Chapter Three

A Mother with "tired blistered nipples": Sunetra Gupta's Calcutta in Memories of

Rain and Other Novels.
In The Glassblower's Breath (1993), Sunetra Gupta's second novel, the rather eccentric

father suggests an antidote to his young daughter - the enigmatic protagonist "you" - in
order to overcome her loneliness in England in the first few months after she voyages
away from her home, Calcutta:
You sat at the sill and wrote stories in a beautiful white exercise book, and sucked
endless lollipops, a story in English and a story in Bengali, on alternate days, that
was what your father had dictated, he had suggested that you write the English
stories in the front half, and to write the Bengali stories, to simply invert the
exercise book, and write from the back, and somewhere they would meet. (61)
This unabashed bilingual exercise, scripted from the two ends of the book, is metonymic
of a snug ease of the author with travel across multiple registers - whether they be
linguistic, cultural or geographical. At home with the world, it has none of the traumatic
undertones of exile and forced dispersal associated with the Judeo-Hebraic origins of the
word "diaspora." 1
Incidentally, Sunetra Gupta has declared this fictional father of The Glassblower's
Breath to be inspired by her own father whom she deeply admires: "The other key
character is you's father who is very much like my own."2 And she herself does not hold
very different ideas when it comes to travel and negotiating across cultures and
geographies. As she says in an interview:

The Oxford Dictionary of English (OED) traces the origin of the word "diaspora" to Greek "diaspeirein"
meaning "disperse" or "be scattered." The term was used in the Septuagint (Deuteronomy 28:25) in the
sentence "ese diaspora en pasais basileis tes ges" which, when translated into English, roughly means
"thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth." This is said to the Jews and till today, the
primary meaning of"diaspora," as cited in OED, is "the dispersion of the Jews beyond Israel." As Robin
Cohen says, with reference to the Jewish people diaspora signified "a collective trauma, a banishment,
where one dreamed of home but lived in exile." (Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1997. x); see also Lazarus, Neil. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial
Lierature. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. 254-55.
Gupta, Sunetra. "The Glassblower's Breath." Homepage. 25 May 2009. <http:/www.sunetragupta.com/
novels.asp/The Glassblower's Breath.htm>.

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I think one has to be comfortable with the notion that one has one's cultural
identity and that one doesn't necessarily have to be at "home," so to speak. But
having had that cultural identity, or whatever else it is that is established for you,
wherever you are rooted, whatever you are rooted in ... I think we have to accept
that we are going to be perpetually wandering . . . That's the kind of crisis that
we're in now, that we're forced to be in a state ofperpetual wandering. I mean we
can't be at home. Even if we sit at home, we are forced to travel, just because of

what is going on around us. 3

And Gupta, an accomplished novelist, essayist and scientist, has been wandering with
skill and poise, whether it be across languages, disciplines, continents or genres. Born in
Calcutta on 15 March 1965 to Dhruba Gupta, a professor of African History at the
University of Calcutta, and Minati Gupta, a schoolteacher, Gupta spent much of her
childhood in places such as Ethiopia, Zambia, Liberia, England- wherever her father's
contractual teaching jobs took the family. When she was eleven, her family returned to
Calcutta, a city that continues to inspire her writing. Gupta believes that Calcutta
prepared her for a life elsewhere by attuning her to the ironies of the human condition,
and equipping her with the emotional and intellectual means to deal with them.4
Gupta's childhood and her family's peripatetic lifestyle had a great impact on her
ability to travel at ease: "My father, Dhruba Gupta (1934-2004), was an extremely important
figure in my life. He had a profmmd influence on every aspect of my thinking . . . He
inculcated within me the spirit of being able to move between the areas of art and science
with ease. He didn't find it at all interesting that I was a scientist, but he made it seem natural
and easy for me to be a scientist and also to write :fiction."5 Through her father's influence,

Gupta qtd. in Williams, Bronwyn T. "A State of Perpetual Wandering: Diaspora and Black British
Writers."
Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3.8 (1999). Italics mine. A vail able at
<http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i3/con33.htm>.
"I acquired a moral framework which reconciled my privilege, unremarkable as it was, with the poverty
that surrounded me. I realised I could be forgiven for not perceiving the true depth of a mother's despair
when she cannot feed her children, for such a nightmare is inconceivable until it actually happens to
you. In negotiating a space to inhabit alongside poverty without being overwhelmed by it, we were
forced to put human suffering in its context, and define the limits of our responsibilities." Gupta says in
her memoir, written as Introduction to Calcutta. By Benoit Lange. Home Page. 15 Apr 2009.
<http://www .sunetragupta.com/essays3 .asp>.
Gupta. Homepage. 25 May 2009. <http/sunetragupta.com/biography.htm>.

110

Gupta developed a deep appreciation for literature and poetry. He introduced her to the work
ofRabindranath Tagore. Tagore-songs were sung daily in her home by her father who was an
accomplished singer. That Tagore had a profound influence on her is evident in her writings,
more visibly in her debut novel, Memories of Rain (1992): "Memories ofRain is very clearly
for me a celebration of my culture, and is recklessly adorned with my own personal
translations of a number of Tagore songs that are central to my sensibilities."6 For Gupta,
Tagore's philosophy which she believes to be loaded with very cogent ideas about education,
and politics grounded in rationalism had as much of an impact as his exquisite poetry and
often quite experimental prose. 7 This initial interest in Tagore eventually widened into an
exploration of Bengali culture itself as she had experienced it.
A Reader in the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the Department of
Zoology, Oxford University, Sunetra Gupta has bridged writing and research effectively.
As a teenager in Calcutta, she started by writing science fiction in Bengali and Adrish
Bardhan, the editor of a local science-fiction journal Fantastic, encouraged her as a child
prodigy. Only after she went to study Biology at Princeton University did Gupta switch
from writing in her mother tongue to English. In 1987 Gupta graduated from Princeton
University and moved to London to pursue her doctoral studies at Imperial College,
University of London. While undertaking her research, she ventured into fiction-writing
and Memories of Rain was published the year that she received her Ph.D. degree. 8 In her
debut novel, as occasionally in her others, she effortlessly intersperses prose with poetry,
proving herself to be a creative translator ofTagore's songs and poems.
Hybridity/multiplicity, then, is not for Gupta a fashionable arrival in the
postcolonial bandwagon; it defines an inevitable condition of her creativity and existence.
Unlike many other diasporic subcontinental writers in English, she does not unduly flaunt
her hyphenated background or view it as an automatic license for exotic attention. An
equal adept in both cultures - those of Calcutta and Oxford - she is too much of an

7
8

Gupta. "Memories ofRain." Homepage. 25 May 2009. <http://www.sunetragupta!Memories ofRain.asp>.

Ibid.
Mandai, Somdatta. "Sunetra Gupta." South Asian Writers in English. Ed. Fakrul Alam. Farmington Hills,
MI: Thomson Gale, 2006. 164-169. 165.

Ill

insider in middle-class Bengal to claim it as the rather romantic "imaginary homeland." 9

Her engagement with the culture back home is too intense and prolonged to be benignly
parodied in abrupt anthropological detail, as is the trend with second-generation
immigrants and many NRis writing in English. As to where her home lies, she does not
suffer any postcolonial confusion: "As far as where home is or where I come from, to me
that is securely Bengal. My roots in the Bengali culture are very deep, my father having
been very connected with it . . . Since then I have lived in places that are not home and
continue to live and probably will spend the rest oflife in a place that's not where I come
from. But that doesn't pose any problems for me. 10 Thus, securely rooted in Bengal, she
hardly suffers any diasporic angst in teaching at Oxford and possibly knowing that she
would not "return" home. As she says, like Daniel Touchett in Henry James's The
Portrait of a Lady, she has found it "so soluble a problem to live in England assimilated
yet unconverted" that the readers who come to her novels looking for the anxiety of
displacement often turn away disappointed:
Although I have lived in England now for over fifteen years, and perhaps will
spend the rest of my life here, I cannot but see myself in this country as a visitor
from Calcutta - a self imposed status with which I am thoroughly comfortable ...
And why is it, I sometimes wonder, that I am rarely traditionally 'homesick',
although of course - like anybody- I indulge in a degree of nostalgia regarding
my past. ... Perhaps it is because I have never tried to 'belong' in England that I
retain, by default, a sense of belonging to Calcutta. 11
Sunetra Gupta thus remains a rather reluctant member in the aggressively publicised coterie
of Indian Writing in English. She does not share its anthropological obsession over the
nostalgic re-creation of home, nor does she celebrate the mongrel crisis about identity.
Indeed she remains skeptical about the twin much-hyped postcolonial categories - diaspora
and IWE. As she comments in an interview with Ranjan Ghosh and Christiane Schotte:

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta, 1991. 11.

Gupta, Sunetra. "The Elements of Style." Interview with Kim Nagy. 20 May 2009. <http://www.
sunetragupta.com/reviews and interviews. asp>.
11
Gupta. Introduction to Calcutta. op. cit ..

10

112

I think there is quite a bit of writing that does exploit the current market which I
liken to the big travel market that we have now ... And I think there's a market
for exotica in literature which has been exploited ... It's important to myself that I
am Indian but is it important to say I'm an Indian writer writing in English? ... I'm
just disconnected from the tradition, if you can call it that, of current Indian
writing in English . . . I think by definition I am part of the diaspora. What
distinguishes me perhaps from some of the debates and discourses in the diaspora
is that it is not a source of any discomfort to me, by any means ... I do feel like a
foreigner in this country. But !like it.

12

In other words, Gupta does not equate the diaspora with the victim mode, 13 nor does she
belong to the matrix of subcontinental English writing which is eager to serve its readers
facile tidbits of India in the name of :fiction. 14 Her interpretation of diaspora is along the
more nuanced moral and emotional axes rather than the anxiety of mere physical dislocation.
A critical survey of her oeuvre will help us engage with her stance on this issue.
Steeped in Bengali culture, Memories of Rain (1992) is a sad yet tender recreation of Calcutta and its intellectual youth of the 1960s and 1970s. For Gupta, writing
this novel was like touching "a part of yourself' as she said to the anonymous rediff.com
interviewer in 1996Y It renders Gupta's looking back at a city and culture to which she
has intensely belonged, a gesture that apparently undercuts her present politics of
indifference to the exoticisation ofhomeland which, according to her, characterises much
of contemporary Indian writing in English. But, as she confesses, the temptation of
(authentic) representation of her culture to a foreign audience was initially too great to
resist: "I think I ain lucky in not feeling that I need to write for a particular audience. I've
no interest in writing for a particular audience, especially now. Maybe at first I was a
12

Gupta, Sunetra. " ... nobody likes to be bracketed." Interview with Ranjan Ghosh and Christiane Schott e.
Critical Practice. 7.2 (2004): 117-124. Italics mine.
13
In a 2004 Interview she says, ''That is a painful condition. Obviously, I relate to that in some ways ... But
in my personal case it really doesn't apply. I don't have any problems with not living in Calcutta
anymore. Many of us don't live where we grew up. I'm certainly not victimized." For detail see ibid.l22.
14
In her interview with rediff.com in 1996 Gupta says, "A readership is being created by offering them
exotic tid-bits to titillate them ... but I'm not concerned whether a foreigner understands the nuances of
the reality I'm presenting in my book." {"A Readership Is Being Created by Offering Them Exotic Tidbits to Titillate Them." 10 Oct 2005. <http://www.rediff.com/news/Feb/21 women.htm>)
15
Qtd. in Mandai. op. cit. 165.

113

little bit interested in conveying my ideas and thoughts about Calcutta to a Western
audience ... But now it's completely irrelevant to the process of writing." 16

In her first novel, Gupta brings together two youngsters, Anthony and Moni, from
disparate worlds in a Calcutta rainstorm in 1978. Anthony is English who has come to
Calcutta in order to research on Bengali theatre. He is intelligent, artistic, assured and
hopelessly promiscuous. Moni is an undergraduate student of English for whom England
is a collage of the romantic imagery of her textbooks. This bright and young Bengali
woman has led a sheltered life, is steeped in traditional cultural protocol, sensitive to
taboos and fond of Jane Austen and the songs of Tagore. She finds herself both repelled
and fascinated by this classmate of her brother, a visitor from across the seven seas, the
Europe of her fevered and literary imagination. They fall in love, apprehending
unconsummated passion and years of unsatisfying, sorrowful memories; instead, they are
able to marry and make their home in London. A fairy-tale, especially so in the Bengali
fantasy, comes true but only to meet a sordid end. The intense but silent Moni meets
disappointment once she arrives in cold London. Caught in the clash of two cultures, their
marriage becomes mired in the pain of infidelity and non-communication. She encounters
prejudices, sexism and betrayal by the husband who had seemed so captivated by her
beauty and virginal purity. His blatant disrespect for her shocks her. Her emotions are
accentuated by the gray British weather, the drab buildings and the bewildering pace of
life in a new country. The fecund warm beauty and tender squalor of faraway home are
contrasted with the bleak circumstances in which Moni now finds herself. When Anthony
begins to stray -even when his mistress become practically a member of the household Moni believes his divided heart will accommodate her, but she cannot bear the hurt when
his manner changes to kindness and indifference. The main action of the novel takes
place during a single weekend, when Moni, despondent over Anthony's infidelity,
secretly plans to take their child and return to Kolkata on their daughter's birthday.
Tension builds as she weighs the consequences and finally makes her decision.
An unmistakable Bengaliness pervades this novel, especially the expression of

Moni's anguished passion and "dark" thoughts, articulated through Tagore's songs.
16

Ibid. 165.

