As the tale begins, we are introduced to a dutiful wife and a young son in the hospital, taking care of the decrepit man of the house.[break] The task of telling the story has fallen on the shoulders of the aforementioned son, Brisha, which he accepts with aplomb. He begins by expounding on the claustrophobic atmosphere of the hospital and the smells of sickness until nausea beckons. But that is when he abruptly changes tracks and hurtles us back to the days of his childhood, where long-tailed langurs and rain-soaked mud and the warbling cuckoo vie with each other to be noticed by us. It is almost a biography, the way the little boy fills the pages with everyday snippets of life in the Matare village.
Brisha invites us to take a peek into his universe – the inner plains of Nepal, where he lives with his tale-carrying yet loving sister, a mother whose only wish is a house that does not leak during the rains, and his father who slaps “not the cheeks but the heart.” In a typical novel, there would be lengthy descriptions of the setting and the characters right in the beginning, but “Blues” has no such direct introductions. The narrator plunges right into the tale, and readers glean what information they can from the short, precise sentences the narrator lends. The scenario may not be spelled out in distinct statements but it lets us visualize, with comfort, things as they are. For example, four-year-old Brisha narrating the story to us does not even seem to realize these things, but we understand the malnutrition hidden behind his best friend Chandre’s straw-yellow hair, polio festering in his lazy limb, and TB lurking beneath Bhagiram’s blood-flecked phlegm. The narrator does not believe in familiarizing his audience with such trivial matters in straightforward terms.
Indeed, nothing in Brisha’s world is described as it is. Every single fact and figure is amplified, vivified, likened to something else. There is such a richness of metaphors, animation and similes that it takes a while to get used to. Mumbling lips are compared to a wounded dove’s beak, breath to a river during the monsoon, moss to a bed sheet, a shaved cheek to a field after harvest. Sunflowers bloom in mother’s lips, a fake doctor is as clever as a squirrel, the prime minister’s hands are milky white, a shopkeeper’s body is bathed in cream. When monsoon arrives, the narrator says, “The sky snapped photos of the earth at times.” These are the images of a poem and it is not surprising that they lend the rhythm and the flow to the work.So the work goes on, flowing. It traverses through life seen from Brisha’s eyes, who grows up a bit but not much. Through him we come to know of the hardships of their life, the changing state of the village and the nation, the hold and release of relationships. We learn of a girl buried half alive and a house half-burnt; of a sturdy father gradually losing his grip on life, and a clean river bearing the brunt of disorganized lifestyles. The author, through the naïve recounting of the narrator, has cleverly touched upon the issues of gender discrimination, ecological degradation, migration, ethics, and morality.
The tone of the narration is such that it does not look down upon anyone, it does not turn bitter or aggressive towards life. And yet, it is not bland or politically correct. The realities of life are presented in such a convincing and matter-of-fact manner that we do not have the heart to allege racism, sexism or insensitivity – even though, rationally speaking, there is plenty of evidence for the same. Much has been written already about the obscenities which appear thick and fast in the work, sometimes three to a page. But considering the context, and also the fact that we hear these words as frequently in life as we do in the world, it seems but a natural inclusion.
While Brisha is busy drawing a moustache on King Birendra or sharing a stolen roasted duck, he will continually remind readers of the schoolboy Raju in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide. The preciousness of rice brings to mind Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, the incident of a father looking at Brisha and mulling about his long-lost son reminds us of Tagore’s Kabuliwalah, and the merciless rains (which even involves a cat) will immediately make us remember our own Indra Bahadur Rai’s The Storm Raged All Night Long. Not because there is an overt similarity among any of them, but just because they are all examples of how the simplest language and events can arouse the most complex emotions.
The emotions this novel can invoke are numerous. We shiver when Brisha and his sister visit the grave of their dead friend, and we suffocate when the narrator’s father has a pipe thrust into his nose. The writer is an expert in penning the everyday details of life such that the readers begin to lose themselves within it. A trivial incident like a mother burning her daughter’s trinkets brings tears to the eyes while Brisha yelling at the invisible people inside the radio and then fearfully running away is enough to make readers break into a grin. Another time, after crossing a supposedly haunted path, Brisha claims, “I survived. So did father.”
Gradually, Brisha’s family moves from the plains to the hills of Kalikot. The news reports and documentaries till date have tried very well to depict Kalikot’s remoteness, but nothing has yet touched the heart quite like this insider’s account. Towards the end, the novel is so painful that it is unbearable; yet the message it delivers is intended to turn us into stronger human beings: life is full of hardships, but it has to be lived, and enjoyed, and welcomed as it is.
The trouble with the work is that readers who have been following Buddhi Sagar’s writings as a columnist will feel at times that they have already read it somewhere before. The portions of Brisha’s crush on a schoolmate, the scenario of Karnali, and even some dialogues exchanged among the characters – they have appeared in some of his earlier columns. This is like cheating the readers, for the exact technique applied twice cannot be refreshing. Another shortcoming is that some languorous portions of the childhood, though interesting, no doubt, do not have much relevance later on. Chunks of entertaining material in the midst could be hacked away with little or no difference to the main narrative.
The narrator (read author) seems very partial to chubby cheeks, yellowed leaves, unkempt hair and people swiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. They have been mentioned so many times that they cease being expressive and turn to mere words by the end. And the work also shows a fixation towards the act of urination. The author need not have included innumerable accounts of people relieving themselves just to render the work realistic, it is irritating after a while. The use of the two words ‘jhain’ and ‘jasto’ (as/like) also borders on the excessive.
After the irksome matters are sifted through, the novel is still brilliant. It shrewdly merges together the past and the present to bring to light the changing life of an ordinary boy which every single reader can relate with. It haunts us with its beauty and its sadness. It makes us feel grateful for a strong roof that does not leak during the rains, a plateful of steaming hot rice, and a passable path to one’s home where one wrong step will not plunge us to the merciless Karnali. Simply put, it is the colors of life caught in words.
“There is no blue without yellow and without orange,” said Vincent Van Gogh – and the author has emulated this philosophy effortlessly.
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