Source of book: Borrowed from the library
Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022. The author has been writing in Hindi for decades, but this book is, incredibly, the first one of hers published in the United States. It was also the first book in any Indian language to win the Booker.
Astute readers might notice that “Geetanjali/Gitanjali” is the name of a delicious poetry collection by Rabindranath Tagore (reviewed here). The name means “song offerings” and is derived from Sanskrit. It is a rather popular feminine name, much like, say, Faith, here in the United States.
Tomb of Sand is not a short book. It is long, rambling, digressive, poetic, and a bit odd at times. I was struck often at how much it resembles Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie - another Booker winner - although it is very different in other ways. Both look at personal stories in light of national events, although Tomb of Sand is more “domestic,” while also about adults throughout, rather than children. But both are divided into three parts, both center on the Partition of India, both are filled with digressions and political and philosophical rabbit trails, and both apologize for the digressions. Yes, there are definitely differences, and the plots are completely unrelated. Still, the style has so much in common that reading both in the same year felt very much like reading two books from a common literary tradition.
While not as obviously in the Magical Realism genre, Tomb of Sand does have those elements, most notably the magic cane and the sentient birds. A crow and a chukar (a partridge-like bird that has become an invasive species here in California) play roles throughout the book.
At its heart, the book is about a family, and particularly about the relationship between the mother and her daughter, in the old age of the mother.
Although it isn’t obvious in the English translation, most of the characters do not have actual names. Instead, they get titles. “Ma” is easy enough - although she is called various things by other characters, most notably the Hindi word for “older sister.” Likewise, there is Beti (daughter), Bade (eldest [son]), his wife Bahu (daughter in law), their kids “Serious Son” and Sidhartha - one of the few characters with an actual name.
In addition to the family, there is another central character, namely the Hijra, Rosie Bua, whose connection to Ma remains obscure for most of the book.
The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Ma’s husband has died, and she falls into a deep depression. Literally nothing happens for many pages. The family tries to get her to get up. She refuses.
It isn’t until Serious Son gives her a cane with butterflies on it that she rouses herself. But then, she gives away most of her possessions, and wanders away, confused as to where she is.
This leads to Beti taking her in. Beti is a divorced feminist, who finds her life turned upside down in the second part, with Ma practically inviting Rosie to live with them, starting a small business reusing and reimagining items.
The third part takes place after (spoiler) Rosie’s violent death. Ma decides to travel to Pakistan, and as part of this journey, we finally discover her past, the trauma of Partition, and her connection to Rosie.
It didn’t become clear to me until near the end, but looking back, the central theme of the book is borders - the artificiality of borders and the way that they blur. Borders between India and Pakistan, of course. But also between the genders, between generations, between external life and the inner world, between family members, between identities.
The book is also thoroughly female-oriented. I mention this mostly because so many books - even books by women - are male-oriented. For this book, men are mostly marginal. Bade is struggling to find himself after retiring from his civil service career, and is completely ineffectual in dealing with Ma, or even getting her to return to his home. KK, Beti’s boyfriend, finds himself increasingly peripheral to Beti’s life. Sid and Serious Son appear sporadically but are clearly busy with their own lives. It is the women who matter in this story, and everything centers around them.
The style of the book isn’t quite Stream of Consciousness, but it isn’t that far off, particularly in the chapters that go off on philosophical tangents. The plot of the book can be a bit hard to follow at times, but I found that simply letting the words wash over me until the thread of the story came back helped. The book isn’t something you read so much as something you experience.
Be patient. Enjoy the journey. It’s worth it.
I should also mention that the translated version is definitely different than the original. (The translator’s note is fascinating - how to translate a book that depends on wordplay? How to bring idioms and jokes into a new language?) The translated version is also longer than the original. Apparently, Daisy Rockwell and the author spent a lot of time on the translation, and Shree was a driving force behind a lot of the decisions. It was a true collaboration.
So what were my favorite lines from the book? I wrote down a few to share. The opening is great.
A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself. Even women on their own are enough. Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass. The setting sun gathers fragments of tales and fashions them into glowing lanterns that hang suspended from clouds. These too will join our story. The story’s path unfurls, not knowing where it will stop, tacking to the right and left, twisting and turning, allowing anything and everything to join in the narration. It will emerge from within a volcano, swelling silently as the past boils forth into the present, bringing steam, embers, and smoke.