114

Unlike her author, Moni feels stunted and trapped in the sterile sophistication of London
away from home; her geographical displacement becomes metonymic of her emotional
and moral suffering. In her, Gupta captures the angst and desolation of diaspora (though
it majorly stems from the estrangement from her husband) contradictory to her personal
theory of cosy travel: "I did not mean to diminish the true dilemma, anxiety and agony of
those who are trapped here within a foreign culture and don't know how to negotiate it.
That is something that impacts on me, and I think, my first novel, to some extent, did
address the issue of somebody who was confined in that way or transplanted. 17 Memories
of Rain, which so contests Gupta's personal views regarding representation and diaspora,
won her the prestigious Indian literary award, the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1996,
possibly because of its nostalgic engagement and even translation of the middle-class
Bengali culture of the 1970s.
Considering that the narrative depicts Moni's "imaginave flights back to the mental
geography of an irretrievable house demolished in Kolkata," 18 it becomes a variation on the
same theme testifying to the continuing relevance in the Bengali diasporic writings of the
"marriage, migration and identity'' paradigm. 19 However, whilst Moni's spirited return
home to Calcutta with her iliixed race daughter suggests a form of resolution and agency,
the novel is less concerned with gender politics or the social issues suggested by Moni's
physical displacement, than with the imaginative sustenance provided by the reworking of
her memories interwoven as they are with the legendary and mythical stories of her
cosmopolitan Bengali past. Moni, unlike Gupta's later Bengali protagonist in The
Glassblower's Breath, is not able to break her umbilical relationship with the past, and
whilst she creates an intensely inward version of home narrated in a stream of consciousness
voice which pervades the emotional realities of all her worlds, her return is portrayed as the
inevitable consequence of her emotional exile, a particular way of reading and seeing the
world.

20

The Washington Post describes Gupta's debut as a contribution to the literature of

17

Gupta. "Memories ofRain." Home Page. op.cit.

Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. New York: Palgrave,
2002.235
19
Vijayasree, C. "Survival as an Ethic: South Asian Immigrant Women's Writing." In Diaspora: Theories,
Histories, Texts. Ed. Paranjape. New Delhi: Indialog, 2001. 130-40. 134.
20
Ibid. 226-27.
18

115

displacement, an elegiac rendering of the cultural loss that emigration entails? The writing
in Memories of Rain is complex, fusing stream of sensuous poetic imagery with streams of
consciousness. A powerful delivery of interior monologue, figurative language, and
continuous time-shifts invites the novelist's comparison with Virginia Woolf.
Memories of Rain, however, in its lyrical evocation of Calcutta and its haunting
memories, its warped chronology alternating flashbacks and fantasy with the present, its
paragraph-stretched sentences conjoined by commas and overflowing grammatical halts,
was a less experimental venture than her next fiction, The Glassblower's Breath (1993)
where Gupta moves closer to her theorising about home and diaspora, exemplified by the
novel's transnational characters seeking the healing-space of home in the very condition
of being unhoused. As she suggests in an interview: "Well, I was quite keen to live here,
again because I considered London to be an international city ... The truth is I don't live
in England in a way. That's just how it is. That's what I have chosen to do is create a

space that is somewhat outside ofbeing anywhere."22

The characters in The Glassblower's Breath (1993) appear to defy any sense of
geographical or even emotional belonging. The plot details a single day in the lives of a
butcher, abaker and a candle-maker and the unnamed woman - referred to as "you"whom all the three men love. All these principal characters happen to be in London that
day. One of them is a man called Jonathan Sparrow, her college friend, with whom she
. has an extraordinary intellectual affinity. She loves him very deeply, more than anyone
else in the book. As the novel begins Jonathan Sparrow is due to leave London where he
has been visiting you. She takes him to Heathrow, but he decides he can't bear to fly to
New York. Without her knowledge he returns to Central London. Sparrow happens to be
a candle maker and the other two men happen to be a butcher and a baker. The baker is
Bengali and has been living in England for a long time; he has submitted to an arranged
marriage but is completely in love with you. He observes her as she emerges from a
bookshop with the butcher and follows them for the rest of the day as they (you and the
butcher) seek a place to make love. The butcher, who is from South London, is on a day

21
22

"Reviews." Home Page. 11 Apr. 2008. <http://www.sunetragupta.com/reviews.asp>.

See Williams, Bronwyn T. op.cit. Italics mine.

116

out with his six year old son. You feels an overwhelming physical attraction towards him,
so much so that she forgets everything she is supposed to do that day. Eventually they
converge upon the Kensington town house where you lives with her wealthy half Iranian,
half English husband and her orphaned niece, who has recently arrived from Calcutta.
The protagonist of this novel is a young Bengali woman in search of ideal love
and companionship, and the novel depicts her relationships with a variety of people and
places. Though settings shift between London, Calcutta, Paris and New York, none of
these cities can be considered the true home of any of the characters. Like true
postcolonial migrants, the characters themselves, thoughborriin one ofthese Cities or
somewhere else, wander through these urban settings, living in each one at some time or
the other and yet always detached from them. The landscapes of these four great cities,
full of urban menace, thus form an almost surreal backdrop for this unsettling tale of an
intelligent woman who struggles but fails to conform to society's blueprints for marriage,
family and friendships.
The heroine of The Glassblower's Breath is thus caught between her own almost
limitless capacity for experience - emotional, intellectual and sexual - and the desire of
the men in her life to capture and define her. In spite of her education, freedom, social
position and the privileges she enjoys, she is condemned to repeat her gendered functions
as daughter, wife or lover. She becomes the quintessential Indian woman, experiencing
emotional and intellectual deprivation. This is also evident in the way her voice has been
usurped by the omniscient narrator who decides her life for her, forms her and fmally
destroys her.
The Glassblower's Breath has something of the quality of myth; her narrator, like
T. S. Eliot's Tiresias, floats freely through every character's mind. Moreover, here, as in
Gupta's other works, even the quotidian gets imbued with a melancholic mysticism. The
protagonist does not have a name and is addressed throughout by the second person
pronoun "you," maybe because, her identity can never be fully grasped. As in a house full
of mirrors, her image is viewed through different perspectives, none of which is
satisfactory or permanent. All the dislocations of life are articulated in this novel by
multiple male narrators who trace the adventure of the female protagonist; the reader has

117

to reconstruct her personality by stitching together these shards of narration. The

possibility of authentic knowledge about the self is lost, as lost as the possibility of
returning home.
The Glassblower's Breath, as I have already indicated, has a more unconventional
style than Memories of Rain: the second-person narration, 23 multiple perspectives about
the protagonist, re-vision of the idyllic notion of home and a greater relish for the absurd.
Many of the events in this book border on the surreal, such as Jonathan Sparrow's
encounter with an eccentric aesthete who believes he has arrived to assist him in
preparing a full alphabetical dinner. The novel mocks expectations nurtUred b)' Memories
of Rain - expectations of branding Gupta as the next icon of multiculturalism and
nostalgic pain among the subcontinental diasporic writers:
This book puzzled those who thought that I was their master of multiculturalism.
It dawned on them that the "adriftness" they were seeking in my book was in fact

an "adriftness" of the mind, rather than exile from culture and country. I like to
think that all my novels are anchored in individual politics, day to day politics.
People look to make acquaintances with new cultures in novels sometimes, or
they say - I like this book because it's an interesting issue. That is certainly not
why or what I write. I try to locate myself outside issues, but not outside
politics?4
The accent on individual politics and mental adriftness - which was explored
through the lens of nostalgia and diaspora in her first two novels - becomes conspicuous
in her characteristically lyrical third novel Moonlight into Marzipan (1995); This is a
story of marriage and betrayal: Promothesh and Esha, dreamy young scientists who were
classmates at Calcutta University, find their relationship changing after marriage. In
keeping with traditional cultural expectations, she turns into a dedicated and submissive
23

The referent of you, the unnamed female protagonist, remains constant throughout the text, whereas the
focalisation changes constantly, either rendering the you-protagonist's point-of-view or the perspectives
of the four men enamoured of her. There are also sections of 'ordinary' third-person narrative with
internal focalisation on Rima, the niece. See Fludernik, Monika. "Colonial vs. Cosmopolitan Hybridity:
A Comparison of Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan with Recent British and North American Expatriate
Writing (Singh-Baldwin, Divakaruni, Sunetra Gupta)." Hybridity and Post colonialism: Twentieth
Century Indian Literature. Ed. Fludernik. Tubingen, Germany: Stauffenburg, 1998. 261-90. 279.
24
Gupta. "The Glassblower's Breath." Homepage. op.cit.

118

wife. Promothesh collapses under her dedication and feels incapable of living up to her
grand expectations. Promothesh conducts his scientific research in their Calcutta garageturned-laboratory and slips into celebrity status when a chance experiment "turns grass
into gold." The childless couple had unintentionally poached into the Promethean realm
of the forbidden as they had dared tinker with the sacred secret of life and creation.
Proceeding to England for further scientific investigations, Promothesh initiates the
breakup of their relationship.
The title of this novel once again reveals Gupta's liking for poetic and at times
oblique titles for her work; the title here refers to the process of photos)'llthesis -the
means by which light is parcelled into usable energy by plants. Promothesh makes an
accidental discovery about this fundamental process which promises fame and riches.
Instead, it triggers a chain of events that begins with his arrival in London accompanied
by his wife and ends with Promothesh's infidelity and Esha's suicide. Esha's death left
Promothesh marooned and confused. His astonishing discovery too is forgotten in the
process. Into this morass of ambition and self-pity slip love in the form of his biographer
Alexandra Vorobyova and the devil himself, in the form of Yuri Sen, also a Bengali
researcher. Yuri Sen subverts the narrative by using italics and telling readers that
Promothesh is incapable of writing to them. The blasphemous dream of creating paradise on
earth and of articulating the secret oflife turns into an interminable experience of hell. 25
Moonlight into Marzipan has no reliable narrator; and from the opening pages, the
reader has to struggle in order to locate the central characters and identifY the
perspectives from which they are viewed. When Alexandra goes away and abandons the
text, Promothesh is left only with shreds of his life scribbled down in notes - the results
of his long conversation and confessions with the dismissive narrator. The novel takes the
form of a dialogue between Promothesh and the absent narrator, playing with the
ambiguity and confusion between the subject and the object of narration. Personal
pronouns "I" and "you" are peppered into the text in the attempt to reconstruct the
trajectory of Promothesh's life, a project that remains unfulfilled in the text. There are

25

See Ponzanesi, Sandra. "Voyage to Hell: Sunetra Gupta's Moonlight into Marzipan." Wasafrri 26
(Autumn 1997): 73-75.

119

constant shifts backward and forward in time and space, leaving the task of re-assembling
the fragments of various overlapping and incomplete texts to the reader. in Moonlight
into Marzipan too, as in the previous novel The Glassblower's Breath, characters are not
representatives of a particular space or culture, but of human vulnerability, estrangement
and appropriation of narration which cut across geographical boundaries and
anthropological curiosity. The initial self-consciousness and the desire to present Bengal
are now over. As she tells in a 1996 interview: "My work is more 'free' now." 26
Gupta's fourth novel, A Sin of Colour published in 1999, recipient of the 2000
Southern Arts Literature Award and shortlisted for the Crossword Award, is about the
choices made by its two main protagonists, Debendranath Roy and his niece Niharika,
when both are in the last phase of youth, during two different time periods. The narrative
sprawls across Oxford and the United States, Calcutta and the rural Bengal, but most of
the action takes place in Oxford and Calcutta, the twin geographies close to Gupta. Both
characters are victims of unrequited love (Debendranath Roy with Reba, an artiste,
musician and actress, a woman married to his brother; the brilliant and imaginative
Niharika with Daniel Faraday, married, and the last man to have seen Debendranath
alive) which colours their lives profoundly, eventually leading them to their sins. 27
Through seven sections named after seven colours, starting with "Amethyst" and
then moving through "indigo," "Azure," "Jade," "Saffron," "Ochre" and "Crimson",
Gupta tells the story of three generations of a house in Calcutta called Mandalay. Built by
a British officer, it passes into the hands of the wealthy Roy family. To this house
Debendranath's father brings his clever but distant bride and many years later,
Debendranath's brother brlligs his own wife- the woman with whom Debendranath is
fated to fall in love. independence and partition rob the family of much of its fortune and
Debendranath flees the house, his family and his hopeless love to find a new life in
Oxford where he eventually marries an English woman whom he largely neglects.

