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The Sepia River

Impossible longing, <i>viraha</i>, is the tenebrous core of Indian imagination. This book gives us the innocuous sepia version, lovely and painless

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The Sepia River
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3,
An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Amulya, a maker of herbal remedies and perfumes, sets up his factory in the small town at the edge of the forest "in about 1907". He is happy. Kananbala, his wife, is not. Twenty years later, two sons and a daughter-in-law haven’t helped Kananbala overcome loneliness. The book, in suspended animation so far, begins its story when Amulya solves the dilemma of an employee whose son has fathered a child on a Santhal girl. Amulya places the baby in an orphanage.

Nirmal, the second son, marries Shanti of Manoharpur and sets off Kananbala’s decline. The house on the banks of the Ganga where Shanti is waiting out her pregnancy floods and kills Shanti.

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Tragedy, though, is crowded out by the tropes of 19th century literature—Kananbala is established as the mad woman in the attic; Mrs Barnum next door mutates into Miss Havisham; Mukunda, the baby rescued from the orphanage, grows up as a cross between Heathcliff and Pip; and the governess Meera threatens to go the way of all Brontes. But Anuradha Roy’s narrative skill overrides all this with pitch-perfect dialogue and sincere sentiment.

Part Two is about the growing love between Nirmal and the widowed Meera who has moved to Songarh to care for motherless Bakul. Mukunda, rescued from the orphanage to work as an unpaid servant, is Bakul’s dearest friend. The child’s resentment towards her father is expressed, but not explored. When Bakul tears up Nirmal’s botanical collection, he reacts with childish malice, commandeering her box of treasures. An extremely brutish response from a parent! Later, the issue is sidestepped. The emotions here are seriously constrained by what seems to be a familial paralysis of will. Meera, portrayed with intelligence, but not enough anger, escapes inaction by quitting the book, love story unresolved.

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Part Three, the strongest, is in Mukunda’s voice. Not really a nice guy, but unlike the folk of Songarh, Mukunda isn’t afraid of his emotions, and makes the most complete character in the novel. Bakul (Cathy-Estella) is woefully lacking. The rest remain charming vignettes, strangers glimpsed from the window of a speeding train.

We love the story, but do not worry enough about its people. Perhaps the prose is responsible. "It was well known that leopards wandered its unknown interior." Sentences like this one treacherously mine the first part of the book. And there’s too much resonance: at the denouement long awaited, bibliophiles will suffer a distinct twinge of deja vu.

Impossible longing, viraha, is the tenebrous core of Indian imagination. Atlas gives us the innocuous sepia version, lovely and painless.

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