Red Earth and Pouring Rain – Vikram Chandra

Red Earth and Pouring Rain – Vikram Chandra

A tale of 19th-century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone “mad with poetry”. Woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, modern narrative – the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends.

This massive, complex, multi-facetted book can be read in many ways: as a contemporary attempt to recapture the epic complexities of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; as a diatribe against the evils of colonialism (both the nineteenth-century British version and its new American counterpart); as an attack on the emptiness of modern capitalist consumerism… No doubt all true in their way, but for me the most astute comment on the book comes from Adam Thorpe (a man who knows a thing or two about storytelling himself): “telling a story – hundreds of them – becomes its own life-preserving act”.

And what a story it is. Indian student Abhay, recently returned from the U.S.A., shoots a monkey which is stealing food. The badly wounded creature, rescued by his horrified relatives, announces that it contains the soul of the poet Sanjay: when Yama, God of the Dead, turns up (rapidly followed by several other minor cabinet ministers of the Hindu pantheon), Sanjay negotiates a stay of execution in exchange for his life story. (The obvious parallel here is with Sheherazade in “The Thousand and One Nights”, and certainly Chandra’s novel is very much “about” the power of narrative.) Sanjay tells us a tale that has it all: he has lived through most of the period of British colonialism, and spares us none of its horrors and injustices; but his tale also has love interest; epic battle scenes; a strong dash of magical realism, or even magical surrealism (twins are born miraculously after the consumption of sticky buns; Sanjay becomes a creature of the Undead to pursue fellow immortal Jack the Ripper through the streets of Victorian London); and perhaps most remarkably, recurrent scenes of emotional desolation on an epic scale (it’s a difficult mood to describe, but no-one does it as well as Chandra: the same mood recurs in his collection of linked novellas, “Love and Longing in Bombay”). Intercut with Sanjay’s tale, and drawing ironic parallels between British and American imperialism, is Abhay’s own narrative of his experiences as a student in America: this has its own scenes of epic emotional desolation.

A strange, beautiful and unique book; and the best story (indeed, hundreds of them) I’ve read for a long time.

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