Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises

Crossing the Border: A Study of Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises

Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises[i], a sensitive account of a girl’s efforts to find her destination in life, is full of keen psychological observations, and culminates in a sane and balanced view of life. Transplanted from her home and the familiar world of Delhi at the age of eighteen to a highly conventional and aristocratic Nair family in Kerala, suffering from the pangs of separation from her first love, married to a man who is neither good nor bad but simply an ‘expert in the art of escape’, and surrounded by nasty and sly in-laws who will never let her belong to their world, the problems Janu has to face are numerous. All her efforts to endear herself to the family of her husband, which includes even begetting a child who is supposed to bridge the gap between herself and her new family, are in vain. It comes as a terrible shock to her when her child is declared ‘mentally handicapped’, but her intense attachment with the baby forms her best protection, and surprisingly, also her means of salvation. She starts rebelling against the snobbish conventions of the family, and slowly there emerges the first faint outline of a plan of escape. She manages a foreign scholarship to go abroad, and it is then, when she is almost ready to get out, that the panicky husband and in-laws try their best to stop her. The last step in this manoeuvre is to take away her daughter Riya. Still she goes to London and completes her course. These are her stolen days of perfect happiness with her lover Arjun. But she must return to Kerala to get her Riya back, because she believes that a life of happiness built on the pain and sufferings of other people cannot last. There is a hole in her soul which only her daughter can fill. Thus her return to Kerala is at the risk of losing even the only other happiness of her life, that is, Arjun. Back in Kerala, things suddenly turn out in her favour, she gets the divorce, Riya is returned to her, and she is ready to start a new life with Arjun.

Now the question Jaishree poses, Janu faces, and the reader wants to pursue, is this: what we call life, this life with all its sufferings, acts of injustice, and rationally incomprehensible puzzles, like, why should innocent people suffer, should people accept suffering as their fate, should we break the cycle of karma and rewrite our story as we like, etc., well, does this life have a design or is it all merely chance? If there is a God who is at the helm of affairs, has he made a mess of things? Or to put it simply: what are we to do with this life when we find ourselves at odds with its main current? Perhaps this is the single, most important question that, since time immemorial, sages and philosophers and great novelists have been trying to tackle. The attitude Jaishree takes towards this question is perhaps more important than the answer she gives. It is the inexplicable suffering of innocent children that makes Ivan ‘return his ticket’ to God’s kingdom in The Brothers Karamazov, the same which generates and justifies the atheism of Tarrou in Camus’s The Plague, the very same which turned Mulk Raj Anand into an atheist at a very early age itself. Now let us see how Jaishree Misra deals with this issue.

Janaki, or simply Janu, the heroine of Ancient Promises, presents this question in the very beginning of the book. She wonders, “ if some God had finally given up his endless task. Had finally drowned all his tools in sheer despair at the weight of errors and mistakes that He simply wasn’t able to control anymore”(p.5). She was not sure whether it was her mistake or His; “ was it a mistake at all or part of some grand plan? That’s what I want to think it was. A grand plan, ancient and meaningful and free of blame”(p.5). She is sure that there has to be a reason for everything and that nothing can happen without a reason. And the whole of the story succeeds in bringing out this conviction in a forceful and convincing way.

Even as a young girl of eighteen, Janu was fully aware that the responsibility for her actions rested entirely with herself. It was her decision to marry Suresh. Even though she did not like it a bit, she acknowledges with hindsight and mature wisdom: “ I had been meant to come here all along. It had all been written so many centuries ago even the writer would have struggled to remember where the real meaning lay”(p.7). It is only vanity to believe that our stories are only ours. We are only minor characters, nothing more than a speck of dust in the grand design. Janu believes that “our destinies and our many pasts were combining in a grand dance so meticulously choreographed, we could easily delude ourselves into believing we were making it all happen” (40). Of course, at first she was scornful of the blind acceptance of everything, and felt that it must be “ a petty poor God who couldn’t even seem to get right who was deserving of punishment and who wasn’t”(p.143). But both her mother and grandmother were typical oriental fatalists who might ask:“ What was the point in going on about something that could not be changed?” (160). What we suffer in this life is caused by something we did in an earlier life, though we can never know what it is: “ I would never know what ancient promise I had made to her, just as she [Riya] would never know what deed had robbed her of words in this life” (160). Any effort to reject one’s lot in life is to fight the gods. But later when she walks into the arms of Arjun, she feels equally certain that it is also meant to happen. Arjun must also be related to one of her previous lives: “Was it because that was what was meant to be because of some promise so ancient I could not even remember it now?” (206). It is interesting to note that it is the same idea of ‘ancient promises’ made in some other life as the justification of present experiences that makes her both accept her lot and fight against it at the same time. This is the philosophical basis of the whole novel and it needs further looking into.

