Genius of the unwritten

Indian writing in English has been hijacked by the semi-literate, by novels that merely aspire to chick-lit, by writing that is over-explained, single-layered, and under-done. Yet — and this says something about the readers — the practitioners of such writing are much feted. They are also sought out for their opinions on subjects beyond their ken, presumably on the assumption that if you are capable of writing a bad novel you must be an authority on nuclear disarmament or economic theory.

 Into this milieu has arrived a novel that restores faith in the English novel as an Indian speciality. The author, Poile Sengupta, is a well-known playwright, poet and children’s author, and Inga is her first adult novel.

Set in the 1960s, Inga is the story of two female relatives — Inga and Rapa — and how they deal with their oppressive lives. This, against the background of some of the most casually vicious relatives in contemporary literature — from aunts and grand aunts to parents and uncles and siblings. Rapa lives in Delhi, is educated, immerses herself in English literature, keeps a journal, writes stories. Inga, who stayed behind, is a brilliantly carved out character, central as well as tangential to the story, which is an incredible achievement. Rapa’s story is about Inga, but the reverse is not necessarily true. The narrative uses three devices: Rapa’s journal, Inga’s letters and the stories Rapa writes from the age of 12. There are too the notes by Rapa’s husband which bookend the novel.

Inga is a common Scandinavian name, but here it is possibly a Tamil abbreviation of a longer word, thangachchi (younger sister). The word that comes to mind when discussing the novel is another Scandinavian one: smorgasbord.

Like some of the best works of fiction, Inga is difficult to classify. Family drama. Social commentary. Mystery. Historical. Love story. Forbidden love. Thriller. Feminist. Comic. Coming-of-Age. Revenge saga. Redemption tale. All fit.

Sengupta, the playwright, handles dialogue deftly; in prose she is mistress of what is left unsaid. The genius of the unwritten is that it is both poetic and shows a healthy respect for the readers’ intelligence. Writers in control of their craft don’t have to illuminate the obvious with the light of their overwrought clichés.

There is unspoken, misunderstood, unrequited love, unsatisfactory marriages and ironies which depend for their effect on the nearly-said. The family stories reveal both character and the author’s passion for language, and control over English, Tamil and Malayalam.

Blood flows — in more ways than one — betrayals abound, yet the tone is non-judgemental. A weapon against suffering is humour. Inga has the comic energy of VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, for even while ridiculing the actions of a character, the author shows deep sympathy for and understanding of how things are and why they cannot be otherwise.

“Did I like being there?” Rapa asks at one point, of her extended family. “I could have rebelled against its authoritative temper, but strangely I didn’t. Why didn’t I? When Inga was with me, I did not ask myself that question. When she wasn’t nothing else mattered.”

Like Don Quixote who raises the ordinary to the level of the heroic, Rapa’s father, an otherwise pragmatic man, confuses the handicapped with the divine when a deformed child is born in the house. It is both typical and out of character, and one of the novel’s strengths is this ability to reconcile apparently contradictory qualities. The comedy is both situational and in the descriptions (“She had the voice of a woman who triumphed at bargaining”).

It is the comedy of forgiveness; but laughter, we realise, is a catalyst for both clemency and cruelty. There is much violence too here, great viciousness and emotional churning. Much of it is off-stage (the playwright’s influence again, perhaps), and all the more powerful for that.

The growth of the family, the gradual revelation of long-kept secrets, the tantalising clutch of what-might-have-beens universalises an individual experience. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Principle (he didn’t call it that, of course) applies: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Inga is a page-turner; again, the reverse is also true. You often linger over a page just to absorb the language, and the passion for the written word. One of Poile’s plays is entitled Keats Was a Tuber, a commentary on the mechanical way lessons are taught in our colleges. Students memorise ‘Keats was a tuberculosis patient’ by breaking the sentence up into two meaningless halves. Clearly, this is a writer who loves words and is pained by wrong usage.

Rapa writes her stories in various styles: from Enid Blyton and Jane Austen to Oliver Goldsmith, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rosetti. Literary styles mark the ageing of a book-loving character subtly but memorably.

Inga fascinates because she seems to be just out of reach. Like a Scott Fitzgerald heroine, she is there, but not there. Her letters to Rapa grout her in reality, but you are never certain that you too are not being pulled into the conspiracy. For the family, as someone in another context, “formed a conspiracy against the outside world, not feeling the necessity to explain itself”.

In a recent essay on the English writer and Booker winner Penelope Fitzgerald, the critic James Wood wrote, “Her fictions sit on the page with the well-rubbed assurance of fact, as if their details were calmly agreed upon, and long established. And though you might expect work of irritating certitude, Fitzgerald’s confidence in her material is oddly disarming; she seems somehow to take life as it comes, as if we were always entering her novels in the middle of how things just are.”

It is a wonderful description that fits Poile Sengupta equally well. The writers have one more thing in common (apart from their gender): both wrote their first novels after the age of 60.

Perhaps that explains the maturity, the depth and the complete absence of any gimmickry. Booker-worthy? Certainly.

The author is Editor, Wisden India Almanack