Where does faith come from, and what does it take to sustain a firm belief in god, religion and their many ritualistic practices? Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan’s The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks, translated by his long-time collaborator, Annie Tucker, asks these questions of the novel’s protagonist, and therefore of its readers.
Kurniawan’s works that are available in English often have a fantastical element, a touch of Indonesian epics. In comparison, The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks feels wholly rooted in contemporary times, in boyhood and growing up angst, in regular teenage rebellion. Here we have Sato Reang, a boy like any other, playing with his friends, causing trouble and getting scolded by elders, and going through the motions during prayer time at the local mosque. Until the day he is circumcised, and his father decides it is time he became ‘a pious child’.
What this means for Sato Reang is that he must become what his father wants him to be, and not aspire to join the forest police as he wants. In a narrative that alternates between first person and the third, Sato Reang tells us readers that being a pious child requires him to pray five times a day, recite the Qur’an in Arabic at night, observe fasting during the Ramzan month without fail, fear god, not sin. To the young boy, all this feels like a diktat against having fun, and he questions these rules, wondering why kids couldn’t ‘just laze around’ or ‘go running in dried out ditches chasing lizards’. Even as he goes through the required rituals half-heartedly, Sato Reang imagines stealing or sinning in some way so as to rebel against the religious discipline being drummed into him—‘How wonderful to humiliate Father.’ With time, this anger and the end of Sato Reang’s carefree days of childhood kicking ball with his friends lead to larger questions of what might happen if his father, the mosque and the need to pray ceased to exist altogether.
Sato Reang grows up a few more years, reluctantly continues to be a ‘pious child’ and is forced into a friendship with Jamal, another pious child, except that Jamal is pious by choice. While other boys his age get girlfriends and go to the theatre, Sato Reang is forced to spend every night in prayer recitation. There are tragedies involving fire. Fire begins to feel like a slowly developing leitmotif, a stand-in for anger, rage, rebellion and other teenhood feelings.
And then father dies. What initially feels like freedom from religious duties quickly starts to escalate into a taste for violence for the teenager. He quickly realizes that his father can no longer force him to play by the rules. Sato Reang is suddenly and absolutely and violently free to do anything he pleases. And almost predictably, in classic Kurniawan fashion there is a shocking twist in the tale at the end, what ensues is tragedy.
A minor quibble regarding Tucker’s translation is that I wish she had retained some Indonesian words, especially for father, for other kin, just so that one could ‘hear’ what the original language sounded like. This very personal preference aside, Tucker’s translation carries a wonderful lightness of touch, even when there are utterly horrific things happening on the page. The big questions of rules, of faith, of where we get our sense of good and bad, of why we make the moral choices we do and such like are woven neatly into a boyhood story. There is a story on the surface, that of teenage rebellion. And there is also another story that encourages readers to ask themselves questions of faith and religion that don’t have easy answers, and certainly not in the world we have around us. Both these make The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks an important book for today.
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and International Booker Prize winning literary translator working in Kannada and English. She is the author of a children’s book Champi and the Fig Tree in Kannada and English. Her published translations from Kannada include works by Kota Shivarama Karanth, Kodagina Gouramma and Banu Mushtaq.