Her first affair with Arjun is almost like a dream. Her marriage into the Maraar family is the reality into which she wakes up. After ten years, when she steps back into her dream at Delhi, she is so much distanced from her married life, both emotionally and geographically, that the reality looks like some previous life, a kind of misty dream. It had all to happen like that. Nothing is wasted; nothing is meaningless. She had to sacrifice ten years of her life, ten long years to pay off some unknown debt from a previous birth to the Maraar family, and that is the price with which she buys her future happiness with Arjun. Her forty-eight weekends with Arjun at Milton Keynes are ‘stolen’ or ‘borrowed’, and for her to start a new life of her own, she has to get her daughter back.

Now what are the things which distinguish this tale from the all too familiar one of a woman leaving her home to run away with a lover? First of all, it must be remembered that her art of characterization sees to it that no character other than Janu receives the ‘close-up’. For example, Arjun does not appear as a ‘real’ character throughout the novel, and it is especially so in the first part. This, I think, is both deliberate and significant. He does not somehow belong to the real world so that we do not pass any judgment on Janu when she decides to marry Suresh. If the character of Arjun had been developed more thoroughly and if we had witnessed his pain and disappointment at her betrayal, our response to Janu’s action could not have been as unequivocal as it is now. The same argument is true about Suresh too, for given a glimpse into his thoughts and feelings at her betrayal, it would have been difficult to withhold moral judgment from Janu’s actions. Similarly, when Janu rushes into the arms of Arjun, and as she enjoys the moment of bliss without guilt, we are convinced that it is beyond blame. For one thing, the dream like figure of Arjun does not seem to be real enough to bring in moral censure. What she experiences then is a moment of pure bliss, uncontaminated by any bitterness or selfishness or even a sense of taking revenge on her insensitive husband. The purity of her experience is thus effected, by a two-way action, which while cutting off her husband from the picture on one hand manages at the same time to sublimate the lover into an ethereal image so that the question of praise or blame does not occur.

Another important device that helps Jaishree to complete the picture of Janu is her daughter, the mentally retarded Riya. If Riya had been a normal child capable of missing her mother, her inconsolable sorrow would have definitely cast its disquieting shadow on Janu’s one year in London. The reader accepts the situation because he knows that the needs of the child which are mainly confined to good food and fine clothes and some looking after can be as well met by the father, or even a good servant. But the final flowering of Janu’s personality occurs when she decides to risk her life of happiness with Arjun for the sake of retrieving her child. Thus it seems that the thorough representation of Janu as a full-fledged character achieves its poignant effect to a very great extent from the semi-representation of other characters as vaguely perceived entities.

Janu’s experiences are typically those of a migrant. Rushdie once wrote:

Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only form of the phenomenon. In many ways, given the international and increasingly homogeneous nature of metropolitan culture, the journey from, for example, rural America to New York city is a more extreme act of migration than a move from, say, Bombay.[ii]

Born and brought up in Delhi, when Janu is married to a Nair family at Valapad and moves over to Kerala, she encounters all the bewildering experiences of a migrant, both on a linguistic and cultural level. Even before her marriage, she had realized her paradoxical situation: “ That these two places [Delhi and Kerala] ran together in my blood, their different languages and different customs never quite mixing, never really coming together as one” (p.18). She grew up in Delhi “with Malayali parents but Delhi friends, and Malayali thoughts but Delhi ways” (p.18). Soon after her marriage, her mother-in-law reminds her: “ Like it or not, you now live in Kerala, so I suggest you drop all these fashionable Pleases and Thank Yous” (p.80). Her Malayalam was woefully inadequate, and the usual mixture of English and Malayalam simply would not do there. Speaking in English would be deemed stylish; her brand of Malayalam always provoked sarcastic laughter. So she was forced into monosyllabic replies. Delhi did not like the Kerala in her and Kerala resented the Delhi about her. She exclaims: “ Half-way children, we could have founded a world-wide club of people belonging nowhere and everywhere, confused all the time by ourselves . . .” (pp.169). Later in England, in moments of crises, as for instance when she is being questioned by the Immigration Department, she becomes aware of the quality of her English deteriorating, as “ my Indian accent was squeezing its way out, sending my tongue into overdrive” (p.290). It is obvious that language has played a crucial role in making her predicament hopelessly awful.

