Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Postcards from God by Imtiaz Dharker
Review by: K. Narayana Chandran
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995),
pp. 872-873
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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872 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

being published, as did Violet Dias Lannoy, two openingwhose first from God - I 8c II." Speak-
poems, "Postcards
novel was published in 1989, sixteening years after"God"
this distress, she promises
died a new start: "I create the
(see WLT 64:4, p. 698). Until halfway, faces / thatI thought
will belong histo you / years from now, . . . //
humor had carried him away: the novel Keep was the channels open. /it
so satirical, I will keep trying to get
was unfeeling. But when all are connected through." to the Dew
Drop Inn, the novel turns, beginning On the facing
with the pages of these poems
suicide of are Dharker' s
Steven after he has been drugged and raped
drawings, byenlarged,
successively Edwin, of a bearded figure de-
Claude, and Jake, who wanted to bring tained behind
him a welded
outmesh,of histhe eyes invisible behind
closet: he could not face himself. the splintered, bedazzling lenses of spectacles. Her op-
At the request of Castello, the historian, Raoul agrees
pressively shaded caricatures of men, women, and things
to be interviewed by Charlotte Merrywood, who wants createtovisual rhymes for the poems that relentlessly pur-
write a novel about Goa under Portuguese rule and sue urban poverty and squalor, violence and disarray. The
"would like to be familiar with the feel of those days,
lastthe
of these poems, "Minority," is exceptional in the ac-
perfume of which still lingers like ghosts, even today."
count it gives of this poet's dark esthetic: "I don't fit, /
The experience is more profound than either expected. like a clumsily-translated poem; / . . . / There's always
He is drawn mentally to Estelle, whom he now realizes that he
point . . . / where the frame slips, / the reception of
could have married if he had chosen to break from family
an image / . . . / that signals, in their midst, / an alien."
and caste - that is, from history. The upper-class English-
Were Bombay and the riots, then, just an excuse? And is it
woman communicates with the upper-class Goan, sees only the poet who feels she "was born a foreigner" in a
through his mask ("bitterness that surfaced in cynicism,"
city ruled by political hoodlums? Dharker of course wrote
the same mask worn by the novelist in the first half)these
, and poems well before the new government in Maha-
realizes she is lonely. Her well of creativity dries up. She resolved to change Bombay into "Mumbai," but it
rashtra
never meets Raoul again: while he is on special assign-
is wildly amusing to speculate whether she would now feel
ment to Manila, his plane is blown up. any less strange in that city with its new name.
Except for Raoul's, all the books have epilogues. Every-
No one, I guess, would seriously question your right to
one must leave the Dew Drop Inn: it was a way station.worship your god in your metaphor. Dharker knows this,
Lila Das buys it and converts it to the Lyda Motel.and The accordingly fashions his language after our young
Morris couple move to Bangalore, and "Whenever anyone folk in cities. Armed with "the biggest remote control of
passed the cottage and greeted them, they would alwaysall," this young fellow proclaims his birthright to channel-
reply with the same words, 'Do drop in.'" The line hop, re- play, stop, fast-forward, "squeak and double-speak,"
minded me of Ray Charles's "One Drop of Love," and andin-then proceed to ask "Question II": "Did I create you /
deed the novel explores pop music and other art forms in my image / or did you create / me in yours?" Christian
such as music, clothing, and writing. and Hindu by turns, this god misses no opportunity to
The Dew Drop Inn seeks redemption. Steven's relatives
threaten us with another birth. Children, they say, are our
emigrated to Australia, and "the bruises on their psyches
hostages to fortune; those better-fed, better-housed
inflicted by a colonial system that had created them, usedthem sat through long sessions of "The Donohue
among
them, and rejected them, disappeared completely, unlike
Show" when Bombay burned. As for those "raked out of
the bones of Steve Murray that would remain in India for-
hostile wombs," they merely tossed themselves from mud
ever." Charlotte may have lost her creativity, but she is
to mud. Did anyone know? That now is the poet's ques-
freed from nostalgia, which blinds one to the dynamic
tion. Dharker can make us hear even the most muted
possibilities in history.
Peter Nazareth
cough along the tapped wire of recent history. And that,
surely, is no vanity.
University of Iowa
The one thing that makes me uncomfortable with
poems like Dharker' s is their refusal to see Bombay wake
India

Imtiaz Dharker. Postcards from God. Illustrated by the au-

thor. New Delhi. Viking Penguin India. 1994. 103 pages,
ill. RslOO. ISBN 0-670-86080-8.

Imtiaz Dharker is almost alone among her peers in

having a highly sophisticated sense of the line - in
poems and in sketches. She is good at both. The drawings
that accompany some of her poems in Postcards from God
are designed to slow down the pace of reading, or per-
haps to urge us to read the sketches and scan the poems.
Either way, Dharker' s messages are not in any serious dan-
ger of being miscarried. The Bombay riots of 1993 and
their aftermath lead her to a series of meditations on how
little we can do for fellow sufferers. Oddly, Dharker cele-
brates art's power amid the debris of social and cultural
institutions, an irony she does not intend to mask in the

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 INDIA 873

up after its nightmare. Many, let usto marry her.