26
27

Gupta. Interview to rediff.com. op.cit.

As the author says, "The sins in the novel - and there are many - are all fuelled by obsessional love or
infatuation." See "A Sin of Colour." Homepage. < http://www.sunetragupta.com/asinofcolour.asp>.

120

The multiple sins, each associated with a colour, are all fuelled by obsessional
love and concern the one sin that forms the basis of this book - Debendranath' s
retirement from this world, his ultimate withdrawal from the clutches of relationships and
escape from the demands that are foisted on an individual by society. His desire for a life
uncluttered by lies by running away from all ties makes the story take a curious turn
when a man in his late thirties is last seen entering a punt on the Cherwell in Oxford.
When he can no longer be traced, Debendranath Roy is presumed drowned. He leaves
behind a pale and languishing widow in Oxford and a mystery that takes twenty years to
unfold. It turns out that Debendranath had fled back to India where he had lived
incognito; his growing blindness drives him back to the family and to his writer-niece
Niharika, who is almost the only family member living in Mandalay.
The thinness of the plot, evident from the above summary of A Sin of Colour is
also noticeable in Gupta's first novel Memories of Rain, but in both these novels this
thinness is brilliantly obscured by Gupta's virtuosity with literary language. Again, this
novel, too, eludes chronology or the expectations from a linear story; the narrative
unfolds like a conversation -picking one thread and jumping back and forth into the past
- with repetitions becoming an inviting story-telling tool.
A crucial difference between Gupta and many Indian writers in English is that she
is not a full-time author. Like her protagonist Niharika, she is both writer and researcher.
Professionally an academic, Gupta is in a position to unabashedly defy the pressures from
the market and flaunt the freedom to write purely at her will and rhythm and according to
her ideals and ethics. It is not surprising therefore that she comes up with her fifth novel,
So Good in Black (2009) after almost a decade of absence. Here too the characters are
transnational and the geographies fluid. Max Gate, an American travel-writer and his
once beloved friend Byron Mallick, a charming and refined Bengali businessman, meet
again in extraordinary circumstances on the shores of Bengal. It is the eve of transit of
Venus in 2004 - a day astrologically associated with transformation of consciousness.
Byron is facing charges of murdering a crusading journalist Damini whose cousin Ela
haunts Max years after their affair has ended. Ela is caught between her deep attachment
to Byron, her loyalty to her husband and her desperate love for Max. Meanwhile Max's

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former brother-in-law, Piers O'Reilly, is determined to bring Byron to justice. As the

intricately layered tale unfolds, all certitudes about love, friendship and morality dissolve
into tantalising ambiguity, defying easy resolution. As a critic says, "Sunetra Gupta's
latest novel So Good in Black is a richly layered narrative of moral and emotional
dislocation across time and space, which dissolves all notions of static truths."28 In the
end, as many of the central characters orbit around the enigmatic Byron Mallick, only the
redemptive power of memory seems able to heal the scars ofloss and betrayal.
Memory, then, becomes a vital player in many of her novels, be it Memories of
Rain, Moonlight into Marzipan or So Good in Black. Giving it the centre stage, however,
could demand an experimental narrative technique, since memory - a highly subjective
and elastic category blending fantasy with the past - keeps intervening in the linear flow
of the plot. This is particularly so in the novels of Sunetra Gupta in which thin plots are
resolved by or revolve around momentous events like deaths, disappearances, drowning
and suicides. She defies the need of a story in order to weave a fiction: "The notion that a
good story is crucial to good fiction seems very confining, as if there is a quality control
checklist on commodities that works of art must meet."29
Her fiction features multiple registers and perspectives of myriad characters: her
stream-of-consciousness technique transforms language and punctuation marks from
normative linguistic symbols into poignant emotional tools. By exploring the limits of
ambiguity in language, she has evolved a personal literary idiom in which prose is pushed
into a territory formerly accessible only to poetry: "There is not enough of a space
between poetry and prose and what I do. The novel swallows everything I do." 30 The
author discourses on her style and attitude to language and punctuation in several
interviews and essays, as well as in a debate between two of her erudite characters,
Jonathan Sparrow and "you," in The Glassblower's Breath.
Gupta's sentence construction deviates from the classical grammatical sentence in
English. Her long sentences, some going on for almost a page, are filled with adjectives,
28

Gupta, Sunetra. "Of Lost Moorings." Interview with Chitra Padmanabhan. The Hindu Online 5 Apr
2009.20 May 2009. < http://www.thehindu.com/mag/2009/04/05/stories/2009040550030200.htm>,
29
lbid.
30
Gupta. Interview with Kim Nagy. op.cit

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descriptions and double metaphors, and they meander through different thought
processes, coming to a halt abruptly when she seems to have run out of breath. The
dialogues are all without quotes and blend into the general narrative. Examples abound in
Memories of Rain. Unlike the protagonist Moni in this novel who is a cautious, even
reverent, user of the coloniser' s tongue, Gupta forges her own variant of English as a
signifier of power. As she comments in her essay "Avoiding Ambiguity'': "in several
post-imperialist cultures ... its very flexibility sometimes permits English to escape the
fate of oppressor's language by mutating into a poetic hybrid, as in some examples of
post-colonial literature."31 Her English reads like a translation of stylised, even poetic
Bengali, in a perhaps unconscious continuum with many other Indian writers in English.
Gupta justifies the poetic meandering of language and stylistic innovation by vouching
for ambiguity in literature, a passion she shares with Sparrow:
In literature, it is often ambiguity itself that enriches our understanding of the
human condition.... Much of the potential energy of literature lies unlocked in
the gap between word and referent. This plasticity of meaning is still exploited
quite explicitly in poetry ... Prose, however, appears these days to come under a
different jurisdiction. I was happily not aware of this when I sat down, more than
fifteen years ago to write my first novel - Memories of Rain. I had no
preconceived desire to play with words or sentence-structure, but what emerged
was English that was largely devoid of fullstops, and where clauses often
belonged to both its flanking sides ...
My reaction to punctuation

IS

truly visceral. I physically abhor the

repeated use of the full-stop. There is something too final about the full-stop - I
am happy to use it judiciously, but mostly I rely on commas to separate
interlinked ideas. Conversely, sometimes, the finality of a full-stop is not enough,
and I need to employ paragraphs or even blank lines or a row of asterisks to create
the correct pause between sections of prose. It is natural that a writer's
relationship with his punctuation should be emotional. 32

31

32

Gupta, Sunetra. "Avoiding Ambiguity." 13 Apr. 2009. <http://www.sunetragupta.com/essays2.asp>.

Gupta. "Essays: lecture delivered in Melbourne in 2005." 13 Apr. 2009.
<http://www. sunetragupta.com/essays/the relation between language and thought.htm>. Italics mine.

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Gupta dislikes the traditional precise sentence with its unambiguity and precision: the
sentence, as she maintains in "Avoiding Ambiguity," evolved from the needs of logic and
law, but these are not the priorities in fashioning her style. She culls canonical support for
emotional revisionls of the conventional usage of punctuation and the sentence:
I am writing a book on contrasting narratives in literature and science, gathering
examples of visceral responses to punctuation. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra says the
semicolon A.K. Ramanujan uses in his sentence acts as an osmotic membrane
between the two languages and realities he inhabits.... As for my writing,
reaching a point in a sentence which would naturally beg a full stop I would feel
reluctant, thinking of a comma or dash.
It's about fmding a style consistent with how I am feeling. When writing
something, I see it as having its own cadence, form, and try and recruit
punctuation to create, re-create that. 33
Gupta however insists that she has never consciously adopted a particular style,
and it was never part of her project to reject conventional grammar. Importantly, her
reluctance to use full stops has to do, among other things, with her Bengali sensibility, as
she explains: "Because in Bengali a full stop is represented by a vertical line and that has
a more organic relationship with the rest of the letters. In English, this bullet thing is
intrusive to my own construction."34
In fact, Bengaliness in Gupta's writing is not a carefully constructed identity that

finds reassurance in difference with others but rather a function of her poetic self that is
formed out of diverse, often contradictory, influences deriving from place, history and
culture. The many references to monsoons and her evocative suggestions of the appeal of
the long wet months are also indications of her distinct style.
Gupta's style, as I have discussed above- especially her stream of consciousness
technique, textual experiments regarding punctuation and sentence-construction and her
female protagonists- has earned her repeated comparisons with Virginia Woolf. Gupta

33
34

Gupta. Interview with Chitra Padmanabhan. op.cit

Gupta. Interview with Kim Nagy. op.cit

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herself cites the canon - though of Indian poetry in English - in order to justify her
linguistic innovations. Woolf is not the only canonical shadow lurking through Memories
of Rain; the novel is rather full of intertexts - cinematic and literary- jostling with each
other.
The canonical link thus runs deeper. There are at least two classic texts used as
metaphor or pre-texts to this novel. One of them has been openly acknowledged - it is a
contemporary revision in the Irish context of the Greek tragedy, Euripides' Medea:
The starting point for Memories of Rain was a production I saw of Medea,
translated by Brendan Kennelly. I'd always wanted to write about a quiet,
intelligent and extremely dignified Bengali woman - a kind of womanhood
almost prescribed as an ideal by Tagore, and something I had aspired to myself
once- who comes to live in this country as someone's wife rather than on her
own terms. Watching Medea, I was moved by her dependence on Jason, and
particularly how he defined this dependence as being beneficial not just to him
but also to her. Eventually, it widened into an exploration of the Bengali culture
itself as I had experienced it ... 35
The other has only been subtly owned. It is a classic Bengali text, Maitreyi Devi's Na
Hanyate about a young Bengali woman who has moulded herself according to Tagore's
ideals of womanhood, idolises the poet and has a tumultuous but tragic love-affair with a
white student of her father, Mircea Eliade.
Memories of Rain is an elegy for Bengali culture and for the genre of romance.
Apparently it is about a middle-class Bengali romantic dream come true - a young
sensitive girl married to and carried off across the seven seas by the white prince of her
dreams. The novel is a rather anti-romantic sequel to the last line of this fairy-tale- "And
they lived happily ever after." The favourite fantasy translated into reality spells trauma
for the girl, since the prince neither cares for nor respects her; the medieval genre of
romance and its myth of true love become a weird joke in the context of Moni and her
promiscuous husband. In this, it has quite a few connections with Medea, the play which
35

Gupta. "Memories ofRain." Homepage. op.cit.

125

engages with the end of the romance between Jason, the Greek and hence "civilized"
hero of the quest in the ship Argo, and Medea, enchantress and princess of the exotic
Colchians. She deceives her father, murders her brother and abandons her homeland in
order to fulfill Jason's quest and flees with him over the seas. She gives up all and
expects in return a perfect love. Jason is however too shrewd to fit in the role of the ideal
lover. His first love is power and fame, and when Creon the king of Corinth offers his
only daughter and kingdom to the exiled Jason, he does not refuse. The untamed Medea
has by that time become an embarrassing burden and she and her two sons are
condemned to exile by Creon, not much to the chagrin of Jason. Medea's love and
suffering, poisoned to intense hatred for Jason, prompt her to plan extreme revenge: she
kills both Creon and his d~ughter and her own children, in order to relish Jason's pain. 36
What unites Medea and Moni in the first place is their fragile position as an ambiguous
foreigner, with their homelands abandoned/betrayed. Anthony's friends voice his benign
chauvinism and superiority in assuming that he has transported her from the barbaric East
to the enlightened West: "For she had come to this island, this demi-paradise, from a
bizarre and wonderful land, so Anthony's friends called it, was it true, they asked, that
they still burn their wives, bury alive their female children?" (Memories 6) This is not
very far from Jason's proud declaration: "A good Greek land hath been!fhy lasting
home, not barbary. Thou hast seen I Our ordered life and justice ... "(Medea ll. 537-39).
Both Moni and Medea- wronged women trapped in a foreign land- have crossed
the threshold. Both are, to quote the epithet given by the chorus in Euripides' play,
"woman without a city'' (1. 650). And both eastern dreamers bitterly repent their
hoinelessness- Medea with her furious words, Moni with her equally articulate silence:
But I, being citiless, am cast aside
By him that wedded me, a savage bride
Won in far seas and left-no mother near,
No brother, not one kinsman anywhere
For harbour in this storm. (Medea ll. 256-260)
36

I have here looked at the Greek play itself rather than the Irish translation/adaptation. The quotations are
from Euripides. "Medea." Collected Plays of Euripides. Trans. by Gilbert Murray. London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1954. 1-96.