So much of what is to come is foreshadowed in that short paragraph.
I also liked this digression on characters.
Oh, tell me, what makes a character important? In the tale of a poor home, wealth is an important character, whereas it’s beauty in the lives of the ugly; for India, it is Pakistan and American that play the characters of villain and hero, respectively; the most important character in the tale of a blind man is an eye, it’s a leg for the lame, a home for the homeless, employment for the unemployed, sleep for the sleepless, and if you’ve had enough of this, look: the most important character in every person’s life is the thing that they lack.
There is another line, about Serious Son, that caught my eye.
He’d had a bit of free time after a meeting, so he’d walked out of his hotel and gone to sit on the beach, where he felt happy, more or less. More or less, because there wasn’t much left in the world to make one feel truly happy. Wherever you look ,the same hideousness, the same consumerist greed, the same fake culture, and the same flittering flimsy frivolous ineffectual people who only know how to imitate and ape, so they belong neither here nor there nor anywhere.
A few of the chapters are narrated (after a fashion) by someone who is not an actual character, just a friend or acquaintance who happened to be there. They don’t get names, and it isn’t easy (or even possible in some cases) to have any real idea who they are. Here is one bit from a typical chapter.
But I’m not here to talk about myself. This isn’t my story, there’s no need for me here; I’m not even a character.
I also made a note about a particularly brutal takedown of white foreigners.
Foreigners have been purposefully overlooked so far. They are white people. The West. If you have them around it becomes all about them, because the world is their oyster. They are the ones who are creating it, and destroying it, but everyone sees them as the Creators; the Rest are perceived as the Destroyers, because they, the West, are the Center, and the origin story is set by the Center. The Rest are the rest. The kite, the decimal point, tea, the zero, typing, gunpowder, all come from over here, but only when they reached the West did they make their debut in the world. All the hues come from the Rest - black, brown, yellow - but the uncolored, not the colored, came to be considered the One True Color, the West and the Rest: the former are reality, the latter, dull, drab, worthless.
Ouch.
Allow me a shameless plug for one of my favorite books about math here, The Nothing That Is - the very basis of our mathematical thinking was not an invention of white people.
Another great line takes on the myth that there was a past when everyone “knew their place.” A myth created by the powerful, of course, without consulting those who didn’t appreciate the system.
There was a time, they say, when all was fixed, and there was no zig, no zag. At least that’s what they say; it’s up to you and me to decide whether or not to believe it. That each human was safely ensconced in his or her own role in society and knew how to behave with whom.
As if that were ever fully true. Or even mostly true.
Family relationships also are examined with a critical eye. Here is one that I noted as being relevant to my own family of origin.
Bahu did not envy this zesty lifestyle. Sisters-in-law do not desire the sort of life another leads. But they are pleased to see another deprived of the life they themselves wish to lead.
There is a line from Rosie that made me smile as well. As a marginalized person, she notes the hypocrisy of “respectability.”
“Good-for-nothings are the best. They always stick with you. It’s the good-for-somethings that leave you high and dry.”
Part of the interior conflict in the book is within Beti, who finds herself changing as she ages - is she becoming like her mother, even as her mother casts off the trappings of conservative married life?
But in the bathroom when she washed her face and was about to look up into the mirror, she felt a rush of fear: What if Amma’s face stares back at me? She’d hear you begin to resemble the person you live with, husband like wife, dog like master, mistress like cow parrot cat, so Beti like Ma?
Perhaps the central statement of the theme of the book comes near the end.
And listen here, there have never been borders in human relationships and there never will be. There were conventions then too, yes, but also people who broke them and moved forward.
Just like transgender people have always existed – Hijra’s date back thousands of years – interracial and interfaith marriages have always existed and defied attempts to outlaw them. Human relationships – and indeed all borders – are illusory in the end.
I’ll end with a line which is part of a touching reconciliation scene, between Ma and the man she was brutally separated from during Partition.
Forgiveness. What happened was not our fault, but we must take responsibility. Forgiveness. The entirety of history and a personal experience all suffused in one word.
Tomb of Sand is the first book I have read translated from Hindi. It was definitely an interesting and worthwhile read. I am curious to see if the success of this book will make it easier to find Shree’s other books? So far, they are difficult to find for sale.
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