|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Zigzag Way
IN our age of political correctness and prim lipstick feminism, Anita Desai remains a steadfast defender of core literary values. Her effortless maturing into a prominent English language novelist over more than three decades speaks of a rare professional dedication away from arc lights, and ensures her place among significant contemporary writers. The Zigzag Way further confirms her status as an internationalist writer aware of issues such as colonialism and exploitation and recalls her remark in a BBC interview that ‘it is not for us to deny history’. In this book, history exacts its revenge on colonisers and the colonised alike. Desai is an internationalist in more than one sense. In real life she moves between India, America and Mexico. In the later novels, her protagonists travel to discover a cat’s cradle of relationships between the colonialist enterprise and a genuine interest in people of different cultures. In The Zigzag Way, Mexico becomes the focus of the rapacity of colonialism as well as its inherent distortions. The novel has three main protagonists: Eric, a directionless historian, driven by "urgency and terror of knowing", searches for his past in the wastes of Sierra Madre; Dona Vera who escapes her Nazi past by sponsoring Ischol Indians; Eric’s grandmother Betty, who having chosen to live among the miners, writes home to detail the Poncho Villa revolution in Mexico. Dona Vera, like Mrs Gould in Conrad’s Nostromo, is in full knowledge of Eric’s grandfather and of his exploitation of the mines that caused genocidal attrition of the native population. Indeed the title of the novel itself derives from the zigzag way in which the labourers carried heavy loads up the mountains of the Sierra to avoid falling off the steep altitudes. Though finally revealed as a charlatan of sorts, her aristocratic aloofness lends her an aura of authority. For Eric’s grandmother Betty as well as his mother, the Mexican experience is "buoyant with curiosity" which makes it easier for them to partially identify with the native populations. Betty in particular stops short at going native but attempts to understand the deprivations of the Sierra population following the arrival of the colonists. "Betty heard herself playing the chants that the villagers sang," reports the narrator. All these characters are victims of an oppressive solitude that sets in as the coloniser confronts the strange other. Usually in Desai this solitude has an existential dimension of the human condition itself, as in the case of Nanda Kaul in Fire on The Fountain, Bim in Clear Light of Day and the poet Nur in In Custody. In this condition the sinister and the beautiful together provide an awesome fascination with what cannot be explained in everyday terms and are conspicuously embodied in the descriptions of the Mexican landscape. Scenic descriptions are the prime nugget of this novel. Their ruminative echo matches the solitude as well as the disenchantment of the characters. Desai’s laden prose enforces the dangers of the colonial adventure itself: "she rode over the mesa where a stranger could easily be lost in the featureless monotony of the rubble and learnt that it had features and contours for those who looked," says the narrator. "The past was alive here, crepuscular, underground—and palpable." By pitting her characters and their dilemmas against the spiky contours of the Sierra in the final Ceremony of the Dead, Desai exposes the comforting lie of the entire "civilising mission". In a sly but quiet way, history pronounces its judgment without the author’s deliberate manipulation. |