126

Like Jason, whose first love was Argo and hence fame and power, Anthony's is
his success, creativity and analytical powers, which become a neat justification of his
adultery, since Anna finally seems to him intellectually adequate to gauge his thirst. His
"tropical lust" (Memories 84) fades in colder British climes. Finally, both texts are about
the unbearable sadness of dead love. Like Medea, Moni too contemplates killing the child
in order to relish his pain and gives her wedding-sari to Anna for wearing at her child's
birthday party, knowing very well that she is going to take the child back home with her.
She hopes Anna would suffer the child's absence and the "cruel gold threads of the
garment lent to her" (189}-:- aparallel to Medea's gift of the poisonous dress to the king's
daughter. And she wants to see her husband destroyed by grief, so much so that she
sacrifices the child in tearing her away from the "cocoon of peace" (160) of an indulgent
father and a privileged fatherland. This is quite similar and almost an equivalent to
Medea's murder of her child: "She feels no compassion for the sorrowful eyes from
which she is rushing away at a speed beyond that of thought . . . he will wander, a
defeated ghost, among the ruins of the surreal birthday party, like the skeleton of a play
he might have written" (Memories 193).
Canonical texts and historical and cultural icons echo in her other novels as wellMoonlight into Marzipan is inspired by Oedipus and The Great Gatsby, So Good in
Black by historical accounts of the trial of Warren Hastings and A Sin of Colour by
Rebecca and the whispered rumour of the incest between Rabindranath Tagore and his
sister-in-law. Not only does Memories of Rain explore the influence of Rabindranath
Tagore on the Bengali psyche, but it takes as prequel the text Na Hanyate, a more idyllic
version of some ofthe favourite Bengali obsessions- for example, the obsession with
adda, with the undebatable greatness ofTagore or with the old manic Anglophilia.

The addiction to adda or prolonged discursive sessions in the Bengali social life
of the 1920s and 30s is one of the themes ofNa Hanyate. Amrita's father's house is filled
with guests across cultures - a Russian magician couple, white professors and students,
eminent desi colleagues of her father like Prafulla Ghosh, famous editors of Bengali
magazines, the dancer Uday Shankar and Tagore himself. Discussions on philosophy and
politics as well as in the lighter vein were in plenty. Moni's generation inherits this adda-

127

culture; her brother belongs to an avant-garde theatre group whose members discuss
everything- from cinema and taboos to literature- in their ritual of intellectual adda.
There are some other obvious parallels between the two texts. The hypnotic
fascination for the white young guest is one. The kissing sequence in the library between
Mircea and Amrita - the moment when her virginal purity is explored by the desired
stranger- parallels the passionate kisses Anthony plants on Moni's frightened lips behind
the tank on the night of fire and thunder, the Kali puja festival. Mircea' s exoticisation of
the land and the woman can be compared to Anthony's unreal expectations of Kolkata
and Moni. Anthony imagines Moni's purity as his refuge from compulsive promiscuity
and deep unpeace, just as he thinks "that perhaps the answers to all his questions about
life and art lay concealed in the mired metropolis" (138). Moni becomes metonymic of
Kolkata. When she fails to live up to these unreal demands, Anthony quickly gets bored.
This immature, yet loaded, response is strikingly similar to Mircea's. Kolkata is
apparently his panacea, the city of his dreams. When old, he confesses to Amrita that he
had wanted to fantasise her as an enigma incarnate, as a Hindu goddess- Kali or Durgawhose actions were inexplicable. Both Moni and Amrita were thus finally fantasies in the
imaginings of their white husband/lover, who refuse to accept them as human beings.
Colonial imagery of the virgin lady/land continue to fester in a postcolonial context.
The pervasive presence of Tagore is yet another continuous leitmotif. For Amrita
located in the 1930s, Tagore is a living god, the ideal beloved to whom she dedicates her
poems, her suffering and her being and whose songs set the rhythm to her world.
Exasperated, Mircea asks, "Will that one man do everything for your race?" And Amrita
retorts in delight: "Yes, yes, that one man sprawls across our skies, shapes our language
and our thoughts, nurtures our love, it is because of him that stars bloom every night and
flowers wake each morning in the forests" (Na Hanyate 11 ). 37 Likewise, we see, decades
later, Moni still cannot fumble out of such ominous influence; she adapts Tagore's songs
to her unspeakable anguish and sorrow in cold England. She has completely personalised
the emotions implicit in his compositions and relied upon them for emotional sustenance.

37

Devi, Maitreyi. Na Hanyate. Kolkata: Dey's Publication, 1974. II. My translation.

128

Now, both Memories of Rain and Na Hanyate engage with image-clusters vital to
the life and ethos of the middle-class Kolkatan Bengali. However, while Na Hanyate
validates many of these habits and practices from a rather innocent and romantic
perspective, Memories of Rain broods over and challenges many of these cultural
axioms. For example, the broken relationship between Amrita and Mircea seems to throb
with the potential of fulfillment had it been given a chance. But the marriage of Anthony
and Moni scripts a tortured footnote to this fairytale.
If Medea and Na Hanyate are the two major co-texts of this novel, then
innumerable references to interte:X.ts in multiple languages are sprinkled.throughout. Both
Anthony and Moni are bibliophiles. Especially Moni's world, including the England of
her dream and her ideal lover, has been fashioned by books, her first love. Hers is a
highly literary imagination. Even Anna belongs to the artistic circle; her father had been a
minor poet. Moni had herself been employed in libraries, as an amateur assistant to
Gayatri at the library pf the small film institute with a diploma course run by a missionary
Father back in Calcutta and later in a public library in London. A glimpse at Moni's
bookshelf reveals an eclectic range of romantic texts in both English and Bengali.
Wuthering Heights has shaped her notion of doomed and passionate, though naively pure,
love: "Shehad loved Heathcliff before she loved any man ... she had convinced herself
amid the long shadows of a tropical summer evening that she would never be able to
leave any man that had loved her, that she had once loved ... " (177).
Her pains help her grow out of this adolescent dream. The canonical Great
Romantic poets, part of her curriculum, are among her favourites. Keats' sonnet "After
Dark Vapors have Oppressed Our Plains" (165) makes her discover a certain romantic
angle to her respiratory problems during her youth; she feels an elating kinship with this
slowly withering, iconic consumptive poet. Her sensibility, influenced greatly by the
canon of English literature as represented in the Calcutta University undergraduate
syllabus, learns to languish for surrender and death. John Keats is an oft-quoted poet in
this novel; his "Ode to Melancholy" frames the dark evening of her first encounter with
Anthony in monsoon-ravaged Calcutta. British texts have helped her map the sacred
geography of London, the imaginary homeland of many cultured Bengalis'

129

intellectualism and acquired literary taste. That is how Moni could visualise the "chalk
cliffs of Shakespeare's demi-paradise" (157) Wessex or Bristol where Rammohan Roy
lay buried, long before she had geographically visited these sites.
Moni is, however, a more intimate insider to the Bengali canon - both romantic
and modernist. When she was twelve she had fed upon the romanticism of Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee's novels deeply influenced by Victorian fiction. As newly-wed
Anthony caresses Moni's dark hair in tender ecstasy, she remembers Jibanananda Das's
"untranslatable line" from the poem "Banalata Sen": "And her hair is a long-lost night of
the ancient kingdom of Bidisha" (159); and as he makes furious love- With hislrist for
Anna in mind - to her, she can only compare the distant moon to Sukanta Bhattacharya's
notoriously anti-romantic image of "charred bread in the eyes of the hungry'' (89).
Moni had of course also devoured the popular junk fiction gifted to her on
birthdays; melodramatically realistic stories of kidnapped children maimed and sent out
to beg in the streets till the maudlin moment of recognition when a hapless boy calls after
his mother, "it is your very own son" (156). Epic myths from her own land also crowd
her imagination, as do absurd Bengali folktales heard during childhood: "She remembers
many nights of discomfort at the thought of monsters dismembered conveniently by
plucking the wings off a bee, buried in a cask under a deep, deep lake, of birds
condemned to blindness unless their eyes be anointed by drops of princely blood" ( 156)
Archetypal myths from the epic Mahabharata - e.g. that of Satyabati the
ferrywoman who got rid of the strong odour of fish that clung to her since birth and emerged
lotus-fragrant from her illicit love with sage Parashar (162) - haurit Moni, as she looks at
Arina who is flushed with love for her husband The estranged couple's emotions are in the
end connected through T.S. Eliot's ''Marina"; Anthony remembers identical lines from the
poem in order to capture the well of emotion within himself when his daughter is born,
which Moni ironically does after six years to bask in his imagined pain on losing the child.
Besides her personal favourites, Moni also has had a fair exposure to diverse
cinema and literatures, being a behind the scene assistant in her brother's experimental
theatre group. Thus she can empathise with the terrible desolation of Sophocles' King

130

Oedipus who tries to retain his human dignity and an undying sense of pain and beauty
when destroyed by fate, or with the sad absurdity of the land of Bombagarh evoked in
Sukumar Ray's poem. Cinema like Satyajit Ray's Satranj Ke Khiladi- also on the absurd
agony of defeat of an art-obsessed king by the conniving British- or the Russian director
Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, and directors like Fellini are
regular topics for her brother's adda and thus part of her intellectual horizon.
Anthony gifts Moni a bilingual copy of Rimbaud in order to have some excuse to ask
for her, when he cannot bear not to see her any longer during their embarrassed courtship in
Calcutta. The sahib is teasingly compared by her brother to one of those disheveled lovelorn
alcoholit: heroes of Sarat Chandra Cl_Iattetjee like Devdas. This further kindles Moni's
passion, for she always expected her lover to emerge out of a book. The missionary Father in
the novel presented Anthony with a copy ofTagore's Red Oleanders, an English translation
of his Rakta Karabi, possibly to provide him an insight into t:he host culture. Finally, more
than Heathcliff, it was perhaps Tagore's couplet on fated love in his novel Chaturanga (Four
Quartets) that pushed Moni to take the leap, to surrender to Anthony's fevered passion
perfumed with potential disaster. "In the dying light of that March dayll saw in your eyes, my
doom" (25). Tagore is, literally, the major context and c<rtext ofthis novel.
Gupta's other texts also abound in intertextual references. For example, in A Sin
of Colour, Niharika's friend and aspiring suitor Rahul stages a Bengali version of the
play "The Threepenny Opera" and Daniel Faradey whistles the theme of the play as
Niharika finds him waiting for her after a gap of six long years. Again Niharika' s mother,
the beautiful and aloof Reba plays Medea - "a woman stunned beyond reason by the
failure of love" (Sin 161 ). In The Glassblower's Breath, too, "you" enjoys reading Anna
Karenina and remembers her conversation with John Sparrow on Rilke's Duino Elegies.
When so many writers jostle within the limited printspace of the text, the selfreflexive subject of writing itself cannot be far behind. Many of the principal characters in
Gupta's texts are successful or at least aspiring writers, or, like Promothesh in Moonlight
into Marzipan, struggle to tease out a coherent plot from disjointed pieces of self-narrative.
Moni admires her friend Sharmila' s beautiful English and maintains a journal in secret in
her red-vinyl-bound diary. She even writes letters, though only to her exclusive reader

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Shannila, while she is away to stay with her headmistress aunt in rural Bengal: "She wrote
long letters to Shannila from the village, half in English, half in Bengali . . . sounds of
violent pondside laundry would lend rhythm to the torrent of emotions that she laid bare on
the faded blue of inland letter forms ... as she scribbled furiously ... " (Moonlight 25).
Moni loves to write, provided it is not public/published; that she takes writing
quite seriously is evident from the way she sulks to write her journal or her letters in
anything but black ink. She had stopped maintaining a journal since meeting Anthony,
"since she had found it embarrassing, difficult, and certainly too dangerous to record her
meetings with Anthony ... " (Memories 26). Anthony seems to complain about