recall, The boy
rushed soon moves to Bombay, however,
forward
to sin, but many others stopped them.leaving Surely
Gudiya gazing into the void. In due course, the
Bombay's
variety even in those worst days included
temple acquireslight,
sanctitylove,
and the holy mother the reputa-
laughter. Dharker's Adam series in tion
"Naming themiracles,
of performing Angels" which survives her death.
is particularly dark and humorless, unless oneoflaughs
The spectacle religion, un-
crime, and sex walking hand
believingly at a line like "Adam, your
in glovenamesake
has always beenlives in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
fascinating.
Dharavi." Unmitigated sorrow, I believe, seldom
has depicted it in her pays the
novels and short stories, even titling
one of herof
lyrical service it requires. In a collection tales "How Ififty
some Became a Holy Mother." That
poems such sorrow can be killing. story conveyed in shrewd, sure, ironic undertones the
K. Narayana Chandran
machinations involved in the making of a religious show.
Namita's tale is simplistic. It is told from the point of view
University of Hyderabad
of Gudiya, an adolescent girl who can hardly be expected
to be aware of the bizarre conditions of her life. Neither
can she be expected to present the character of her
Namita Gokhale. Gods, Graves and Grandmother. New grandmother sufficiently. All that she is capable of doing
Delhi. Rupa. 1994. 181 pages. Rs70. ISBN 81-7167-246-9. is offering a straightforward narration of events as they
are embedded in her memory. The ethereal story of her
In literary fecundity Indian women writers in En- life generates its own humor.
glish have outnumbered the Indian male writers in Ramlal Agarwal
English. Gita Mehta, Bharati Mukherjee, Raji Narsimhya, J.E.S. College, Jalna, India
Shashi Deshpande, Shobha De, Nayantara Sahgal, and
others have been hitting the stalls pretty regularly with
sleek editions of fiction. They explore a variety of subjects.
Sometimes it is the Raj, sometimes it is Indians in Ameri-
ca, sometimes it is the infatuation of Indian women with
Englishmen or English literature, and sometimes it is neu-
rotic women in higher echelons of Indian Society. Some Lakshmi Kannan. India Gate and Other Stories. Translated
of these women writers take on sex so boldly as to shameby the author. New Delhi. Disha (Orient Longman,
even the bawdiest male writers. But more often than not, distr.). 1993 (released 1994). xi + 159 pages. Rs70. ISBN 0-
their novels are written with an eye on the Western audi- 863-11345-1.
ence. Apart from a certain measure of felicity of expres-
sion, these writers do not give any impression of having What kind of a woman do we have inside the Indian
any compulsions to write. Nor do they give the impression woman? Lakshmi Kannan probes this question with a
of writing from experience. The Indian novel in Englishtouch of acid on her scalpel. It is quite obvious that the
has bypassed the Western practice of characterization, orIndian woman is excellent at keeping up facades and is
evocation of social milieu. More often than not, it seems certainly a hardy plant capable of enduring phenomenal
to have no center. Consequently, it becomes difficult to oppression. But must it always be so? Aren't we about to
see such works in terms of the various aspects by which a enter the twenty-first century, after all?
Western novel is viewed. Bilingual, Lakshmi Kannan is primarily a thinker who
Gods, Graves and Grandmother follows Namita Gokhalekeeps 's her emotions under control. The fire of imagina-
first novel, Paw: The Dreams of Passion. The narrator's tion gets lit only when she settles down to analyze a given
grandmother runs a Kotha or brothel. As is usual with situation. With her, ideas go in search of characters,
Kothawalis or courtesans, she becomes implicated in which a is why one cannot ignore her, even when a story
murder case and is forced to leave her comfortable kotha may be no more than a flash of experience. When the
along with her daughter and granddaughter. This does ideas are successfully matched with the right type of char-
not deter her. One fine morning she steals a green mar- acters, Lakshmi comes up with a forthright, challenging
ble slab and a few pebbles and turns them into a deity coup,and like Shobha "escaping" the familial-societal stan-
herself into a holy mother. The transformation is effected dards of behavior by gulping down martinis in a tavern:
as smoothly as one changes a shirt. Soon people passing "Why do Indian women shrink within their own skin, so
by stop and offer coins to the deity. The offerings increasepainfully shy?"
day by day. The narrator's mother, who had contractedThe a title story takes this question to its logical conclu-
venereal disease, runs away with an acquaintance. Sham- sion, with Padmini boldly opting out of a stifling mar-
bu, an oldtimer, opens up a flower shop just outside riage. the But such rebellion is not always prudently practica-
temple. The muscleman of the area, Sunder Pahelwan, ble in the Indian milieu. Most of the stories in the

joins hands with the holy mother, and all is set for a grand collection insinuate this problem by projecting bored
spectacle. Further color is added by Shambu's involve- housewives, aging women. And then Kannan seems to ask
ment with a tribal woman and his subsequent murder. why blame the Indian situation alone? The so-called liber-
Phulwati, Shambu's wife, takes over the flower shop, and ated a West, has it liberated itself from considering the
pundit takes over the task of astrological calculationsman-woman
so equation as nothing more than a sexual part-
necessary in the administration of a temple. Meanwhile, nership?
Gudiya, the narrator, grows up, attends an English medi- "Sable Shadows at the Witching Time of Night" is a
um school, has an affair with a bandboy, and becomes comprehensive picture of the International Writing Pro-
pregnant. When Phulwati learns of Gudiya's condition, gram at the University of Iowa. Meant to be a nest for cre-
she seeks the help of Sunder Pahelwan and forces theative boywriters from all over the globe, the program has a

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