seems unmoved by the death of his mother but he cares more for her than he lets on. I think the sentiment behind the opening sentence which has been analyzed to pieces by critics, is somewhat lost in translation. Instead of “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don’t know’, a better translation would be: “Today, Mama died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The word ‘Mother’ gives an impersonal tone as opposed to the more familiar ‘Maman’ and the order of the word ‘today’ slightly alters the meaning of the sentence. 

Anyway, I will save Camus for another day. I haven’t blogged for a few months as I have been living in a daze. Since May I have been on a rollercoaster ride- I had a wonderful trip to India where I met my ailing mother after 3 years and after postponing my trip twice as the pandemic had messed up my travel plans. The trip was followed by both my daughters’ graduations and then the whole family ended up getting Covid. Three weeks after I returned from India, my mother passed away. It was uncanny. It was almost as if she were waiting for me before crossing over. I went back again for a short trip to attend the funeral rites of my mother. 

I lost my father at a young age and have always been afraid of mortality. There is even a name for the condition- thanatophobia or death anxiety. I would avoid thinking or talking about death but since my mother passed away, I have been contemplating the prospect of our demise and accepting it as part of the human condition. I have been reading the poetry of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore who in 1913 became the first non European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was always conscious of the inevitability of death. His lost his mother at a young age and his beloved sister in law, his wife, his daughter, and youngest son all predeceased him. For a poet around whom death was hovering constantly, there had to be something to hope for, to believe in a life beyond death. 

Death for Tagore was but one small event in the cycle of life. He was deeply influenced by Hindu philosophy and mysticism and believed in the imperishability and eternal nature of the soul. While reading his poems from Gitanjali ( Song Offerings), I was struck by how often he employed the metaphor of the meeting of a bride and bridegroom to describe the union of life and death:

O thou the last fulfilment of life,
Death, my death, come and whisper to me!
Day after day I have kept watch for thee;
for thee have I borne the joys and pangs of life.
All that I am, that I have, that I hope and all my love
have ever flowed towards thee in depth of secrecy.
One final glance from thine eyes
and my life will be ever thine own.
The flowers have been woven
and the garland is ready for the bridegroom.
After the wedding the bride shall leave her home
and meet her lord alone in the solitude of night.( Gitanjali, No.91)

Tagore resorts to bridal metaphors frequently in his work.The soul of a poet is a bride in waiting or a loyal and devoted wife and the Divine Self, the groom. The beloved looks forward to the ecstasy of union and Death is the consummation of the marriage as seen in these lines from The Gardener ( 82) :

WE are to play the game of death to-night, my bride and I.
The night is black, the clouds in the sky are capricious, and the waves are raving at sea.
We have left our bed of dreams, flung open the door and come out, my bride and I.
We sit upon a swing, and the storm winds give us a wild push from behind.
My bride starts up with fear and delight, she trembles and clings to my breast.
Long have I served her tenderly.
I made for her a bed of flowers and I closed the doors to shut out the rude light from her eyes.
I kissed her gently on her lips and whispered softly in her ears till she half swooned in languor.
She was lost in the endless mist of vague sweetness.
She answered not to my touch, my songs failed to arouse her.
To-night has come to us the call of the storm from the wild.
My bride has shivered and stood up, she has clasped my hand and come out.
Her hair is flying in the wind, her veil is fluttering, her garland rustles over her breast.
The push of death has swung her into life.
We are face to face and heart to heart, my bride and I.

Interestingly, Emily Dickinson, Tagore’s contemporary depicts the union of the mystic poet with death in many of her poems. Like Tagore she witnessed the death of many near and dear ones. Never married, she was a recluse. Her poems reveal that she wished to experience wifehood in death.I have noticed similarities in the motifs and metaphors employed by both poets. In Tagore’s Maran Milan (Death Wedding), the speaker addresses death who approaches him surreptitiously: “Why do you speak so softly, Death?Creep upon me, watch me so stealthily? This is not how a lover should behave.” In Dickinson’s poem, ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, Death is imagined as the lover and the poet/ speaker as the bride:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—  
And Immortality.