Mom

stifling his creativity and intellectual life; but it is Moni who is initially overwhelmed and
then too numbed by pain to pour out her shock in a journal; she stops writing and chokes
her imaginative life, paralysed by Anthony's betrayal.
Anthony too is an aspiring writer but with more professional aims; he had come to
Calcutta for his research on Bengali theatre and Moni had been an accidental exquisite
fmd. His notes on Bengali theatre kept in thick journals in India had been interspersed
with declarations of his love for Moni. In the early days of their love, he had thought of
dedicating his thesis to her, "his tropical dream" (82), and sending her a copy by seamail. He had considered featuring in her bookshelf rather than in her boudoir: "she would
treasure it among her volumes of poetry" (82). Till then Moni had remained a harmless
exotic muse, who could be evoked in melancholic citations from Romantic poetry- "she
dwells with Beauty- Beauty that must die" (82). But Moni had failed to play his virginal
muse: his thesis remained unfinished, the sheaves of paper gathered dust in redundant
cartons and the typewriter lay unused in the comer. Anna slipped into the role: "It was
Anna who had led him back into the world to which he belonged, taught him to breathe
richly, again, oflife ... he had found his way, through her, into the circles to which he had
always aspired ... he had longed for success, more than the love of a woman" (83).
Only one of Anthony's works found its way to print- a short story on his sister's
suicide, a story begun in Calcutta when he had to fit the devastating details ofhis sister's
death to suit Moni's naive emotions of peace and beauty, and later, in a cathartic spell,
had "retched the soiled memories that he had concealed from her upon the turbid sheets"

132

(115). He finally finished it in London, inspired by his affair with Anna. He read out the
manuscript not to Moni but to Anna on a stolen weekend in Brittany. Roused from his
intellectual stupor after meeting Anna, he even wrote a play which however remained
unpublished in Anna's desk drawer, along with other mementos of their togetherness.
Narratives- whether scripted or oral- have been projected as the healing-space
in Gupta's texts, particularly in Memories of Rain. For Anthony writing is clearly a
release. And for Moni, it is only after she decides to end her unworded suffering in
coping with Anthony's unabashed promiscuity, that she could break her silence and
unleash her pain in a torrent of anecdotes the day before she leaves with her child. Moni
was transplanted to England when young as Anthony's dependent, and hence remains
less mature than Gupta's other brilliant protagonists like Niharika. What is merely a
bashful and private hobby for Moni becomes a full time engagement for Niharika in A Sin
of Colour - the history of a pygmy exhibited as an anthropological curiosity in a zoo in
the USA who later commits suicide is the subject of both her Oxford D.Phil. and debut
novel. She later returns to her house in Calcutta in order to write a book on the
disappearance of her enigmatic uncle Debendranath. Writing provides a partial release
from the unbearable pain of her love for Daniel Faradey who has left her for Australia:
She ceased to think of the pygmy purely as part of the analytical exercise of
obtaining a D.Phil, and instead as a character in the peculiar drama she had set out
to investigate ... her imagination - which had made so much out of far less-seized
him and wove him into an endless string of fantasies, which she felt compelled to
write down, first in Bengali, but later in English ... (96-97).
Promothesh in-Moonlight into Marzipan seeks to retrieve his dignity by scribbling down
shreds of his life or by narrating them to his biographer Alexandra. The otherwise
unhomed "You" in The Glassblower's Breath irregularly contributes Bengali poems to a
Calcutta-based literary magazine and later, inspired by her father, plans to write a novel
about her friend John Sparrow.
If writing be at least one of the vital concerns in Gupta's texts, must not then the
iconic Writer of the Bengali canon, Rabindranath Tagore, take a frontseat in Memories of

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Rain which remains planted in that culture? Tagore, indeed, is an overwhelming presence
in this text. So much so that Moni, who remains inarticulate as much in her brother's
circle as later in Anthony's, chooses to voice her unspoken emotions through Tagore's
songs. Her emotions and fantasies have been shaped to a large extent by Tagore's works,
intensely personalised by a section of the Bengali community. As Gupta herself says:
My novel Memories of Rain is an examination of the dependence of Bengali

culture on the toweringfigure of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. At the time that I
wrote the book, I saw it as a relationship which was extremely enriching and
nourishing and yet tragically also somewhat confming. The original title of the
novel The Dregs ofa Poet's Dream (naturally instantly rejected by the publishers)
was meant to reflect how the culture itself had also failed him. 38
Memories of Rain then explores in a highly romantic idiom the often antiromantic and even awry outcome of this cultural overdependence on the poet. Tagore had
tall dreams about the Bengali race but they seem to have lapsed into an over-sophisticated
rhetoric largely inspired by his poems, and graceless passivity. Gupta seems to think that
its parasitical leaning on Tagore has ironically largely spelled the present decadence of
Calcutta. The Bengalis have chosen to ignore his urgent visions regarding politics and
education and thereby reduced the poet's dreams to its dregs, clutching on obsessively to
over-stylised versions of his romantic songs and poems:
So pervasive and absolute was his [Tagore' s] philosophy that when I was child I easily
misconceived him as a divine being on account of 'Tagore' (or Thakur as it is properly
pronounced) translating as 'Lord'.... And yet later I came to see Calcutta as
representing the dregs of this poet's dream, came to feel that we had betrayed Tagore
precisely by enslaving ourselves to his poetry. In fact, Tagore was an intensely
practical man as well as a poet, considered the pursuit of earthly beauty as an essential
process of the refinement of the spirit. I feel closer to his philosophy [in London] than
amid the babble of a people ritually perfecting their imitation of his style in their prose,
their poetry and their everyday speak. I cannot entirely ascribe the decay of the culture

38

Gupta. "Memories of Rain." Homepage. op.cit. Italics mine.

134

to the unhealthy dependence upon the vision, albeit grand and broad, of a single
literary genius, but I am certain it had a m~or part to play.

39

Like the author, Moni too idolises Tagore and even deifies him: "he, whom she
had thought, for the greater part of her childhood, to be one of the gods ... she recognized
then [on discovering that he was a mortal!] that a mortal may command more reverence
than the gods themselves ... " (Memories 137). She finds it "faintly obscene" (137) to
imagine her Poet dabbling with the modem hybrid medium of cinema. When she was
young and darkly certain about her unfulfilled love for Anthony, she had even
contemplated seeking lonely refuge at the poet's idyllic school in Santiniketan, eerily
resembling the desperation with which Amrita of Na Hanyate repeatedly rushes to seek
solace in the live presence of the poet after her tragic separation from Mircea: "She
[Moni] had seen herself then, growing old without him, upon the red soil of the poet's
home, that was where she resolved to spend the rest of her days, at the poet's school, she
would hold her memories close in the dry Birbhum cold ... the students would whisper of
a lost love, an Englishman she had never followed across the seas" (Memories 181 ).
Tagore is a religion for Moni and for the culturally inclined, middle-class Bengalis
she represents. Every year her family would make a pilgrimage to the poet's house in
Jorashanko in north Calcutta to commemorate his birthday, ignoring the May heat. His
prophetic presence in the being of Bengalis is evident in the way Moni thinks that his love for
an older brother's wife has permanently infused the race "with the deep tragedy of incest"
(196). The novel itself is replete with Gupta's poetic translations ofTagore's songs- mostly
evoking monsoon but also related to love and puja- used to articulate its central emotions.
Gupta thinks that the essence ofBengaliness post-Tagore is captured in his monsoon songs:
The terrible beauty of the rains never failed to resonate within us ... Indeed I believe
my expectations of romantic love - in my youth, at least- were largely conditioned by
my experience of monsoon, or perhaps more by its poetic treatment not only in the
hands ofKalidasa and Tagore but also some of our lesser known writers ... Life, death,
and love - all seemed to be united by the rhythm of rain, and the perfect translocation

39

Gupta. Introduction to Calcutta. op.cit.

135

of it into song. To this day I do not know whether it was that Tagore had managed to
capture and express the complex response of the Bengali psyche to rain or whether we
- and I would be such a victim - had completely internalized what was actually his
very personal response and made it our collective response. Whatever the case, they are
his songs of rain that evoke for me most completely the essence of Bengal.

40

Moni, herself an accomplished singer ofTagore's songs, possibly shares all of these
sentiments with her author. It was on such a rain-soaked evening that Anthony had come to
her house. Tagore's songs provide her a magnificent and exaggerated metaphor for her own
adolescent pain, romanticism and sexuality. Anthony first hears her sing the morning after
his arrival, a song rendered even more enigmatic in that it is not translated: "And so he woke
... to the sound of her windy voice, unfamiliar halftones, words he would never understand"
(1 0). The song, apparently belonging to the genre of nature-songs, also invokes the mood of
invitation and longing for the unknown beloved, weaving the ambience of Moni's
fascination for Anthony. Later, during their tour in France, when Anthony discovers his
heady lust for Anna, both can hear Moni singing by the window another Tagore song about
the poet's resolve to resist the intoxicating spring night and wait, wakeful, for his Beloved.
Ironically, it is her "foreign lament" (11) that further enchants Anthony and Anna and fuels
their passion. Finally, the song is infused with Moni's private emotions of abhimaan
biraha

42

41

and

for her husband, as she can hint the love between them which promises to become

more than a fleeting affair. She plays the powerless Medea - an enchantress who casts a
spell (here with her song) to her own confusion and disadvantage.
Anthony's many obsessions with women make Moni remember Tagore's song
about losing only to rediscover his beloved in a slightly ironic context. She comes up
with a personal revised adaptation as she remembers his lasting lee/a

43

with Anna While

the others were illusory/impermanent tricks hatched to play hide-and-seek with her, now
Moni was sure of losing him forever: "I lose you my beloved, and you will remain among

40

Ibid.
An emotion that can be proximally translated as gentle scornful reproach for a loved one.
42
A state of separation from the beloved mingled with the pain and vivid waiting which usually accompany
such a situation.
43
The word is in the corresponding song of Tagore: "Tomai natun kore pabo bole harai khane khan."
"Leela" means a playful prank tinged with naughtiness.

41

136

the shadows that will be my world" (50). The translated version of the original runs: "I
lose you, my beloved ... You remain invisible, yet you are not of the shadows" (50). The
anguish of the poet shapes the desolation and misery of her own charred passion. Her
untranslated songs mourn their lost love and the terrifying possibility of a life spent
without love, as in "If you did not give me love" (97). And finally it is a Tagore song that
echoes one of the core themes of the novel - memories as an autonomous healing-space
privileged with the sanctity of forgiveness. For, after all that has happened between them
and however estranged they might presently be, Moni still does not disown their past
togetherness. Only memories could unwound her, or serve as the medium of reaching out
to Anthony without bitterness through a Tagore song:
Even so, remember me
If I should move far away, even so
If the old love should be lost in the mazes of a new passion
Even so, remember me (197).
Moni refuses to translate her songs, as if the sanctity of the songs or of her pain
would be violated/adulterated through translation. Even during their courtship, she sang a
Rabindrasangeet adapted to her own confused adoration for Anthony, but leaves the
words unexplained: "Tears well up in her eyes, she has always wished to be able to
address someone with her song . . . she had hoped it would be one who would grasp the
beauty of the poet's words, not a stranger who has no knowledge of her tongue, who gropes
among the unknown words, the unfamiliar halftones, for an answer to his mute caress" (57).
Anthony struggles to comprehend the mood of her song and begs for a translation;
but the trance of incomprehension remains, for the lights come back and Amrita's
translation of Moni's song remains unfmished. Later, during the sad years of their
marriage, the "excruciating grief of her untranslated songs" (17) communes to him her
silent misery. Much later, she tries translating the first song he has heard her sing but he
does not listen to her eager, nervous efforts, wrapped up as he is in the memory of his
secret afternoon with Anna. The translation proves futile. It is as if Tagore's songs
present a sacred and original poetics and language in themselves, which defy copies/
translations. Translation in Moni's imagination is a secondary activity - reserved for

137

rendering something as mundane as the medical complaints of Bangladeshi patients to

physicians (her job for sometime in London) - incapable of accommodating Tagore's
songs. She shares the long-standing colonial notion of translation as inferior to the
powerful original and as a process inevitably involving loss. As in her take on the
overdependence of Bengali culture on Tagore, here too Gupta's position is ambiguous.
She herself does not translate the Tagore songs she sings to her children:
They [Tagore's songs] are nonet.;eless, the songs I sing to my children when they
ask me to sing to them at bedtime. And sometimes I am briefly lost in the meshes
of the eii1otions they recall, and they are bewildered, but soothed nonetheless.
Do you not know any English songs? the three year old asks.
Not many, I reply.
Why not?
Because I am not English.
I am pleased that this realization should come to her in this way, through songs of
rain that ache with unrequited love, rather than as a simple fact or just another part
of the multicultural jigsaw that will be her life. 44
In a way Gupta refuses to be completely co-opted into the mainstream British culture by
refusing to translate herself always to her children, but she is not as traumatised as Moni
by transplantation/translation - which etymologically means "to be carried across." As
author, she does translate - sometimes in both prose and poetry - a number of Tagore
songs that are central to her sensibilities in Memories of Rain, undercutting Moni's
resistance to translation. Tagore's songs resonate through the subtext of A Sin of Colour
as well, voicing the unspoken angst and desire of Debendranath and Niharika.
If Tagore's songs are one constant through Memories of Rain, the other is a
haunting evocation of Calcutta from multiple perspectives - whether it be a glimpse into

its cosmopolitan past and present or its nostalgic image as a tired mother betrayed and
abused by her own child. Calcutta has been represented from Anthony's superior gaze as

44

Gupta. Introduction to Calcutta. op.cit.

