Author: Tilottama Misra
Translator: Udayon Misra
A review by
Sawpon Dowerah
As a starting point before coming to the “Threshold,” it would be interest- ing to comment on the cover of the book High Wind, displaying a fairly eloquent oil painting of a windswept pine tree by the celebrated artist Hemanta Mishra that makes one wonder if the painting is trying to tell the reader something about the theme or about the protagonist before the novel has been read. The tree in the painting swaying in the wind, looking so helplessly feminine, seems to project an image of the protagonist’s life upset by storms, but the orange sky of evening as its background carries the message of some blessed hope as well.
The “Threshold” introduces a group of seminar participants gathering for dinner on the front lawn of a university guest house at Guwahati and chatting about the issues raised in the seminar that day. Among the participants, there is Jewmon Diengdoh, who takes her friend Arvind Das, both from Delhi, to her grandfather’s house, High Wind, in Shillong on the following day. On the way to Shillong by taxi, Jewmon narrates to Arvind the plot of a novel that she is writing. The “Threshold” and the tailpiece of the last chapter of High Wind apparently provide a frame for Jewmon’s narrative.
The narrative goes back to the early part of the twentieth century by providing glimpses of the traditional socio-cultural values seen in terms of Lower and Upper Assam, with each part having a variation in speech patterns and cultural ethos. These are the values that had shaped the mindset of Raghunath Bhattacharyya and his family, and any deviation from that mold was seriously viewed. Raghunath Bhattacharjee had little to say when his son Banamali Panchatirtha, after spending several years in centres of Sanskrit learning in Coochbehar, Rangpur, Kashi, and Calcutta, joined a school in Sivasagar as a Sanskrit teacher. But when Banamali married Haimavati, the younger sister of a school friend of his from Jorhat in Upper Assam, considering that the girl was from a “bread-eating” background that classed her as a “memsahib” and that her father had a government job in Shillong where he had his own house, Raghunath Bhattacharjee put his foot, or rather his hookah, down with a bang. He lost no time in publicly disowning Banamali for going against his acceptable standards of social behavior.
Notwithstanding the father-son relationship, Haimavati kept herself busy with her family, first at Sivasagar and then at Shillong, where she divided her time between her newly introduced social commitments in Asom Sangha and her housekeeping work. The latter included reading books in Assamese and Bengali from the library of Asom Sangha, weaving gamosas and sadars at her own loom, and doing needlework and embroidery besides her culinary work. But more than anything else, the stormiest part of her work was to maintain a balance of power structure in the house when the marriage of Bhabani, their elder daughter, with the mentally deranged son of a mouzadar from Dergaon had ended in a fiasco. Moreover, she took on monitoring Sorubaapu Bijoy’s peculiar whims besides keeping an eye on the growing closeness of Bhabani with the radio singer Prashanta Hazarika.
A generation later, the same set of traditional socio-cultural values nurtured by Raghunath Bhattacharjee in his village on the bank of the Pagaladia influenced the mindset of Banamali Panchatirtha. Similar to his father, Banamali Panchatirtha firmly objected when his son Saratchandra Bhattacharjee, a university teacher in Guwahati, expressed his desire to marry Lisimon Diengdoh, a Khasi girl he deeply admired. It was not that Banamali Panchatirtha disliked the girl; on the contrary, he had always liked her and enjoyed listening to her Assamese songs during her frequent visits to their house. But the marriage of his son Sarat with Kong Keliyan’s daughter Lisimon was an altogether different matter considering that the customs and rituals of their faith that were scrupulously practiced were entirely different from theirs, and more so because of their matrilineal background. Like his father, he firmly objected to the proposal.
Haima was now caught in a storm. She had known how her husband had flouted the traditional norms of the society while marrying her. She painfully remembered her husband’s role in the hasty marriage of Bhabani to the lunatic son of the mouzadar and how a disaster was narrowly averted. She also shockingly remembered the day when she had received the telegram from her husband with the news of Bhabani’s marriage to Prashanta from Calcutta. Then there was Bijoy’s marriage to Nancy. In all these marriages, Banamali remained the passive onlooker he had always been, often unaware of the changes approaching in his life. His abiding trust in Dharmaprabhu to take charge on his behalf of such matters was all that he had to say in defence of his stand.
Yet the question remained: why then should he disapprove of the marriage of Sarat with Lichimon? These changes taking place in the value system in the family and her husband’s nearly indifferent approach to the domestic problems, especially subsequent to his retirement from government service, greatly upset her, but they didn’t break her spirit. All the time, she had stood firmly like a windswept pine tree, braving all storms and still hopeful for a sunset glow to brighten her life. Reflecting on the Sarat-Lichimon relationship, she took the opportunity to give her total support to their marriage. This was the last thing that she did for her family before her death.
The scene of the taxi from Guwahati coming to a stop at the gate of High Wind and Jewmon, with Arvind stepping out to a musical welcome home, brings the narrative to a close. Reading the novel was itself an experience of gliding through the translator’s delightful English.