Death is male and drives a carriage to take the dead speaker on a journey through the different phases of her life before she reaches her ultimate resting place. The poem is full of ambiguity leaving us to guess the intentions of her wooer? Is he going to escort her to a blissful afterlife and have a celestial marriage with her donned in her ‘only gossamer, my Gown- My Tippet- only Tulle”? Is the soft silk the white robes of the bride of Christ or the tulle is just a sheer gown in which she is cold and shivers both literally and at the prospect of her grim ending? Has death come more ominously as a rapist to lead her to her ruin? In Tagore’s poem ‘On the Edge of the Sea‘ a veiled woman arrives in a black horse and lures the speaker/poet to undertake a journey with her which culminates in a marriage ceremony and it is only on the nuptial bed or rather death chamber when her veil is uncovered that she is discovered to be a demon. 

In Dickinson’s ‘Death is the supple suitor’, death is personified as a suitor who appears with bugles in a bisected coach. 

Death is the supple Suitor
That wins at last—
It is a stealthy Wooing
Conducted first
By pallid innuendoes
And dim approach
But brave at last with Bugles
And a bisected Coach
It bears away in triumph
To Troth unknown
And Kindred as responsive
As Porcelain

This poem too abounds in ambiguities. The ‘bisected coach’ is both a wedding chariot and a hearse. Or it could refer to the separation of the soul from the body. Death is again a seductive suitor who woos the poet/speaker slyly. There is both celebration in the air in the form of bugles and a carriage and a morbid atmosphere with death wooing with ‘pallid innuendoes’ and leading the poet/ speaker to her relatives who are as cold as porcelain. 

I am struck by both poets’ mystical preoccupations with death although they represent different cultures and traditions. For Tagore, death is the union of the mystic poet with the divine being and for Emily Dickinson, the sublimation of her passion in a celestial marriage as she becomes the bride of Christ. This kind of bridal mysticism or the eroticization of divine love in the hereafter is also a thème de prédilection with Sufis who believe that the human soul had been separated from its divine source of origin and yearns to return to it. Sufi saints’ death anniversaries are celebrated as ‘urs’ or weddings.

The fusion of life and death as the meeting of a bride and bridegroom is seen in both eastern and western mystical traditions and the similarity and universality of these shared human beliefs stems from our ‘collective unconscious. I’ll end this post with a few lines from the Gitanjali. For Tagore life and death are two sides of the same coin. One can’t exist without the other. Just like an infant frets for a few moments moving from one breast of the mother to the other, death is a transitory moment between two states of bliss:

“And because I love this life
I know I shall love death as well.
The child cries out when
From the right breast the mother
Takes it away, in the very next moment
To Find in the left one
Its consolation.” 

For Tagore, death is not the void or dissolving into nothingness but a continuation of our journey. Who knows what lies in the afterlife or if there is even one but having lost a loved one recently, these lines sure provide me with solace and strength. 

Precious Bane

Recently I read a beautifully written book that is unfortunately underrated possibly because it is not well known. Published in 1924, but set over a hundred years before, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, Precious Bane by Mary Webb is the story of the trials and tribulations of rural folk in Shropshire, England, near the Welsh border. Usually when I read a book, I am at least subliminally aware that I am reading a made up story, however moved I might be by the characters and their issues. I was so immersed in this story that I almost forgot it was fiction. I was shaken to the core by a tragedy that befalls on the family and my husband was surprised to see me affected this deeply and had to remind me that it was just a story. If this is not the mark of a truly gifted writer, I don’t know what is.