138

well as from Moni's blending of nostalgic imaginings with apparently unbiased vintage
footages of the city and its chequered history and geography.
Moni' s reminiscences create a collage of memories of Calcutta as well as the life and
ethos of middle-class Calcuttan Bengalis of the 1970s - struck by both Tagore and
communism - and their love for literature, music, theatre, adda and intellectualism. As
Sunetra Gupta mentions in her essay on Calcutta: "We also chose to ignore- perhaps more
consciously- the history of our city ... Like so many of the visitors to the city over the years
since its birth, they had come and gone, leaving only mysterious relics - like the Armenian
Church or the Jewish Girl's School, which we simply took for granted, treated them as labels,
quite shorn of any history or meaning." Moni's perspective is largely indifferent to the
history of this colonial city. Nonetheless, we find stray references to Raja Ram Mohan Roy
"who had transformed the destiny of their race" (175) and to some of his extremely
anglicised disciples who comprised Young Bengal in the early days of the nineteenth century
Bengal Renaissance, or to the obscure tomb of the Awadh nawab Wajid Ali Shah who sought
refuge in Calcutta once dethroned by the British East India Company. Moni' s mapping of
Calcutta is more through micro histories etched in her personal memory, e.g. the flood of
1978 when she had first met Anthony, the regular powercuts then, the expectant alleys and
cheap Chinese restaurants of Calcutta during their first courtship or the grim and suppressed
oral history of Anwar Shah Road brimming with buried skulls of murdered young
revolutionaries/Naxals way back in the 1960s. Her sense of the geography of the city too is
not that of a professional flaneur or of a scholar on Kolkata's geography like John Sparrow in
The Glassblower's Breath: "He [Sparrow] had drawn you a map of Calcutta ... but at least he
has never been there, you had consoled yourself, I may muddle my history, but it is I who
knows the scent of the bubbled tar ... and his erudition hangs almost pitiful without experience,
the taciturn Sparrow, entangled in the city maps of exotic, impossible dreamlands" (42).
Moni's knowledge of the geography of the city is that of an insider -limited yet
personal. It only stretches to the neighbouring terrains of her home and college, to the
Academy of Fine Arts, Ballygunge, Max Mueller Bhavan, Rashbehari A venue, Dhakuria
Bridge and Lower Circular Road, i.e. places dotting central and south Calcutta. The
Bengalis in the Calcutta of Memories of Rain- mainly represented by Moni's brother

139

and his experimental theatre group - play Beethoven on the record player, are obsessed
with Tagore, wear long Punjabi shirts to their addas and forbid trashy commercial
Hindi/Bengali films for their younger siblings. They prefer Citizen Kane and are more

comfortable in film societies showing Western classics, rather than in the squalid Kolkata
fish market. This is possibly Gupta's only novel in which she deigns to furnish intricate
anthropological footnotes in order to translate her city to a Western audience.
Untranslated Bengali words are sparse in Memories of Rain except the much familiar
Bengali word for an elder brother, "dada" (178) while translated cultural details abound.
Thus we have references to rickshaw bells, rumali roti with spicy meat in earthenware
containers,45 the favourite dish of many food-loving Bengalis and the fashionably radical
relish for beef of Moni's brother and his group where Moni is teased for her Brahmanic
food-habits. Her staple diet is the traditional Bengali steaming fish curry. On her first
arrival in lonely London, the local clocktime does not correspond to Moni' s private time
set in her Calcutta wristwatch as she remembers the routine chores of her household
typical of any middle-class Bengali Hindu family: "It was six in the morning in Calcutta,
her father would be stretching his limbs in preparation for his journey to the market, her
mother wiping the night sweat from her brow with a stale sari, is boiling the water for his
morning tea, her grandmother has been up since four, she has bathed and prayed at her
small household shrine, she will touch the blessed flowers to their foreheads ... "(104)
Then there are exhaustive details about Durga Puja - complete with anjali or the
offering of flowers to the goddess, and bhasan, the procession carrying the idol of the
goddess to the river Ganga- and Kali Puja- the festival of fire- about idols, myths and
rituals central to both occasions and the tropical festivity tensed with frantic shoppers:
In the park outside their home, the set of serene idols that graced a large canopy
during the three days of puja festivities, a few weeks ago, has been replaced by
the charred figure of Kali, Goddess of Destruction, alter ego of the bleached lionborne Durga . . . these idols had been modeled after the popular film stars, thus
religion and popular cinema had achieved an ironic synergy ... Indeed, the city is

45

Gupta does not provide the corresponding Bengali word, khuri, possibly revealing her primary target, the
white audience in London.

140

ablaze, with candles in every window, rockets shoot up into the clear darkness,
the roar of crackers vies with the loudspeakers in the park, and downstairs her
cousins are igniting the round clay fireworks that they have baked themselves (42).
Of course, the "exotic" institution of arranged marriage is not left out, nor are some of
the rituals of the elaborate Hindu wedding, Moni' s father's one request being that his daughter
would wed a foreigner at least in "a proper Bengali wedding" (21 ). So there are references to
the ritual of the virgin's last meal before marriage,

46

of decorating the cement floor of the

wedding house with "alpana" or the "milky solution of ground rice that dried hard and white
in large spirals of flowers and sea shells" (97) and of the vast excesses of her wedding feast.
Educated in Western ideas of freedom and equality, Moni had begun feeling uncomfortable
about such wastage even during her marriage and secretly spumed the notion of arranged
marriage which involves surrender to "some unknown customer of her body" (44).
The text is replete with another cultural trademark - the Bengali intellectualism
and vibrant adda-culture which was almost metonymic of the urban Bengali youth way
back in the 1970s. Indeed, the age-old Coffee House near Presidency College was iconic
as the host of such adda sessions - where topics ranged from literature, culture, society
and taboos to radical politics. Moni's brother, a theatre activist/enthusiast, was an addaaddict. He and his circle - Amrita, Gayatri, Manash, Tapan - formed a close literary
society who are obsessed with cricket, discussed films and theatre, staged well-rehearsed
and costumed Greek plays like Oedipus and Antigone, revelled over forbidden food like
beef, undertook journeys to obscure parts of the city, read out and criticised each other's
theatre manuscripts and sometimes preferred awed silence while listening to Moni's
renderings ofTagore's songs: "her brother's friends, opinionated, enthusiastic, they were
terrifying, the stem, beautiful Amrita, the rotund Gayatri who always played the mother
with her glorious, deep voice, the men, all in beards" (13). It is here that fresh ideas gain
currency, where Moni's brother can propose a theatre without props or costume for
performance on the streets in which both actors and audience become co-participants. It
is of such an animated youthful group foisted by the adda-culture that the Father tells
Anthony: "our librarian is associated with a group of young people who put on rather
46

The corresponding Bengali word, absent in the novel, is aiburo-bhaat.

141

alarmingly experimental plays, they have become very popular, a wonderful group, such
intelligent young people, and so enthusiastic about life, it's what I like to see" (138).
In A Sin of Colour, too, adda has been upheld not only as a necessary marker of
Calcutta culture, but as a vibrant promoter of free intellectual and social discussions
among the youth. Since Reba is uprooted from her famous History professor father's flat
echoing with hearty adda to her in-laws' silent mansion called Mandalay, she becomes
strangely aloof and possibly bored. Even her admirer and brother-in-law Debendranath
cannot resist visiting this adda, the evenings of "violent emotional discourse" (40).
Moni, being more of an introvert than her brother, has no adda-circle to belong to,
but rather one very close friend, Sharmila, in her college days. Sharmila - from a
westernised family who spoke a queer mixture of English and Bengali at home represents a cocooned section, the highly anglicised elite of Calcutta. Moni secretly
adores her, for she is much more adept in British culture and literature than Moni can
ever aspire to be. She dances at the Calcutta clubs and can write "such beautiful English
and such clear Bengali" (25) that Moni who loves writing loses her heart to her. Together
they visit the old people's home on Lower Circular Road where Moni becomes aware of
the cosmopolitan roots of Calcutta that many of its citizens have chosen to forget. The
home houses abandoned Anglo-Indians, "the last forlorn dregs of a vanished past'' (1 08),
where an Austrian who had never seen Austria would recount to Moni her Indian
memories. This Austrian is Gupta's autobiographical touch; in her essay on Calcutta
Gupta mentions her and explores what this wrinkled desolate lady implied for her:
The Anglo-Indian community in the 1970's in Calcutta was dwindling every
day .... She [the Austrian woman] had never married, had stayed on, and now
would spend what was left of her life within the confines of the rather gracious
charitable institution that had accepted her as one of its residents. I held her
withered hands and gratefully breathed the slightly rancid perfume of her
nostalgia, but I was never able to see these lives as part of the tapestry of my past.
Gupta's representation of Calcutta in the 1970s is minutely detailed, but how
inclusive is this depiction? Excepting a few fringe references to poor children "sent out to

142

serve tea in tall grimy glasses in roadside stalls, or to pluck the gray hairs of obese turmericstained metropolitan housewives" (6) or the roadside kids and maid's daughters to whom she
distributed her dolls during childhood, Calcuttans in her fiction are safely middle-class and
intellectually oriented. They can afford the comfort of intellectualism, not being grinded by
poverty that is the fate of so many inhabitants of this city. There is hardly any reference to the
struggling Bangladeshi refugees who had come in hordes to this city during that period or to
the millions of part-time or wholesale immigrants from rural Bengal or other states who
depended on Calcutta for their survival. Except Moni's memory of occasional visits to an
aunt who had left her cruel in-laws and become headmistress of a remote school in rural
Bengal - "a two-hour cycle rickshaw ride from an obscure train station" (24) - the huge
hinterland that supplied all kinds of resources to Calcutta is also conspicuously absent.
Gupta's Bengal, then, is practically synonymous with educated, middle-class Calcutta of the
1970s, brushing shoulders with and yet blissfully oblivious of the teeming millions of
destitutes who populated the cityscape. Her representation could thus be intetpreted to be at
least insulated. What Gupta describes as her relationship with the city and its people in her
essay on Calcutta is true ofMoni and the Calcutta documented in Memories of Rain:
My relationship with Calcutta during my formative years was not really one of
engagement with the city itself, but with a particular strain of Bengali culture that
had by then almost become divorced from the metropolis .... We rode the same
overcrowded buses as those who went home to shanty town shacks without water
or electricity or any sensible sanitation . . . But we never really knew the depths of
their despair, the true horror of their condition. We performed our plays in the
streets so that they could see, but the plays that we chose were Bengali translations
of Bertolt Brecht and Jean Anouilh, and whether they really transcended the
cultural boundaries that we sought to eliminate, we never really cared to know.47

In the economic crisis of the city in the 1970s, she recalls in her essay, conditions so
deteriorated that they could no longer afford eggs for every breakfast, that they had to adapt
to an average of eight hours a day without electricity due to power rationing; however, "All
of this we bore with considerable fortitude, aided by our strong and unique sense of
47

Gupta. Introduction to Calcutta. op.cit.

143

Bengali humour.',. 8 Gupta describes "the terrible beauty of the rains" in Kolkata that
"never failed to resonate within us, even though it meant that our homes would fill with
bloodsucking insects, powercuts would become more frequent, tramlines would be flooded,
and we would be forced to wade home from school through waist deep water that had just
rinsed the pavements of all those bits of cowdung and betelspit we had picked our way
through that very morning.',.9 The essay however not only elaborates on Bengal's rainy
season; it describes the weather and life in other seasons too. Her descriptions are replete
with some beautiful vignettes of Bengal's natural beauties and idiosyncrasies.
Gupta reveals that it was not just the ultimate horror of true poverty that their
generation quietly evaded in their seemingly uninsulated lives, they also chose to ignoreperhaps more consciously- the history of their city as they could not reconcile to its
undeniable British legacy. The year 1690 was the year of Calcutta's birth, the year in
which an agent of the East India Company by the name of Job Charnock finally secured a
site for a fortified factory on the east side of the river Ganges, where they could
successfully defend it from the Mughal army: "It seemed ironic that our city - a city of
poets as we saw it - should have been born out of such a confluence of commercial and
military necessities ... we could not accept Job Charnock as part of our cultural lineage."
Another element of the city to which they were absurdly indifferent, for the same reason,
was the river Hooghly - on the bank of which Kolkata is situated, the now slow, silted
river which separated them from the main railway station of the city, the Howrah Station
- which at one time afforded the servants of the East India Company "the diversion of
fishing or fowling" and a ceremonial landing and embarkation point (Prinsep Ghat of the
river) for British dignitaries. 5 The exposure of this indifference was never meant to be a
criticism against the contemporary Calcuttans by Gupta:
It is not a criticism that our love for the city was rooted neither in its history nor
in its geography, for where it existed was in the life of the mind of its inhabitants.

