Aruni Kashyap’s debut novel The House with a Thousand Stories (Penguin, 2013) is about many things: women, marriage, fear, guilt, purity and xenophobia, alienation from the state, language and its transformative properties, and a variety of oppressions. When Pablo, a young man raised in Guwahati, returns to the village of Hatimura in remote Assam, he becomes witness to gossip, assists in the rending of the fabric of a family, and falls briefly ‘in lust’. The entire novel revolves around few such visits to Hatimura: for weddings, for funerals.
There is a constant drone of fear in the backdrop: fear of uniformed Indian Army men whose visits seem to always end in violence and rape, except when mitigated by the deployment of the English language; and fear of the traditional – how ancient rules of religion and decorum invest one individual or another with the power to control the fates of others. It is possible to claim there is a tender love-story in the midst of it all, but Pablo – who also narrates the myriad threads running through the novel – won’t ever admit to it. There is much tenderness, most of it spent in describing the rural landscape, the Brahmaputra and the flowers and trees along its banks, the food, and young virgins with breasts like young, green coconuts, large buttocks, long, dark hair and large eyes. It feels as if Kashyap is afraid to show tenderness towards his characters and their fates, but hungers to embrace the inanimate and the fragmented with his descriptive prose.
If anything, The House with a Thousand Stories is an attempt to serve as a witness to greater political and societal changes happening in Assam, and in the process, call attention to the utter helplessness of everybody involved. Very loosely, Kashyap tries to equate rifts created within a big joint family to the fractures and frictions within society and the state. Central to the unravelling of lives – to the helplessness of individuals before the caustic and explosive potential of faceless forces – is the idea of hearsay and gossip, of lives upended and fates violently derailed because of a casual slip of the tongue or a little indiscretion away from constantly prying eyes. In this narrow sense, the novel is skewered through by the idea that words can make or unmake: false accusations or insinuations may lead the extraordinarily empowered Army men to arrive, interrogate, insult, rape or kill; similarly, false accusations or insinuations may lead to the disintegration of family, to loss of face and stature in the hierarchy of family, to despair of deathly proportions. Thus, after many false leads about a thousand different narratives, the novel settles upon one idea or two to bind it all into a whole.
Assam was among the richest provinces of the British Raj, the novel reminds us: here was timber and wildlife and riches of every kind to fatten imperial purses. But, unlike Myanmar, Assam and other states of the northeast were lumped together with India, a vast population devoid of empathy for the exotic tribes and tongues of the seven distant states. If the northeast had invested more energy in claiming English as their own, instead of fragmenting into different linguistic and cultural groups, perhaps the people – Assamese, Nagas, Manipuris, etc., – would have a better hand, if not the upper hand, while negotiating with the Indian state for a place in the imagining of the Indian nation. The narrow insistence upon inherited identity leads to the stifling of the youth and their energy, and to alienation from the culture du jour of the larger Indian polity: Bollywood, Sufi songs, jeans and romance, tolerance and assimilation.
The seed of intolerance, however, is deeply ingrained in the culture, and the elders are the custodians of that heritage, and those who have moved away to the city can’t possibly claim to understand how things are or ought to be in the village, even though village life seems steeped in anti-woman biases, xenophobia, racism and fear of change. Therefore, the younger characters in the novel are just as entrapped as are the elders around them. Neither generation can fully break away from the other. The future is unforgivably wormed with the past. This is the source of the tragic in the novel.
But this is not a very satisfying novel to read or to riddle through. It is wooly, and not in a good way. The language is dissatisfying just when the reader wants to dive into the narrative or taste the atmosphere. Characters are oftentimes cast aside in order to give the stage to the narrator’s profitless navel-gazing. If, in one place, Kashyap creates sonic richness with his list of names and descriptions of food and flowers and the mood with which clouds descend or lift, in another place he will employ throwaway, lazy descriptors instead of reaching either into the trove words in English, or into Assamese or Bengali or Hindi. When a writer fails to impress with basic nouns, his craft begins to falter, the people and the world they live in seem less and less credible.
As impressive as The House with a Thousand Stories is for a debut novel – it is quite long, after all, and has a lot of characters who are all related to each other – it is also disappointing for the lazy editing and hollow ambition. However, I recommend it as an introduction to fiction from northeastern India. Nepali readers have a long relationship with Assam – Lil Bahadur Chhetri’s Basain, one of the biggest selling novels in Nepali, is by an Assamese Nepali. If for nothing else, this relationship recommends Kashyap’s novel to us.