I think one of the reasons the novel is not that popular is that the language is hard to get into as it is old fashioned with archaic words and employs dialect distinctive to the area. ‘Mon’ is the word used for man, ‘tuthree’ is a word to refer to two or three, ‘clemmed’ is a term for hungry, ‘bostin’ means wonderful and ‘ow bist’ is the expression for how are you and ‘durst’ for do you? But soon you will get the hang of it and you will know that ‘inna’ means isn’t, ‘canna’ can’t and ‘dunna’ don’t. I had to read with a dictionary next to me which annoyed me in the beginning but eventually I started savoring the language. My advice would be to persevere as it is worth it. The language adds authenticity. It is needed to evoke the rural atmosphere of the place and to transport us to another world where you can see the fields of sweet barley rustling in the wind and hear the thin notes of the willow wrens across the mere. Before you know it you will swept in the enchantment and will soak in the local color.

Precious Bane is the story of of a young girl, Prue, who is ‘hare shotten’- born with a hare lip disfigurement and for that reason she is believed to be a witch by her rural community. She has a desire for knowledge and learns to read and write from her neighbor Beguildy who dabbles in potions and is considered to be a wizard. When her father passes away, her brother Gideon takes over the farm. He is ambitious with his only purpose in life to become rich and acquire a house in town. He is in love with Jancis, the wizard’s daughter but money is his first motivation. He prevails upon Prue to pledge herself into a life of servitude on the farm with the promise that one day he will pay for an operation to mend her lip. They work very hard, depriving themselves of little pleasures. Then one day love walks into Prue’s life in the form of Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. But is she resigned to the life of a ‘spinster’ because of her deformity? Or will Gideon meet with success and liberate them from a life of poverty and hardship?

The oxymoronic title of the story is taken from lines in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 690-692):

Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best
Deserve the precious bane.

It refers to the love of money which is disastrous. Gideon’s story is tragic. He puts money above everything – above his dependent mother, his devoted sister and his loyal fiancée- which not only leads him to ruin their lives but also descend on a path to self-destruction. The title can also refer to Prue’s deformity which is a source of great strength and makes her the person she is. In the portrayal of the two siblings, we witness human nature at its best and worst. What Gideon believes to be precious becomes his bane and Prue’s bane ends up being precious!  

Prue is an unconventional protagonist because of her disability, but has become one of my favorite literary characters. She is such a breath of fresh air. The first person narrative makes it easy to relate with her. Not only was I rooting for this gentle and beautiful soul who deserved happiness, I found her personality to be very inspiring. She is kind, hardworking, cheerful and loving. She has reserves of strength and resilience in the face of misfortunes. She helps everyone around her even those who are mean and cold-hearted. She is surrounded by evil but she views the world around her with a child like innocence. She is a strong but kind female character who enjoys a spiritual communion with nature and often feels a mystical presence when alone in the attic, where she writes in her journal:

“I cannot tell whence, a most powerful sweetness that had never come to me afore. It was not religious, like the goodness of a text heard at preaching. It was beyond that. It was as if some creature made all of light had come on a sudden from a great way off, and nestled in my bosom…I cared not to ask what it was.”

Mary Webb evokes the countryside poetically whether she is describing dragonflies breaking out of their larval bodies and drying out their iridescent wings, or the changing reflections on the mere with its outer ring of bulrushes and inner ring of waterlilies. There are Biblical allusions throughout the book yet pagan symbols abound. Nature and the elements- the earth, water and fire play a pivotal role in the unraveling of the plot. There are whispers of witchcraft and wizardry among the local folk. Felena, the shepherdess dances naked by moonlight in a ring of cattle and sheep. Webb magically recreates a world of superstitions and small town gossip. I enjoyed learning about rural customs like ‘love spinning’ which is a gathering at which local women spin the wool that will be woven into the wedding fabric of the couple, the concept of ‘sin eating’ when a person takes over the sins of a deceased person for a fee, and the tradition of ‘telling the bees ‘when bees would be told of important events like birth and death in their keeper’s lives.