The landscapes of urban decay that we walked through every day provided a
strangely neutral backdrop to our appreciation of poetry and music, and all our
48

Ibid.
Ibid.
50
Ibid.

49

144

other spiritual quests. We invested heavily in emotions, in artistic and political

opinions. We did not seek to sanctify either space or time by tracing its lineage
but rather by its immediate associations ... Our relationship with the city was
essentially juvenile, unrooted, and charged therefore constantly with the
indefatigable energy of youth . . . We moved with ease in and out of spaces still

echoing the rigid order of the British Empire - our offices and classrooms without ever being subdued by it. 5 1
Once upon a time in Calcutta, when Moni was an adolescent, television was a rare
luxury in a house and a source of warm neighbourhood bonding. Every Tuesday
afternoon, Moni would shyly go to her neighbour's house in order to watch the British
serial Fawlty Towers and was affectionately welcomed with sweets by the lady of the
house. When she decides to return home from London, evening prayers are hastened in
Calcutta before the television soaps begin. Despite this apparent technological coming of
age, there are telltale signs of the decay of the city and its culture at present in both
Memories of Rain and elsewhere. Heritage Calcutta in the north, which was the former
heart of the city and Tagore's birthplace, lies crumbling in its convulsed alleys and on the
Eastern Bypass, one of the main connectors of Calcutta through which Moni passes,
"vultures circle over the tanning fields" (195). Her uncle who was once rumoured to have
senthis laundry to Paris before the War has to compromise his aristocracy in this milieu.
He sets his ivory-handled mahogany walking stick, beloved relic of a now shabby
sophistication, "upon the pavements, among the dung and the calf-spittle, the crushed
rodent skulls, graveyards of thick insects, and the drainwater that overflowed the narrow
street in Dhakuria" (164). For this colonial capital, elegance and grace seem to have
become concepts rehabilitated only in memory. And this is as much true of the dumped
filth and architectural anarchy of Calcutta as of its decadent citizens. Moni's family, for
example, is shattered. Her father is paralysed, her mother spent and tired in serving him,
her brother no longer a playwright but a paltry journalist and alcoholic and the experimental
theatre group being long dissolved. As Gupta concludes in her essay on Calcutta:

51

Ibid. Italics mine.

145

In the end, my strongest feeling about Calcutta is one of disappointment. Not

because it has failed to clean up its streets, wantonly tom down so many of the
gracious buildings that once made it a 'City of Palaces,' not because it has failed
to give its citizens a better life ... A failure of the Bengali culture to truly sustain
itself which is where my real disappointment with the city lies, that it failed to
nourish somehow what was an extraordinary vibrant and dignified culture, for
what I grew up with as the culture of Calcutta has all but disappeared . . . the
spiritual concerns of the ordinary middle classes have very clearly shifted away
from those that I had come to appreciate as a basic minimum among my fellow
citizens. 52
Studies of this decadence - of both the city and its citizens - are there in A Sin of
Colour and The Glassblower's Breath as well. "You's" father, an intellectual in love with
the old Calcutta culture in The Glassblower's Breath, knows Calcutta to be a decaying city.
After twenty years, Debendranath Roy in A Sin of Colour does a Rip Van Twinkle act by
returning from presumed death to Calcutta, only to discover that the city has decayed
irretrievably: "The roads and pavements are actually in somewhat better condition than in
1975, he decides, but what little was left then of the grace of the city has now completely
disappeared. He watches a gaggle of schoolgirls emerging from a plastic faced ice-cream
parlour licking their dripping cones and chattering in a horrible sounding English. How
could we have come to this? He wonders, how could we have come to this?"( 177)
However, if Calcutta appears to have slipped into decadence to Gupta and many
of her characters only 'now,' i.e. in the late nineties, the city had never exceeded its
primary images of poverty, misery and decay to most of its foreign visitors in her fiction.
John Sparrow in The Glassblower's Breath notoriously likens the city to a cadaver: "I
enjoyed your city, he told you, but only because it clings like a cadaver to that wise and
filthy river, hoping forever to reach the sea, which it will never do, it is like a stranded
cadaver, on the banks of that strange, powerless river which, even a hundred years ago,
was not fit to make ice of ... " (41).

52

Ibid. Italics mine.

146

This casual detest for the city is echoed by Anthony in his images of the
"putrefying city": "this unashamed city, its gorged pavements, the tired faces of colonial
buildings jostled by indifferent, insect-eyed multistoried flats, the patient streets lacerated
by the construction of an underground [the Metro], the smell of hot mud after a brief
rain" (38). There are warmer white responses to this city which starkly offset Anthony's
in Memories of Rain, e.g. the "dense affection" (138) the missionary Father has for the
city and its youth, the city to which he now belongs. Anthony had come to Calcutta
wearing the white man's complacent mask of the "gentle anthropologist" (38), eager to
be acquainted with rural Bengal and its horrors and to study Bengali theatre as a
dissertational curiosity. This mask can hardly hide his post/pro colonial smugness of
playing the detached observer kind enough to rescue Moni from a sterile existence back
in the diseased city, or the "enchanted benefactor'' capable of translating into reality her
naive literary wanderlust for Europe: "He had given her the world, the countless trips to
Europe, would she ever have seen France, but for him, home to the language she had
worshiped ... he had seen her move, as in a dream through the Louvre" (45).
Anthony arrives with the white man's burden of imagining himself as a
conqueror, though non-violent, of the virgin landscape of the city or its women. He
literally has colonial connections since his mother's uncle lies buried in India. "He had
come to this land, as his forefathers had done, with a conviction that all he wanted would
be his" (40). He had presumed that they would be ready to offer themselves to satiate his
"desire for knowledge, for experience" (40). In his sahib's way, he had come to equate
the woman and the city, both neutral commodities to be controlled, explored; and
possessed as "a tender tropical memory" (161) when he would leave. With the snug
chauvinism of his coloniser's gaze, he wants to penetrate the enigma of "this uncorseted
city'' (118) by husbanding Moni; the sexuality of the Calcutta rains is hicarnate in her:
"He felt on that day that he had penetrated the very spirit of life in this city, the very
essence of their culture had been revealed to him in the few dense hours he had gazed
upon the rain-swollen curve of her mouth, this was what he had come to discover, to
feel.. .oh, if he could only draw his lips through the velvet valley of her hair, his
experience of the tropics would be complete" (124, italics mine). But he loves to

rationalise and discourse on the rains, emphasising in his diary how it exposes socio147

economic divisions in the city- a response deeply different from Moni's romanticism.
His unfinished thesis becomes metonymic of his futile bent for the well-worded
abstraction with which he tries to explain everything, ranging from his infidelity and
Moni's trauma to the anarchic city. He does not relate to the city, just as he does not
relate with his wife once she fails to fit into his fantasised role of the Bengali muse ofhis
thesis and stories. He can only relish from a distance the occasional "exotic aroma" (121)
of her fond memories of Calcutta unleashed by pains. For him, she is a wasted orchid
incapable of flourishing in his British home: "he has sheltered her within his palms as the
bud he had plucked, untimely, intoxicated by its incomplete scent, he had treasured in his
glass house until he found that she would not bloom in her surrounds ... " (81-2). And
Kolkata becomes a tired souvenirof''the brittle shell of their tropical lust'' (84).
On failing to shape her destiny as his ideal woman/dream or to fit Calcutta into his

fantasy of amniotic shanti, Anthony rejects Moni and Calcutta as intellectually inadequate. The
very Anthony, who had once rued his disinterest in cricket as a major conversational drawback
in the regular Bengali adda of her brother's group, now dismisses the brother's communist
ideology ''with a casual irritation that had pierced her heart" (1 00). His air of superior tolerance
becomes symbolic of his attitude to the city and his marriage is reduced to a faded quixotic
adventure into a different culture, preserved only in a series of forgotten photographs.
If Anthony has disgust blended with benign curiosity for Calcutta, Moni' s
imagining of London is its obverse. London has been her cultural homeland. Like the
majority of middle-class and elite Bengalis in Calcutta, the foniler colonial capital, she is
deeply Anglophilic. She secretly shares with many other Bengalis Nirad Chaudhury' s
nostalgic gratitude towards the erstwhile rulers. 53 Her curriculum as an English Honours
student, as well as the intellectual training inculcated by her brother, have inspired her to
look up to the British cultural canon as the ideal and London as the revered site of
pilgrimage. Thus when this literary dreamscape becomes her "real home" (174) after her

53

Nirad Cbaudhury dedicated his controversial memoir The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian to "the
memory of the British Empire in India .. ./ Because all that was good and living within us I Was made,
shaped and quickened I By the same British rule."

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marriage to Anthony, she accepts it with awed reverence. 54 Even the Mother of the
missionary college where she studied was thrilled: "the Mother had held her hand and
asked her to promise that she would not ever relinquish the pursuit of knowledge, God
has laid at your feet a unique opportunity, she had said" ( 151 ). As a girl, Moni has always
worshipped the coloniser's language; her brother's terrible English hurts her.
But, unlike her home Calcutta, London turns out to be cold, depressing and
hostile, an apt silhouette to her marital angst. The city refuses to house her; it remains for
her an unfamiliar country across the seas. As Tabish Khair mentions in his online essay
on Sunetra Gupta, in Memories of Rain "the onus of 'primitivity' is reversed and applied
implicitly to 'cold' England rather than the Bengal of Rabindra Sangeet." 55
For Moni as for her brother, London was mapped by literary coordinates. She had
fancied roaming with a Heathcliff-like beloved upon English moors. As Moni leaves, she
remembers walking "upon the very streets that Dickens, Hardy, Virginia Woolf had trod"
(148); the actual geographical points of Tottenham Court Road, Gower Street or
University College Hospital become more like a dream. Her emotional geography of
London cluttered by Big Ben and literary personae, sites and myths do not correspond to
the aloof and uncaring city. She remains a stranger to both London and the language
where she fmally feels strangely trapped. With its littered stairs, a cold sky, an
anonymous and automated Metro and passengers intolerant of any co-reader of their
tabloids, she finds London oddly mechanised and unfriendly that makes her deeply
homesick. Her silence is articulated by her American admirer who calls England "a
morbid island" and concludes "your English autumn is like death" (95). Ironically, the
moment of tenderness and possible belonging comes on the day she leaves. London
seems to recover from its habitual nonchalance to fmally play "an indifferent parent
suddenly entreating a prodigal child" (174) though only in vain: "her bones feel heavy,
leadlined, as if the tendrils of this land were pulling at her feet, fmally pleading with her
not to leave ... she turns to contemplate the gray sky that has always ignored her desire to
spread herself thin upon its arms" (174).
54

55

Once married, a woman's in-laws' house is considered to be her own home in patriarchal Bengali
society. She is thought to have become a stranger in her father's home.
Khair, Tabish. 12 Jan 2009. <http:/lbiography.jrank.org/pages/4386/Gupta-Sunetra.html>.

