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Rupa Publications India, 2003
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She got up, rummaged in the cupboard, and pulled out a large sheet of paper, the corners curling, and handed it to Ramchandra. The drawing was of a large mansion, and the caption, at the bottom, read PANDEY PALACE. The two people standing above the house were labeled Grandfather and Grandmother. Their faces were clearly unhappy; drooping curves were drawn as their lips. Above Grandfather's head she'd written 'The Guru of Money.' Alongside the mansion was a smaller house, with broken windows (Sanu had neatly cut the windows in half, with jagged lines showing their panes), and a door that seemed to hang on the hinges. Underneath was written 'The Archarya Hut.' The four people above the hut, who reflected her own family, had smiling faces, and above Ramchandra's head was written, 'The Guru of Love.'
The Novel: Ramchandra is a mathematics teacher living in Kathmandu with his wife Goma, thirteen year old daughter Sanu and nine year old son Rakesh. A poor man who divides his time between teaching at a local school and coaching private students in his cramped and crumbling apartment, Ramchandra nevertheless considers himself to be more or less contented with his life. Although he, Goma and the children lack a bathroom and a telephone and live in Jaisideval, one of the city's less salubrious neighborhoods, he still takes pride in the fact that his slightly older wife chose him to be her husband when, as the eldest daughter of the wealthy and well-connected Pandey family, she literally had her choice of eligible suitors. Despite their occasional squabbles over money and her parents' deliberate rudeness to him, he and Goma remain a devoted couple whose relationship is, for the most part, a stable and successful one.
This changes when Ramchandra takes on a new private pupil named Malati, an attractive girl in her twenties who is determined to improve herself by passing the exam that will see her rewarded with a School Leaving Certificate –– a qualification that she hopes will gain her entry to a business college and eventually enable her to work as a secretary. Although he fights it for a long time, Ramchandra is unable to resist his overwhelming attraction to Malati, finding himself captivated as much by her aura of sadness and mystery as he is by the girl's youth and undeniable beauty. Learning that she's a single mother with a baby daughter named Rachana does nothing to dampen his ardour. His lust for Malati, which he finally satisfies after failing to do so in an abandoned temple where they're attacked by a troupe of monkeys who steal the girl's clothes and scratch her face, becomes inextricably linked with his desire to ensure she passes her exams so she can finally escape the hovel she shares with her vindictive stepmother.
Yet Ramchandra is not without guilt regarding his betrayal of Goma, blaming his behaviour on the fact that something must be wrong deep inside him which only she, his wife, can help him to identify. With this in mind, he plucks up his courage and confesses his adultery to Goma, resulting in her taking Sanu and Rakesh to live in Pandey Palace, the luxurious colonial-era mansion owned by her rich and snobbish parents who continually remind her of his inability to provide her with a decent house or even a servant of her own.
Ramchandra, filled with remorse now that he's ostensibly ended his affair with the equally guilt-ridden Malati, tries to explain his actions to Goma, only to be rebuffed while he becomes an object of scorn to his daughter Sanu who, in less confusing times, scolded her wealthy and pretentious grandparents for treating him, as she once angrily put it, "like a dog." After much pleading, Goma agrees to return to the apartment in Jaisideval where she cooks and runs the household as before, her one stipulation being that she will no longer share a bed with her unfaithful husband.
Things come to a head, however, when Malati is thrown out by her stepmother after being called a slut and appears at the school where Ramchandra teaches to inform him of what has happened. Unable to accept the thought of his former lover becoming a prostitute in order to support herself, he begs Malati to visit him at home that night, by which time he expects to have found a solution to her problem. The solution comes not from him, however, but from Goma who insists, in her stubbornly practical way, that the girl and her child must come to live with them. "Don't you see?" she asks when Ramchandra protests and accuses her of trying to punish him. "You've found something in her you haven't found in me. You have to decide for yourself exactly what that is. And the only way to do so is by being honest, by living with her, as if you were husband and wife… You need to find out what it is you crave. So this is the only way." The next day, after many assurances from Ramchandra that Goma will accept the arrangement because she herself suggested it, Malati moves in with the Archarya family. "Will you forgive me, bhauku?" the frightened girl asks after meekly approaching her savior in her kitchen. "I don't have that power," Goma tells her. "You'll have to forgive yourself."
While living together proves to be extremely awkward for everyone, it gradually reveals the underlying wisdom of what, on the surface, appeared to be a very foolish notion on the part of Goma. Their close proximity –– Ramchandra and Malati share the bedroom with the latter's daughter Rachana, while Goma sleeps in a separate room with her own children –– revives their affair but also creates new problems for Ramchandra, among the most perplexing of which are his wife's changed attitude toward him and the terrible injuries he fears he's done to her pride and sense of identity. But far from being crushed by the new arrangement, Goma copes magnificently with it. She stops being sad and, to her husband's surprise, does not walk in on him and Malati making love or angrily order the girl to leave. She even arranges a family outing to a Hindu temple to pray for Malati to pass her exams and, later, insists the girl accompany them to dinner at her parents' house. Ramchandra, in the meantime, becomes an object of ridicule to his neighbours and fellow teachers, who tease him about taking a 'second wife' as news of his unusual situation spreads throughout a city now poised for the political coup that will see the nation's hated one party 'Panchayat' political system replaced by its first true multi-party democracy.
But all is not as it seems with Malati who, in time, reunites with Amrit, the already married father of her baby who seduced her when she was a schoolgirl and then callously abandoned her after learning she was pregnant. What was once the burning if self-damning passion of Ramchandra's life gradually but inevitably cools, bringing him to the realization that the special qualities he thought he saw in the girl were the products of her youth, her elusiveness and her unanticipated availability. His doubts about Goma and her decision to marry so late –– doubts which have plagued him on and off since he was first shown her photograph by his mother so many years earlier –– also played a role, he's now prepared to admit, in drawing him toward Malati.