The book is filled with pearls of wisdom from the pen of Prue who is true to her name ( Prudence). Here are two quotes among many that struck my fancy:

For if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high?”

I got together all the pails and buckets, and thought it seemed a pitiful thing that with all that great mere (lake) full of water we could only slake our fire with as much as we could get into our little buckets. And I’ve thought since that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is the fault of their bucket’s smallness.

I enjoyed reading about a now lost way of life, a time when rural communities were isolated and on the cusp of change. Mary Webb’s writing is reminiscent of the works of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot though sadly she did not achieve their fame. The story is dark and heartbreaking for the most part but there is also a ray of hope in the form of a love story with a Cinderella touch. I was so moved by this sweet romance. If only Mary Webb had devoted more of the plot to it!

Precious Bane is a book that deserves a place in my own personal library. It is one of the finest books I have read. I’d lief read it again a tuthree times! 

World of Wonders

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments was Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year 2020 and poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book in prose. One could call it poetry in prose as the poet’s touch is very evident in the collection of essays. In each essay or rather vignette, the author focuses on a specific natural wonder from the plant or animal kingdom and connects it to a personal experience in her life. The stunning cover and the gorgeous illustrations that accompany almost every vignette by artist Fumi Nakamura pair beautifully with the writing.

As an half Indian and half Filipino person of color living in the US, Aimee felt quite out of place in school and took refuge in the natural world around her. Her parents were educated professionals who moved around quite a bit within the US. It was nature that helped Aimee get through a lonely childhood whether in Arizona or Western New York, Kansas, Ohio or Mississippi. Life was difficult as a bi-racial first generation American and she recounts how her family was subjected to comments that ranged all the way from ignorant remarks and micro-aggressions to blatant racism.

Aimee makes her way through this hateful world with the help of nature. A tall catalpa tree with its giant heart-shaped leaves and long extending branches served as a green umbrella to provide shade to her and her sister from the sun in western Kansas and also to shelter them from unblinking eyes who were not used to brown-skinned people. The leaves could cover her face entirely if she needed anonymity. The distinctive smile of an axolotl which extends from one end of its face to the other is similar to her sheepish or rather salamander- like smile when a white girl at school tells her what make up she can wear and not wear on her brown skin.

In one of the chapters she describes how in an animal drawing contest at elementary school, she picked the peacock as her subject, inspired by the beautiful peacocks with their iridescent turquoise and jade feathers she came across in her father’s hometown in India. Her teacher told her sternly that she was supposed to draw only American animals as they live in ‘Ah-mer-i-kah’ and she had to abandon her animal of choice and pick another one. She drew a bald eagle perched on a cliff and added an American flag to the picture as well. She ended up winning first prize but the incident scarred her and she writes:

This is the story of how I learned to ignore anything from India….. But what the peacock can do is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.

As an Indian-American, it pained me to see that a teacher caused her to reject her beautiful and rich cultural background. I would have rushed to set up a conference with the principal if my children had to deal with such a prejudiced teacher. But I understand that she grew up in the eighties in a small town and the only way to survive in those days was to ignore and fit in completely to be accepted. Eventually as she grows up, she learns to love what she pushed away with embarrassment during her childhood and on her wedding day chooses a peacock- hued saree as her outfit. The sarees on the dance floor worn by her and her guests flash in the light in reds, violets, teal and turquoise reminding her of a bird of paradise.

The essays are mostly in chronological order tracing the trajectory of her life as she completes her education and settles into a career, falls in love and marries, has children and finds a place she can call ‘home’. She has a strong bond with her family. It is the world outside that is hostile and frightening. Just like the red-spotted newt that spends years wandering the forest floor before it decides which spot to settle in, she wandered from state to state before putting her roots down in Mississippi.

