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The Folded Earth
Reviewed by Deepti THERE is love, hate, change and loss. And there is a sense of dislocation and disbelief. Yet, being with woods, streams, stones and animals in a sleepy town is what is destined for Maya. The Folded Earth unfolds the story of love and longing of Maya for her husband Michael who died under mysterious circumstances during one of his trekking expeditions in the Himalayas. Estranged from family and friends, Maya tries to reconstruct her life in Ranikhet, a hill town in the Himalayas. It is here that she begins to understand the reason for Michael’s unfathomable yearning for the mountains after first realising that her "rival in love was not a woman but a mountain range".
Maya’s friendship with Charu, a semi-literate neighbour, gives her a sense of guardianship over her as she begins teaching her how to read and write. The novel intersperses the past and present of the lives of all the characters. The neat chronology defies the narrative; it serves as a repository of memories of childhood, dreams and frustrations. It’s about how Maya tries to reconstruct Michael’s face amidst the chaos and confusion caused by a fragmented memory. The title of the novel reflects the folds created on the surface of the earth in the form of mountains, and numerous folds inside every human mind exemplified through various layers in the story and the characters. Charu may seem like a simple village girl, yet manages to elope with her lover. Diwan Sahib’s nephew Veer, who seems gentle on the outside, turns out to be the bystander of Michael’s death. Maya, who seems a vulnerable widow, shows unexceptional strength in testing times. She gets into in a torpid talk-of-the-town liaison with Veer who provides her the solace of a companion, only to realise later that he had kept the truth behind her husband’s death under a shroud of silence. She would avenge this betrayal later by concealing an essential truth about his lineage with Diwan Sahib’s words ringing in her ears, "Revenge is a kind of wild justice". The novel strikes one as a
lyrical, poignant tale of human emotions, nature, seasons, animals on
the one hand and an attempt to bring "development" in a town
on the other. The polemics of this contrast described in the beings of
Sanki Puran, a lover of animals, and Chauhan, an administrator, who puts
signs all over the town that are meaningless to the illiterate locals.
Change in the seasons is reflected by the change in view of the
mountains from the town and where Diwan Sahib could tell the month from
the way Maya smelled after coming back from the jam factory. In Keatsian
fashion, he says, "If you smell of oranges, it must be January; if
it’s apricots, this must be June."
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Ranikhet
offers Maya a reason to live and explore the hitherto unknown folds of
her convoluted past and that of others. She tries to rebuild her life
teaching ineptly at a school and then around Diwan Sahib, the eccentric
old man, towards whom she is drawn by daughterly affection. Diwan Sahib
stands as a relic of the bygone British era, as enigmatic as the town
and the letters exchanged between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina. His
near-obsession and respect for Jim Corbett and his magnum opus to be
typed by Maya give him a lease of life in his old days. The fascination
for the Raj period looms large over the novel, merging the personal and
the political, the private and the public, and the outside and the
inside.