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Moni cannot cope with the reality of her imagined London, especially when it comes
to its pitiless and more sordid face. London too has poverty, particularly for its coloured
minorities in Brick Lane-ish ghettoes in the East End. Moni has a close exposure to this
squalor bordering on misery due to her sometime job in London as a translator of
Bangladeshi patients. Her sunny house upon the hill is a stark contrast "to the pits of squalor
that they called their homes": "her attention had been diverted by the sad shadows of the
garroted alleyways that she would come to know so well, years later, in her job ... she would
become familiar with the dense smell of spice trapped in winter wool, of old oil and fungus,
poverty and filth took on a different shape in these temperate climes" (170). The shape of
poverty and despair in this peripheral London is much more pitiless and desolate than in the
poor wann city of Calcutta. Though composed much before Brick Lane, this could be
Gupta's brief nod towards the potential of a different kind of novel in that colourful but often
invisible London fringe populated by Bengali Muslims and other peripheral groups.
Clearly, then, Moni could not belong to London. For her home is the Calcutta she
had abandoned for Anthony, an irretrievable home frozen in time and space that can now
be visited only in memory: "she is seized by an overwhelming desire to return to that
world, although she knows it is there for her no longer'' (15). By her marriage, she has
been reduced to the status of an insider-outsider in her own home; like Medea she has
subtly betrayed her brother and kin and her place. Her brother makes clear the stake by
suggesting on the eve of her marriage that there could be "no back to Bengal" (178) for
her: "Later that night, her brother came up with her onto the roof terrace, where a crisp
layer of night lay above the smoky lights of the city, and looking out onto the sea of night
smoke, their impenitent city, he reminded her, this is what you are giving up, this is what
you will be leaving, forever" (22). In ten years, she had been a visitor to Calcutta only
once for four weeks and her family had been formally distant to her. No one had even
asked her to sing. It is to this home now that she plans to return, unlike Durga, not as a
daughter well loved by her husband, but rather as a daughter spumed and rejected. Her
return could only inflict wild grief on her parents.
Even during her London years, Moni inhabits two geographies- spatially she is in
London but emotionally and psychologically, she remains rooted in Calcutta. She is thus

150

too close to the city to indulge in fantasies about what it could afford on homecoming. In
her memory, Calcutta comes across as poor and overburdened but not without kindness
and love, unlike London:
And among the dusky streets of London, she feels reproach, she had wanted to make
this her home, and instead the city had remained stately and aloof, the dispassionate
streets look up to her now, silent, ignoring the secret they share, and yet, ten years
ago, every alleyway in Ballygunge had trembled with the heaviness ofher departure,

weeping puddles upon the cracked pavements, they had turned away, indignant,
betrayed, she will go back to them, the narrow pitted streets, cloaked in a miasma of
car fumes, the dung smoke of a thousand clay ovens (80, italics mine).
Her imagery of Calcutta, with its heat and unhygienic food, is rather squalid. She knows
that back home, she would miss the technology and "creature comforts" which were
promised in this land of privilege and were thus "the bane of so many patriotic souls"
(32) and her daughter might never ever see or taste such unadulterated food as she now
pushed away. She remembers the hideous poverty, adulterated food and corruption of that
city teeming with "the sea of humanity'' (69) and her details are surreally nightmarish:
Suddenly she remembers the sliced fruit laid bare to the roadside flies, unwashed
thumbs pushing spiced potato mix into puffed wheat shells, to dip in tamarind juice
diluted with drain water, 56 rusty machines squeezing cane juice into grimy glasses,
that was where she was taking her, what would she eat in that land of hunger,
where children crammed their mouths with fetid soil to dull the burning of digestive
juices against the thin bare walls of their gut, in the famine of '42 her father had
seen a woman insane with hunger, racing with her child to finish the bowl of food
they shared ... and now, in the days of plenty, they thickened yogurt with lime,
added ground glass to sugar, churned the seeds of spiteful yellow foxthom flowers
to adulterate mustard oil, and children lay blinded, crippled, unborn (68-9).
Moni shares the disgust of the diasporic desi mother; she cannot imagine flinging her
child into such a life. But for her, as Anthony once observed, disgust comes coupled with
56

This is a descriptive translation of a Bengali roadside speciality- phuchka.

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fascination/compassion and there is no dearth of both when it comes to her emotions for
Calcutta. She shares an ambiguous and complex relation with Calcutta, a relation that
throbs with anguished love and guilt. The city has nurtured her and she cannot escape its
amniotic allure despite many inadequacies. It is cast in her psyche as the tired betrayed
mother whose love could never be matched by Anthony, who had always been
apprehensive about the match in the first place: "he smiled, I won't leave this city without
you, and the city had stared balefully, penitently'' (112).
Moni now wants to compensate partly by giving her life to the city that she had
once left behind. She would identify with the spirit of Calcutta which embraces and
accommodates all by tending the poor, hungry and abandoned of the city, thereby
overcoming her fear of the filth of poverty. Rebuffed by the London of her dreams, she
wishes to renew her sacred intimacy with Calcutta, this time without her secret disdain
for the city: "she had been too proud then, to share her pain with the city, would the city
allow her now to tend its sores, the city, whose tired blistered nipples she had pushed
aside with disdainful lips, for within her a great longing has risen to hold to her all its

starving children" (112, italics mine).

Hybridity therefore cannot be a cause of celebration for Moni, nor can she afford
to be fashionably multicultural. Unlike Gupta's transnational characters in her other
novels, e.g. "you" in The Glassblower's Breath who could only offer Calcutta the "halfhearted courtship of nostalgia" (35), Moni is firmly planted. Her decision to leave
London, as Shashi Tharoor identifies, implies not only love's loss but also "the inability
to reside emotionally as well as physically in two lands."57 Moni's return is ironically
paralleled with Goddess Durga's mythic annual visit to this earth, her father's home,
which is the occasion of Durga Puja in Bengal; she has accidentally timed her ticket on
the eve of the Puja. However, her return is laced with bitterness and humiliation and she
might not be as welcome back home as Devi Durga is. Debjani Ganguly has noted,
"Whilst Moni is apprehensive about the possibility of rejection by her maternal city, her
return to Calcutta is nevertheless rendered in mythical terms and enshrined by the
ritualistic Durga Puja ceremony, a ceremony which enacts a welcome for the Goddess to
57

Tharoor, Shashi. "Out of India: A Thirst for Past." Book World. 29 March 1994: 3.

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her father's home." 58 The mythic parallel pre-empts a healing possibility of the
unconditional acceptance of a daughter come home, in spite of all humiliation and pain.
Moni has a simple definition of diaspora - "wrestling to reconcile her existence
within this city [Calcutta] with her life in London" (197). For her diaspora has been a
difficult experience, but there are other Jhumpa Lahiri-esque' fictional characters in
Memories of Rain itself who advertise their diasporic lives and identities as a successstory, e.g. the young man who goes to Calcutta in the same flight and narrates his life to
Moni, a narrative that turns out to be a repetition of accounts she has heard before:
He was a child of two when his parents left, she knows their story, she has heard
it many times before, of how they had landed upon English soil with a mere five
pounds to their name, the first difficult years, on weekends they had shared
curried shad with other couples and reminisced of hilsa fish, cradling their
children, they had rubbed their eyes in the damp heat of the coin-operated gas
fires, and absorbed heavy texts, and now they basked in their hard-earned success,
in detached suburban homes, their children amassing A-levels ( 186).
It is a faintly parodic adaptation of the background of most of Lahiri 's characters in the

British context. Gupta seems to nod to such mainstream diasporic fiction, but they can at
best only afford to be fringe accounts in her novel.
Parallel narratives featuring the anguish, poverty and consequences of a historical
homeleaving loom large as regular subtexts in A Sin of Colour, The Glassblower's Breath
and Memories of Rain too. This is the subcontinental diaspora created post-partition- the
diaspora of the millions of refugees who dispersed or were forced to migrate from their
homeland to the "promised land" of India/Pakistan. True to her roots, Sunetra Gupta's
novels engage with the hidden angst, anger and decadence of the well-off East Bengali
Hindus who had to start afresh and build everything anew, either in India or beyond.
In Memories of Rain, for example, Moni receives an unexpected call during her
first homesick days in London from her father's distant cousin who thinks she will not
58

See Ganguly, Debjani. "Of Dreams, Digression and Dislocations: The Surreal Fiction ofSunetra Gupta."
The Postmodern Indian English Novel. Ed. Vinay Kirpal. Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1996.

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remember him. His East Bengal accent is unmistakable, as is his warmth in driving from
Cardiff to take her with him in order to spend a day with them. His kind wife, in spite of
her delicate awe of this Englishman's bride, wants to share some of her old clothes and
nuggets of wisdom which Moni might fmd useful in this alien land. It is a displaced
community's urge to protect their young, however distant or practically unknown, from
the anxieties of dislocation.
In A Sin of Colour, too, Debendranath Roy spent his childhood days in their
feudal estate in East Bengal and says with nostalgic pride, "I come from a land of rivers"
(27); his father has more bitter memories and insists, "We were good to them (the
dependants) ... They were far better off before we were dispossessed" (60). Partition had
affected Debendranath's mother Nirupama's family badly; her father was forced to pack
his bags and move his large family to Calcutta, where they lived in the cramped southern
fringes of the city and struggled to make ends meet. Debendranath's father Indranath Roy
could possibly retain his wealth only because of the timber business. In The
Glassblower's Breath, you's family fortunes were severely affected by the partition and
the dispossessed zamindar, you's predecessor, had to convert the music room in their
family mansion into a printing press for smutty tabloids in order to cope with the loss of
the feudal estate to partition. Finally the mansion has to be sold to Marwari developers,
symbolising the cultural onslaught of the city, and the family rehabilitates itself in some
poky Shyambazar flat with the zamindar's mannequin as a bitter reminder of better days.
If partition be one of the mourning-points of her fiction, the end of most of her

women protagonists could well be another. Most of Gupta's women characters are
extraordinary, if not exceptional; and nearly all of them have unfortunate ends in the
traditional sense of the term. Niharika in A Sin of Colour, Esha in Moonlight into
Marzipan and "you" in The Glassblower's Breath are deep, sensitive and academically
brilliant women. However, they all share a sacrificial/suicidal streak and no overtly
feminist agenda to follow. Niharika, in hopeless love with Daniel Faradey, gives up her
plans of a peaceful settled life on meeting him after six years and follows him to commit
suicide; betrayed by her husband, Esha, a budding scientist who had willingly played
second fiddle to him, also commits suicide; and ''you" is killed. All of these women veer

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between control and passivity or self-surrender. Even "you" who seems so fiercely, even
selfishly, in control most of the times cannot control the narrative about her.
In many ways, Moni is a precursor to these protagonists. She has not received as

much formal education as Niharika, Esha or "you," nor does she become a successful
novelist, scientist or scholar, but she shares the love for bookshelves and writing and an
imaginative mind with them. However, unlike Moni, most of these characters and even
the author herself do not seek a physical home back in Calcutta; they have found it a
soluble problem to live in England assimilated, yet unconverted. They have moved on
from overwhelmin:g nostalgia fora geographical site to making homes in their minds and
memories. Moni, on the other hand, has been plucked prematurely from her city and for
ten long years, surrenders to Anthony's hurting will with full passivity. But in the end,
she too does manage to transform a traditional tale of woman's victimhood and
retaliation - the myth embodied in Medea - into one of agency without bitterness.
Sunetra Gupta rejects the victim mode implicit in many brands of feminism. Her novels,
especially Memories of Rain, engage with the suffering of women characters and could
have been very sensitive content for a feminist treatment. But Gupta does not seem to
have wanted to confine herself to a particular paradigm of identity politics in exploring
life and her characters, whether men or women. Her approach is broadly humanist
transcending a focused, gendered approach; if Esha and Niharika have suffered, so have
Promothesh and Debendranath.
Finally, memories become the redemptive gesture in this novel; they create the
healing-space where nostalgia and compassion become possible; unfocused and
uncensored memories provide Moni with moments of pure rebellion as well. On the eve
of her departure, she floods Anthony and Anna with her hysterical "torrent of anecdotes"
(123) based on memories of Calcutta. In the process, she usurps her friends' stories as
well, since she wants to reconstruct the Calcutta of the 1970s for these foreigners through
a collage of private memoirs. It provides her a cathartic domain where she can fully
inhabit her culture without inhibition or embarrassment and flaunt her resistance to
integration into the British cultural mainstream. She regales them on that eve with literal
translations of Bengali proverbs e.g. "picked snake gourd" meaning "died" or "moon of a

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moonless night" meaning "someone we do not see very often." Memories of these
proverbs or of funny local superstitions- e.g. with the rats' blessing, children could have
sharp rodent teeth sprouting once their milk teeth fell (154) - release her from the pain of
a long-sustained suppressive elegant silence. She remembers her childhood adventures of
sailing paper boats in the overflowing muddy drains of the Calcutta rains or of pelting
stones at frogs in a holiday home in Digha. The playfulness and violence latent in these
accounts free her from playing the blonde angel.
Moni has again and again caught Anthony drifting away from her, locked in his
own memories. Ironically, memories - personal as well as cultural - bind, as well

as set

us free; Moni, for example, is freed of her bitterness for Anthony and London by
remembering her togetherness with both. Even as she leaves London, she carries the city
with her in a series of nostalgic images - ''watercress in the window, wild heath pond
fringed by luminous rushes, ducks, foul geese among the violent yellow of new daffodils,
the woman upon Oxford Street crushing ice cream cones to feed the pigeons" (172). And
the novel ends with memory as the only viable idiom connecting Anthony and Moni. By
"memories," the author possibly means self-preserved mindscapes tinged with nostalgia
and not the outwardly projected, "papery memories" (122) of photographs, all of which
Moni rejects as souvenir.
After the death of love between the couple, the one thing that Moni fears is that
her life could be wrung dry of all memory. Memory finally becomes the elusive amniotic
sap that could salvage the being. It is the quested home. As implied in the title, the text
builds itself as a self-reflexive house of memories - of persons, moments, cities and a
culture - promising thereby both author and reader the jouissance, peace and nest that
had escaped the questers within the novel, Anthony and Moni.

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