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Ravi Shankar Etteth, well-known cartoonist and deputy editor of India
Today, begins his first novel The Tiger by the River with
standard elements that are very popular with certain critics.
This is by no means his first attempt at writing for he has been
writing short stories from the age of 15, first in Malayalam and
then in English.
Drawn, by Etteth’s
own admission, from the actual story of Choorikathi Kombiyachan,
the pyscopathic ruler of Palghat, the novel begins in the true
fashion of Raj novels made popular by M. M. Kaye and Paul Scott,
but soon we begin to see shades of Leon Uris and the other
Holocaust writers. Having begun so ambitiously, Etteth soon
looses direction and so do we. What adds to our disorientation
is a vast array of characters of all sorts, and the situation is
further complicated by the devise of telling a story within a
story and yet another story within it. Just a few pages after we
meet Swati, his parents come on the stage, and just as we begin
to get used to them we are taken back to the 1930s with Swati’s
grandfather, Rama Varma, marrying for a second time, and this
time a Jewess named Else. The scene now shifts to Germany
(Berlin) that is poised to start World War II. The grandfather
fears persecution at the hands of the Nazis. His son manages to
escape, and then we learn that Swati has a cousin in America
named Vel Kramer. The scene now shifts to America. On the one
end we have Swati who brings the ashes of his wife to Panayur,
and at the other end of the world Vel embarks on a mission to
bring the ashes of his grandfather home. Interwoven with all
this is the legend of the tiger, the rituals, the occult,
mythology, history of Panayur, Kerala, India, fundamentalism,
terrorism and even sex.
In an effort to
please everybody, Etteth packs his story with so many diverse
elements, styles and genres, that in spite of his good prose,
the whole exercise fails to impress. We have the myths, the
curses, the tigers hunts, the rajas, the Portuguese, the
Holocaust, Gandhi, Patel, the Vishava Hindu Parishad, communists
with familiar-sounding names like Namboodiri, and even Osama bin
Laden. Most of the contemporary events appear to have been
thrown in the plot, as if in a last minute bid to make the story
contemporary and to cash in on the current news value. But all
this comes at a heavy price. What could have been an interesting
story ends up as a poor montage filled with characters that we
hardly care to remember.
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SWATIRAJA
VARMA, the last King of Panayur, a princely state in Kerala, has a
promise to keep. A promise that becomes not only a sort of
homecoming for him but also a voyage of discovery. Nina, the Queen
of this Delhi-based royal, is pregnant and somehow knows that her
baby is going to be a son. She has been having ominous dreams in
which she sees destruction as predicted by Nostradamus. The monsoon
sets in, lashing the land. Nina dies in a road accident, so does the
future heir of Panayur that was still in her stomach. The bereaved
Swati remembers that he had promised his dead wife that one day he
would take her and their son to Panayur, his ancestral estate. So he
decides to take the ashes of his wife to Panayur and immerse them in
the Papanasini river.