Only when his relationship with the girl is truly over and he and Goma are once again living in their cramped apartment following the deaths of Mr and Mrs Pandey does Ramchandra finally learn the truth about his wife's past. Goma, it seems, wanted him from the moment he arrived at Pandey Palace to serve as tutor to her younger sister. So great was her need for him, she explains, that she refused to eat until her parents agreed to drop their objections to the idea of him becoming her suitor. "There was something about your face –– your belief in the world, as if you viewed it with an innocence that would drown all sorrows. At the same time you looked tired, almost wise beyond your years. I was smitten," she adds with a smile. "I used to walk past the living room just to see your face." In time they resume their old routine, Ramchandra's indiscretion forgotten as democracy comes to Nepal and, in time, Goma starts a sewing business which enables them to build the decent house her parents always wanted her to have.
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Mariner Books US, 2004
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Although Ramchandra is identified in his daughter's drawing as 'The Guru of Love,' it is really the patient, level-headed Goma whose actions show her to be worthy of this moniker. With grace and determination she sets out to teach her confused husband the error of his ways, treating him at times like an over-indulged child and at others with the sort of dispassionate laxity he finds at first bewildering and, in time, maddening. Ramchandra is not a cruel or heartless man, but someone who finds himself in an absurd situation he can neither control nor escape, the victim of a mid-life crisis which, as he tells Goma more than once, he requires her support and assistance to understand and emerge from. His predicament can also be seen as a metaphor for the turbulent political situation in Nepal in the lead-up to the abolition of the Panchayat system in April 1990 –– a system symbolized by the selfish attitudes of Mr and Mrs Pandey and the 'palace' they call home while so many in Kathmandu struggle to feed, house and educate themselves. Goma's decision to sell the house following their deaths represents a further symbolic break with the past, a new beginning for herself and Ramchandra who, after much striving, regains her trust and respect along with that of their children. Malati, in the meantime, loses her former power over him, becoming the second wife of the recently divorced Amrit who, as a shopkeeper confides to Ramchandra after he drops in to visit her one last time, finds it impossible to keep his hands off other women.
The Guru of Love could easily have been titled The Guru of Wisdom. Perhaps the most telling moment in what is a quietly revelatory book is a scene in which Ramchandra informs Goma that a colleague of his has been seen flirting with a female student. Goma defends the colleague's behavior, reminding her husband that the man may not have been able to help himself. "I didn't say I'm supporting him," she adds when Ramchandra expresses surprise at her leniency. "I just said we can't judge people without knowing what's ailing them." The heart wants what it wants, this statement implies, even when wanting it has the capacity to rob us of everything we value in life. Goma is wise to let her husband decide his own course of action rather than attempting to impose her own desires on him. What truly loves you, she instinctively seems to understand, will always return if you can somehow find the courage to set it free. As Upadhyay himself put it in a 2011 interview:
…I don’t know whether that’s actually a Buddhist gesture on Goma’s part, to do that, but it is a very loving gesture, because she could have easily said, 'Well, I’m not going to have anything of this, I’m done, I’m out,' but then that would have made it a very predictable novel for me. For her to do that was a challenge to her husband. It was a very strong challenge. 'Okay, you want it? Here, you can have it, and now what?'… She’s a higher being than Ramchandra is, and I think she proves herself at that point –– someone who’s able to move beyond the predictable emotions, which is part of Buddhist philosophy. The Buddhists say, all right, you have your emotions, but so what? There’s a higher nature that you can aspire to.
A higher nature indeed. The Guru of Love is more than just a fascinating contemporary novel written with tremendous skill, verve, intelligence and compassion. It is a transcendent work of literature which manages to be supremely entertaining while succeeding admirably at the difficult task of challenging if not destroying clichéd Western ideas of 'Eastern exoticism.' Ramchandra and Goma may be Nepali, but they are first and foremost human beings, making them no more 'exotic' in their reactions to what proves to be a major but not insurmountable threat to their happiness than any other human being.
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SAMRAT UPADHYAY, c 2011
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The Writer: The following biographical statement appears on the website of Samrat Upadhyay. It is re-posted here for information purposes only and remains the exclusive copyright-protected property of its author:
Samrat Upadhyay’s first book, the short story collection Arresting God in Kathmandu (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) has been translated into French and Greek and was the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award as well as a pick for the 2001 Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers Program. Upadhyay’s stories have been read live on National Public Radio and published widely as well as in Scribner's Best of the Writing Workshops and Best American Short Stories 1999.
Upadhyay’s novel The Guru of Love (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003, a San Franciso Chronicle Best Book of 2003, and a BookSense 76 collection. The novel was also a finalist for the 2004 Kiriyama Prize, and has been translated into several European languages.
Upadhyay’s story collection The Royal Ghosts (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) won the 2007 Asian American Literary Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award, and was declared a Best of Fiction in 2006 by the Washington Post. The book was also a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award from Ireland and for the Ohioana Book Award.
His second novel Buddha's Orphans (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) has been called 'powerful' and 'beautifully told' by Publishers Weekly, which gave it a starred review. The novel has been translated into German and Czech. It was also longlisted for the DSC prize in India.
Upadhyay has also co-edited the anthology Secret Places: New Writing from Nepal (University of Hawai’i Press), published in Winter 2001 as a special issue of Manoa magazine.
His novel The City Son was published by Soho Press in 2014. It has been shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award.
He is the Martha C Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University.
Use the links below to visit the website of North American-Nepali writer SAMRAT UPADHYAY and read an interview with him conducted by CAROL POLSGROVE:
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