Close on the heels of this linguistic disorientation follows the cultural dislocation. Though she hated Kerala often, she would miss it too, as Kerala was in her blood. But her main problem was in getting accepted as a member of her husband’s family. For this, she had to transform herself into someone who was totally different from her actual self. On the morning of her wedding, after the make-up is completed, she looks into the mirror and sees a stranger looking back, ‘a proud product of Preethi’s Beauty Parlour’ (p.72). Her in-laws dress her up in a Maraar sari and Maraar jewellery and turn her into someone else. She muses: “ I stood in front of them, a counterfeit Maraar, hiding Delhi insides and a very heavy heart” (p.92). Even little things seem to accentuate her oddity. “ Even a badly hung blouse could announce to everyone who walked past the washing line that there was an intruder in their midst, one that could never ever measure up to the others” (p.109). In short, though she was never beaten up, though nothing really terrible had happened to her, there was only “ a long and constant catalogue of very small things, . . . so small and so subtle as to be almost invisible, could not do any grave damage, just rob me gradually of my knowledge of myself” (pp.110-11). Suresh never bothered to find out what she thought or how she felt. As far as she was concerned, he never existed really. Thus her earnest efforts to be a good wife and an acceptable daughter-in-law were thwarted, partly by the insensitivity of her husband, partly by the devious nastiness of her in-laws, but mainly by the alien customs of a narrow-minded society, a system which was hostile to her true inner nature. Her firm refusal to accept her share of this ‘forced’ happiness is indeed heroic.

Nowadays, terms like ‘honesty’, ‘sincerity’, ‘integrity’ etc., have become somewhat outdated in literary criticism. But Ancient Promises makes its impact mainly through the writer’s honest approach to life, and as a female Bildungsroman, it makes its mark with astounding clarity and intensity. Janu has fought her fights with unrelenting determination, and in the course of the whole novel, never for a moment does she become selfish or inhuman: she has never betrayed her true self. And that is not something we can say of many people.



Notes:

[i] Jaishree Misra, Ancient Promises, (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000).

[ii] ‘Introduction by Salman Rushdie’ in Gunter Grass, trans. Ralph Manheim, On Writing and Politics, 1967 – 1983 (London: Penguin, 1987).

3 comments:

Sindhu said...

Just found this Uncle dear- I didn't beleive Appu when she told me you were actually into blogging!!!! What next, I wonder?
Oh, by the way, Jaishree Misra or Rani Chechi as I still call her was my "relative by marriage"- and quite frankly, my only doubt is how she survived in that marriage for so long!
Your astounded Neice,
Sindhu.

Anonymous said...

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Jayaprakash A said...

