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Meanwhile, Upriver
Having begun her career as a journalist with Saturday Times, Chatura Rao turned to story telling with children’s book. She has authored The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories, The Puffin Book of Funny Stories, Puffin’s Favourite Stories for Girls and Scholastic India’s The Moustache Maharishi and Other Unlikely Stories. Meanwhile, Upriver is the maiden foray into the world of adult literature by the author who graduated from Sophia College, Mumbai. Chatura’s pivotal characters, Yamini and Shiva, are not merely puppets in her hand; they seem to take on a life of their own. It is the story of their struggle to survive against all odds. Yamini is a woman who unnerves prospective suitors with her sharp tongue and portly frame. Any other associations that she could possibly have are drowned in the choicest of abuses that she hurls left and right. Even as a child in a large joint family, she had to get used to being ignored and that made her want to be a part of the whole all the more badly. Chatura sums up her plight aptly when she says that all a gecko lizard’s tail, which the lizard itself leaves wriggling on the floor, wants is to belong to the reptile’s rear end. Her life revolves around taking care of her ill father, going for work and ignoring the cruel jibes of one and all. Her desperation for a partner becomes increasingly evident when she falls for the first person who she thinks is attracted towards her. Shiva is an orphan who lives a privileged life as he has been adopted by a sadhu who enjoys as much clout as a leader of a political party in power would. He refers to his adoptive father as a madman. Under his aegis he goes through the rigmarole of his triumphs and tribulations. His father had numerous stories about how he found Shiva but none of them seemed to satisfy him. For Shiva, the truth about his mother was elusive. His childish antics lend an endearing quality to Yamini’s Bridget Jones’ like plight. His fascination with Ramlila and his participation in its various aspects make the story colourful. His chance meeting with Yamini is interspersed with silence that talks louder than words. The latter feels that their bond is strong because it was not interrupted with words, which she feels hold no meaning other than to pull things apart by lending subtexts that dance out of reach and form their own meaning. The other characters, though brief in their presence, are in no way short on depth. The beggar, Yamini’s lover, Shiva’s friends and his father’s chaperones are all alive and play crucial roles. The tiny illustrations depicting Shiva as a little monkey and Yamini as a stout watermelon atop their respective chapters lend themselves better than chapter numbers. Though childlike in its simplicity, the novel is very thought provoking and dwells on subjects like love in a very mature manner and doesn’t overly romanticise any notion. The prose flows fluently and absorbs in its folds the very essence of the city of Banaras. Its ghats and lanes and all the hullabaloo of the city seem to surround you as you turn the pages. The author delightfully sums up the soul of the city when she states that all roads around the ghat lead to noisy, paan-stained salvation.
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THERE are stories that can
be categorised as love stories, chick lit, thriller, suspense, sci-fi or
just children’s literature. But some traverse all boundaries and touch
the soul of the reader. It has to do as much with the story as with the
art of story telling.