Amitava Kumar’s ‘My Beloved Life’: Shared, remembered lives

Bindu Menon

Writer Arundhati Roy once described the pandemic as a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. “We can choose to walk through it,” Roy wrote, “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.” Four years since the pandemic, the choice remains anybody’s guess.

In some way, Amitava Kumar’s novel, too, appears to portray a gateway between two worlds — of a father and daughter, Jadu and Jugnu. These aren’t insular worlds but very real and messy entanglements with the social, cultural and political gridlock of a nation. And then, there is the pandemic too.

‘My Beloved Life’ ostensibly follows the life of Jadu, or Jadunath Kunwar, born in 1935 in a village in Bihar, near George Orwell’s birthplace. Incidentally, the bungalow which once served as the Orwell residence would at various turns become an opium warehouse, a dilapidated cowshed overrun by stray dogs and pigs, or “animal farm”, as a Patna newspaper cleverly headlined it, and finally a museum dedicated to the writer. While the pandemic does evoke an Orwellian atmosphere, Kumar doesn’t make it the novel’s mainstay. Instead, he ushers in the familiar world of an everyday India, where the mythical and mundane sit well, where the village and city effortlessly intersect, where the humdrum of the personal is ever so linked with the hubbub of the political.

When Jadu comes to Patna for college, it seems like rebirth, a feeling of having become modern. So we witness Jadu’s first flush of infatuation, his learnings about life and language from the kavi sammelans he attends, his meeting with the genial Tenzing Norgay who tells students why team spirit matters more than the lunge towards the summit, and then the many encounters with caste. When a student, Ramdeo Manjhi, narrates in class how he was once punished for drinking water from a pot in school, there is a studied silence. That day Jadu realises the subject of caste is untouchable too.

Along the way, ordinary and momentous events get enmeshed within the narrative. Like a docu-reel, we witness the rise of Jayaprakash Narayan and the movement he shepherded, the imposition of Emergency, and the flight of a young Dalai Lama from Tibet. It’s the story of a nation where a Dashrath Manjhi can tame mountains and a Gauri Lankesh can be felled by the bullets of bigots. Nothing feels disjointed or superficial in Kumar’s prose, nor is there any grand, expansive unfolding of events, but a gentle nudge into the theatre of history as it plays out.

The novel, like most of Kumar’s works, is also a mandatory ode to his beloved Patna. It’s the city where Jadu builds his life as a history professor or where Jugnu finds love. Yet, when her marriage breaks down and Jugnu takes flight to the US to become a television journalist, she finds anchorage in a new life and love. In this distant country, the experiences of migrants and the everyday struggles of the Blacks invoke parallels to the country she has left behind.

‘My Beloved Life’ is also a deeply personal story, of the tender love between a father and daughter. Over long-distance calls, as Jugnu listens to Jadu read out a few paragraphs of a memoir that he intends to publish, she realises that in doing so, her father is calling her back, “even if momentarily, to a life we had shared”. It is these shared, remembered lives that Kumar honours, as also the irreplaceable and incomparable histories that hold them together.