Mash Nonpareil

My first acquaintance with Nandan Mash began I think during 1996 when I joined for BA English at Sree Kerala Varma College. I must have surely seen him at the campus when I did my pre-degree from 1994-1996. But it was during the degree days that I got to know him closer. I used to look with admiration at the Mash full of life wearing a cooling glass and riding his bullet with Shalini Miss behind him. As new students, we used to enquire about the teachers to our seniors and all of them had a single voice when they said that Nandan Mash was the best; a recognition which would make all other teachers envy him for many more years to come.
The words of the senior students came true in our own experience when Nandan Mash taught us like pacha vellam The Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams, a text considered by most students to be a difficult nut to crack. And unlike the tradition in Kerala Varma, he explained and made us understand the entire dictionary-like book from A to Z. From then, I have had no fear for theoretical words or jargon employed in the academia. He handled European Fiction for MA and made all the fifteen novels come alive in class. It was the magic of Mash that he could make any text simple and enjoyable. To sit in his class was like enjoying a wonderful show of whatever you like most. Sometimes he would be taking two or three hours continuously and none of us would know how the time had passed. Fiction was his forte, but there was nothing behind the roof of literature which did not yield to his magical wand.
I have to say with pride that I have never had such a wonderful teacher in my student career like Nandan Mash. He was much much more than a teacher. He was a friend to his students. Once we, the MA students, bunked class and went to watch a movie. The Department viewed this matter seriously and an emergency meeting was called. Everybody said that stringent action should be taken against the students. But Nandan Mash disagreed to be a party to this. He asked, "Before we discipline the students, are we teachers doing our duty. Do we go regularly to classes? Do we do justice to our work? Do we come to sign or to teach?" One sentence which he often repeated was that "The whole bloody institution exists for the students." He believed that the student is the most important person in a campus of learning. Administration and even the teachers are incidental; that is, they are there only because the students are there. If the students were not there, none of them would be needed. As a human being, he was a gem, rare of its kind. He was a person who said what he meant and meant what he said. Mash was straightforward in speech and behaviour and he hated hypocrisy and humbug in others. His dedication to work, utter lack of pretence of any sort, and open approach to life itself, has always touched me.
I had the good fortune to work with Nandan Mash as a colleague when I worked as a guest lecturer at Kerala Varma during 2001-2002. He used to help me in every possible way whenever I expressed any difficulty regarding anything. He consoled me when I was depressed. I wrote the UGC-NET twice and was unable to clear it. At that time I was working at Kerala Varma. I was about to go for the next class and I told him, "Mash, with what face will I meet the students? The UGC seems to suggest that I am unfit for teaching." Mash smiled, patted me on my back and told me, "JP, look here, one or two failures is not the end of the world." After a pause he continued, "JP, I have a feeling that you will get only both together, NET and JRF. Maybe that is why it is getting delayed." The words of Mash came true. In my very next attempt in December 2001, I cleared the NET and was awarded the JRF.
My brother did his MA in the distance education mode and scored 52% in his exams. He was sad that he did not get 55%, the minimum required to appear in the NET. I used to tell about Mash at my home but they had not seen him. I went with my brother to Mash's house, and he welcomed us as the usual caring host. He told my brother, "Yours is a glorious 52", and patted him on the back. On coming back home, my brother told me, "Your Mash is wonderful". With Mash's blessings and encouragement, he appeared in the improvement exams and succeeded in scoring 55%. Mash's concern for his students was more than as a teacher. He was like a family member, or even as concerned as our parents.
Once I was admitted a hospital down with back pain. Mash came to see me in the hospital and that was the only time my father had met him. However, when Mash passed away, I was telling father that it was unbelievable for me even after a few days, he told me, "Yes, I also felt some unknown pangs inside me, though I did not have much acquaintance with Mash. The sadness is also there in nature, the atmosphere tells it." My mother had never seen Mash. But when the news of Mash's demise reached home on the Vidyarambam evening, she blurted out, "Why he? He was a loving Mash, who loved all the children and whom all loved. There are so many others still around, why he had to go so soon?"
I have traveled several times with Mash in his car to the Calicut University where I did research for some time. He would be coming there to take some class at the Academic Staff College, or to meet his daughter Aparna who was studying at the Providence College, and he would invite me for a privileged trip in his car. We used to discuss so many things during those long journeys lasting for several hours. By then, I had been deep into meditation and used to tell him how it had benefited me a lot. He told me that he was not interested in all these stuff. He used to proudly call himself an atheist. I remember an instance in our MA class, when he asked, "Those who do not believe in God raise your hands", and Mash's hand was up. I looked around and saw no single hand and so I raised my hand. Mash laughed and said, "Poda." He knew too well of me to swallow that! However in the private discussions we had in our car journey, he told me that he was aware at some point in his life that it was necessary to sublimate the mind. For that he found reading, especially fiction, a safe means. He was skeptical of the inner search and introspections of meditation. We agreed to disagree on this point, but he never discouraged me or made fun of my meditation. I have a strong suspicion to this day that he was a strong believer, a true lover of God, who did not want this secret sacred relationship between he and his beloved to be exposed to others. A few weeks before his demise, I wrote to him a request asking for donations for a Meditation hall under construction at Thrissur. He immediately responded promising to do whatever he can. He sent the money to me, and I asked him for his residence address to issue the receipt. He wrote back to me not to worry about the receipt. "As for receipt, keep it with you, or leave it with Shinoj; you need not post it at all. Or bring it to me, another excuse to meet you again. ha ha… Mash" were the last words in the last mail that he sent to me a few days before his passing away. Mash had the last laugh. By the time I got the receipt, he had already gone.
The old students meet Mash organized a few days before his demise was a grand event. Most of the old students had come and Mash was the central figure of the whole function. It unwittingly turned out to be a farewell meeting for him. Mash was a person who hated being considered old and used to say that he was "growing young". A man who passionately loved life and described himself as the kind of man "who ought to live a thousand years" echoing Zorba of Kazantzakis. Surely Mash will never grow old. Neither will he ever die. His smiling person full of vigour and vitality will remain fresh in the hearts of hundreds and hundreds of students. Mash had during his last days started a blog www.nandantk.blogspot.com where he writes that he wishes to look at his own life as a story. But it was as if he gave a strange unexpected twist to the end. Like the expert writer of fiction he never dropped a cue to this twist and silently withdrew without leaving any loose ends. As Shalini Miss told, "He wound up everything well".