For the most part, the author seamlessly weaves the natural world into her personal stories but sometimes the connections she makes between the exterior world and her interior state of mind are tenuous and facile. A corpse flower with its stinking smell reminds her how to clear out the weeds of the dating world or the touch-me-not plant teaches her to fend off predators by folding inward and shutting down. Her son opens his wee mouth in amazement and wonder and she is reminded of the ribbon eel drawing water over its gills to help it breathe. 

The first few essays were wonderful and informative. My interest was piqued when she referred to obscure flora and fauna. For instance, the colorful glass bangles that she got as a gift from her grandmother in India remind her of a comb jelly which flashes mini rainbows in the darkest oceans. I immediately googled the creature as I wanted to find out more about it. But unfortunately some of the later chapters had almost an encyclopedic feel to them and I felt I was reading a Wikipedia entry.

She also keeps hammering the point that she is brown-skinned. I can understand the trauma she must have endured as a child but why have a chapter entitled “Questions while Searching for Birds with my half- white sons…”? She has already told us she is married to a white guy. Is there any need to keep reinforcing the color of skin when there is no relevance? Also the writing evoked mixed reactions in me. It vacillates from lush and lyrical paragraphs describing succulent cara cara oranges or the chattering of bonnet macaques to clumsy phrases like “…after an especially plus amount of warm rain.” I am also nitpicky about grammar and some chapters have typos and errors like ‘another boatmen came up’ or ‘they busted out laughing.’ The book would have benefited from more fastidious proofreading and editing.

In spite of these annoying features, it is a gentle and meditative book that reminds us to savor the world around us. It is also a call for conservation entreating us to save our fragile planet. The author brings up the fascinating but sobering fact that fourteen new species of dancing frogs were discovered in Kerala, in southern India, only to be endangered almost as soon as they were discovered, due to erratic monsoon patterns. There are thousands of unnamed extinctions in the natural world when species become extinct even before they have had a chance to be discovered. She bemoans the fact that children have lost touch with nature and are glued to their phones or games. I was surprised when she mentioned that out of 22 students in her poetry class, 17 said that they had never seen a firefly although they lived in a town where fireflies were common. Aimee Nezhukumatathil asks us to slow down and look for fireflies:

I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. 

World of Wonders is a paean to nature and its amazing diversity as reflected in the millions of species that make up life on earth. If only we would also embrace this diversity within our own species!

Interior Chinatown

There has been a spate of violent attacks targeted against Asians and Asian- Americans in recent times. However Anti-Asian harassment is not new. Although exacerbated during the pandemic, the prejudice is rooted in a long history of discrimination towards Asian-Americans since the earliest Asian immigrants came to the US centuries ago. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020, is a satirical novel on the Chinese-American immigrant experience. The most unique feature of the novel is its unconventional format.

The characters of the book are part of a procedural cop show called ‘Black and White’ and the book itself is written in the form of a screenplay for a TV show. It is divided into seven acts with scene headings and even presented in the Courier font used in scripts. ‘Black and White'(ostensibly a spoof of ‘Law and Order’) has a charismatic black man and a beautiful white woman in the lead roles of detectives. Willis Wu, a Taiwanese- American has the role of ‘Background Oriental Male’. He is relegated to the background as all Asian-Americans are in the formulaic world of Hollywood. They only get bit parts and are sometimes reduced to playing props and corpses.

Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy.

The Golden Palace restaurant in Chinatown serves as the set for the television show. Willis Wu, his friends and parents live in SRO ( Single Room Occupancy) apartments directly above the restaurant and are all Asian American extras. Their highest aspiration is to become ‘ Kung Fu Guy’ emulating an ‘older brother’, one of their gang who has made it. To land the coveted role of ‘Kung- Fu Guy’, Willis Wu practices martial arts and perfects his fake accent. In other words, he tries to fit his stereotype. He eventually makes his way up to ‘Special Guest Star’. Even Willis’ father’ Sifu’ was once ‘Kung Fu Guy’ but is now ‘Old Asian Man’ and his mother has been demoted from ‘Seductress’ to ‘Old Asian Woman’. These immigrants with their dreams and struggles are trapped in Chinatown just as they are trapped in these roles. The real world is only an extension of the entertainment world.

