Explaining Two Worlds
Christel R. Devadawson
WHAT YOU CALL WINTER by Nalini Jones Harper Collins, 2008, 233 pp., 295
April 2008, volume 32, No 4

In this collection of nine short stories Nalini Jones conjures up two worlds that her predominantly Roman Catholic characters seek to explain to each other and to themselves. There is Santa Clara, a suburb modelled on Bandra, in a Bombay that is not yet Mumbai. There is also the world of small town domesticity in the United States, to which some members of Santa Clara emigrate. The stories capture them at different points in their lives as they travel between these two worlds. There are children who look to meet grandparents they have never known, and there are adults who return to take care of parents they are close to losing. We are conscious that we move amongst a closed circle of families: the Almeidas, the D’Souzas, and the Lobos. We are also conscious that we grow into an understanding of the way in which apparently minor social events act as markers of major social shifts. Marian Almeida whom we meet as a ten-year old brimful of excitement regarding a birthday dress will be someone whom we encounter later as an adolescent worrying over an unhappy little brother sent to seminary and then as a mother of an even more troubled teenager in the States travelling back to Santa Clara. 

Conversely Grace Lobo finds herself at the centre of strong if contrary pulls of affection from her daughters: Biddy who has lived with her always in Santa Clara, and Colleen who has returned from the States to see her mother through cataract surgery. Rowena and Mark who have grown up in Santa Clara return to adopt children with whom they will go back to their home in the States. On the most obvious level of narrative therefore, this collection is accurately described in the epigraph from Gerson da Cunha’s poem, ‘A letter completed from another time,’ that says ‘footprints leading outwards on the beach/ point us the pathway back.’ The cycle of emigration and return seems as compulsive as the need of the home dwellers and the emigrants to explain themselves to each other. The title ‘What you call winter,’ is a phrase both affectionate and patronizing, used by a young man to his father to nudge him into understanding that even in terms of weather, Santa Clara and the United States can barely be translated into a shared language.

Is this cycle passionately lived? There is a good deal of stylish deflection in the opening story, ‘In the Garden,’ which makes the reader wonder about the particular crime for which Edenic innocence is lost. Marian is convinced of her own criminality when she sneaks her birthday dress out of its concealed place in her mother’s cupboard only to stain it indelibly. Her aunt is amused when she finds Marian ignorant of the facts of life. The reader feels a pang that a servant is dismissed unjustly under suspicion of having robbed the dress. There is also some careful negotiation between fiction and lifewriting. The author’s mother is Indian, while her father is from the United States, where she lives and works. Francis Almeida, University Registrar, who appears as Marian’s understanding father, later the parent who regrets sending his son away to seminary, and last of all as an old gentleman waiting for children who may never return, is modelled on Francis Soares, the author’s maternal grandfather, who was Registrar of Bombay University. A certain authorial shrewdness determines the stories that are never to be told. Colleen’s possible love affair with another woman, in ‘The Bold, the Beautiful,’ the merest hint of child abuse in ‘Half the Story,’ are stories that are outlined but not developed. Perhaps the most real anguish is that which is not to be spoken. The sorrows of individuals, if not their loves, are passionate.

What, however, of the community? In terms of demographics, as Irudayan Pandya’s 1993 study has shown, the Roman Catholics of Maharashtra are a community in the last phase of transition, owing to their decline in numbers. In terms of cultural vibrancy, however, this community has enriched the popular imagination enormously. From the nineteen forties through to the nineteen eighties—the period upon which most characters of this collection can look back—this community has accounted for many Olympians in India’s national sport of field hockey. The legendary Leslie Claudius who played four consecutive Olympics between 1948 and 1960, Adrian, Darryl and Walter D’Souza, and more recently Mervyn Fernandes are sports icons from Bombay. We hear nothing of sport in this collection, although it has generated icons from within this community for the country. Again, the common phrase used to describe classical western music in Bombay during this period was to say that ‘RCs and Parsis’ dominated the cultural scene. Despite the hope that a character might learn ‘the shape of music,’ we hear not a single note in the text. This is an unfortunate gap because community life is based on cultural achievement, and to evoke the first but not the second is surely to sacrifice the core of its existence.

Just as cultural achievement seems to be missing, so is cultural anger. Saeed Mirza’s 1975 classic Hindi film in parallel cinema, Albert Pinto ko gussa kyon aata hai, discussed the anger that the Roman Catholic community in Bombay felt towards generations of myopic stereotyping. The anger or the confusion of a community, particularly one that is relatively small, is important because it maps its imaginative life in terms of a larger world. For example, when Esther David captures the Ben’e Israeli community in Ahmedabad she depicts the anger and disappointment felt by children who cannot understand why they cannot wear bindis or celebrate the same festivals that their Hindu classmates do. The intensity of cultural confusion within a community is entirely missing in this collection. So also is cultural grief. When the imaginative life of a small community that feels itself threatened is captured in some narratives, oral or written, it can be done through a story of terse bitterness. In an example outside this collection, the plight of the ageing Tamil community in Wellawatte, a suburb of Colombo is evoked in a story of how the Wellawatte Post Office handles more overseas money transfers than any other in the island. This is because the young people of this community have emigrated and live for their parents only through the form of remittances. Within this collection, we might look for some account of how the community negotiates its day-to-day life. In reality it lives through its neighbourhood-level forums, its festivals such as the annual Feast of the Nativity (September 9) and its commitment to a particular set of occupations: secretarial and office practice, administration and teaching. We see nothing of the life of the former, and while the occupations of the characters are appropriately chosen, they do not live in terms of their work-choices. The line drawing is always clear, but the portraits do not always come alive.

The cover photograph by Anil Ahuja is enchanting largely because it opens up a scene we never get to see in the text. A stone cross looks out onto a grey sea fading into a line of grey-green coast. The cross might have come from anywhere in the world: but its garland of orange and yellow marigolds could have come only from India. It is colourful, complex and alive, all of these qualities that could have improved What you call Winter.

Christel R Devadawson, a Cambridge Nehru scholar is a Reader at the Department of English, University of Delhi. She has published on postcolonialism, popular culture, and contemporary political caricature. 

Review Details

[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_5a8fda89081be” show_label=”yes” el_class=”customlable”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_5a8e671abaeb3″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_5a8e675bbaeb5″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_5a8e67d9baeb8″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_58ad1f992ca85″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_5a8e673dbaeb4″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_5a8e67a9baeb7″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_58ad1fbd2ca87″ show_label=”yes”]
[acf_vc_integrator field_group=”15222″ field_from_15222=”field_58ad1fcd2ca88″ show_label=”yes”]