An elegant paifang or archway marks the official entrance to Chinatown in most cities. It is symbolic as an entryway for immigrants settling there. But the book cover design shows vertical bars that resemble a prison under the pagoda-like structure. The title Interior Chinatown is the description of the setting written on the script and could also refer to the claustrophobic lives of the residents living in humble conditions eking out a hand to mouth existence. They live in a physical and mental prison. And a metaphorical one too for they are also trapped in prisons of prejudice and stereotypes.

While reading the book there are times when you don’t know where the reel life ends and the real life begins. The boundaries are blurred between the two for Hollywood is nothing but the microcosm of the macrocosm. White people raise their voices and speak slowly to Asian people as if they won’t be able to understand anything they are saying. Asia is seen as a monolith. Every Asian is believed to be from mainland China. They are all lumped together just as all five of Willis Wu’s housemates are lumped together.

According to a witness, as the first man hit Allen in the temple, knocking him to the ground, they said, “This is for Pearl Harbor.” Young Wu thinks: it could have been him. Nakamoto says: it should have been him. All of the housemates realize: it was them. All of them. That was the point. They are all the same. All the same to the people who struck Allen in the head until his eyes swelled shut. All the same as they filled a large sack with batteries and stones, and hit Allen in the stomach with it until blood came up from his throat. Allen was Wu and Park and Kim and Nakamoto, and they were all Allen. Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam. Whatever. Anywhere over there. Slope. Jap. Nip. Chink. Towelhead. Whatever. All of them in the house, after that, they should become closer. But they don’t. They don’t sit around the table anymore, comparing names. because now they know what they are. Will always be. Asian Man.

Willis falls in love with Karen, a mixed race actress who used to play the role of ‘Ethnically Ambiguous girl’. They get married and have a daughter together. She receives an offer for a show of her own with a part included for Willis but he refuses to get out of Chinatown and give up on his ‘Kung Fu Guy’ dream. They get divorced and she moves to the suburbs with their daughter. When Willis eventually gets the coveted role of ‘Kung Fu Guy’, he wonders why he even wanted it. He will only be perpetuating the stereotype. How much of the racism has he internalized? In order to be accepted, you have to live according to the script. You live to fit into the stereotype and it then becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy. In his quest for the fake role of ‘Kung Fu Guy’, he has lost the real life role of family man. He leaves Chinatown to rejoin Karen and his daughter and is tried in court in the ‘Case of the Missing Man’ for running away from the role assigned to him with who else but his successful ‘older brother’ as his defense lawyer. The unusual court case culminating in the denouement is a brilliant tour de force by the author.

  The script format is occasionally interspersed with disturbing facts about the history of anti-immigration laws in the US and narration in the second person when Willis reflects on his life and on his parents’ lives. The use of the second person creates instant empathy in the reader. There is a moving passage where Willis’ father sings at the local karaoke bar. As an immigrant myself, I could relate to that feeling that even if you have left the country, it never leaves you.

If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.” 

Yu ingeniously exposes the marginalization of Asian Americans through the lens of ‘Black and White’, the clever title revealing how we view the world with no nuance, no shades in between. There were two things that bothered me slightly about the book; the first the implication that black people are more visible than Asians and are treated the same as white actors, and, the second, the focus on just the working class diaspora without any mention of the more successful Asian immigrants like the author himself. The only accomplished immigrant we come across is this mystical ‘older brother’ who seems to represent an ideal. In this aspect, the book seems a little dated in its depiction. Is the author guilty of the same kind of ‘Generic Asian Man’ portrayal that he is criticizing? Or was that deliberate to reinforce the premise of the book? Nevertheless, it is an ambitious and brilliant book both thematically and stylistically that makes us think more deeply about race, identity and assimilation.