Bricks of hate, cracked walls

A cacophony of voices and perspectives (both animate and inanimate) people the pages of Geetanjali Shree’s 2018 Hindi language novel Ret Samadhi and translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand. That collaboration won Shree and Rockwell the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first work translated from Hindi — or any Indian language — to win the award.

Rockwell has now translated Shree’s earlier novel, Hamara Shahar Us Baras, which was originally published in 1998. Titled Our City That Year in English, the story is set in a nameless city where communal tensions are being fomented and polarisation slowly creeps across religious and class divides, eventually shattering close friendships and destroying lives. While Shree takes a more conventional approach to storytelling in Our City That Year when compared to the wildly imaginative Tomb of Sand, you can see her unique prose style emerging — not yet fully fledged — in this earlier work.

The friendship at the core of Our City That Year is the one between Hanif and Sharad, two academics who work at the local university. Shruti, a writer and Hanif’s wife, and Daddu, Sharad’s father, round out the little group who attempt to ride out the storm of hate and violence that is slowly eating away at their city. They live together in Daddu’s house — while Sharad lives with his father on the ground floor, Shruti and Hanif rent the upstairs flat.

There is another character who looms large but doesn’t play an active role in the proceedings of the story — and that is the narrator, who though by definition is omniscient, objects to being described as such: “I write about wherever I am, whenever. I cannot weave things together.” This narrator, whose voice and personal views about the act of writing, of bearing witness which they insist is actually copying from real life “without comprehension” rather than creative writing, provides a wider view of the violence and misery that’s afflicting the city. These frequent interjections take the reader in and out of conversations happening between the main characters. It’s disorienting at first, but eventually, a pattern of sorts emerges, a firm intention in Shree’s narrative jugglery, braiding the gradual building-up of hate without and souring of relations within the main quartet.

Hanif is, to a painful degree, almost a caricature of what the secular imagination thinks is a “good” Muslim. You know the kind: doesn’t wear a marker of his religion, doesn’t pray, has a social circle that excludes members of his own community, vociferously denies his own Muslim-ness, and enjoys his liquor. He’s held up, at various points at the start of the novel, to be different from the Muslim who is considered the instigator of riots, the other. His students exclaim that Hanif is “special” and that “The problem is with them, with those who are not us and not you; it’s those people, the ones on the other side of the bridge, the ones that riot: those people.”

Of course, Hanif’s notion that he can be both — nominally Muslim and a respected member of liberal academic circles — is soon shaken and his sense of self slowly erodes. And the poison that was hitherto on the “other side of the bridge” is coursing its way through the university department and directly affecting his career prospects. Even at home things are turning, slowly, for the worse. What was before considered light-hearted teasing — Sharad using pejoratives to describe Muslims in an “affectionate tone” — is now seen differently. As the narrator puts it, these same slurs which “…are being said outside the house, out in the open, on the streets, in the clear light of day” cause incalculable damage in times of heightened tensions.

The one character through whom the memories of a more pluralistic (though still unequal) society are conveyed is Sharad’s father. Daddu stays at home — “I cannot tolerate this “outside”…staying inside and sitting is the best.” He spends his time reading Urdu poetry, laughs at the conceits and arguments of the younger generation, and encourages Shruti to find her writerly voice. He’s her sounding board, her constant companion and the one who mercilessly slices open society’s underbelly and shows how fragile the bonds between humans are. But even Daddu, with his appealing mix of innocence and cynicism, finds that the current cycle of hatred cannot be easily overcome. This time, the wounds go deep and possibly beyond healing.

There cannot be a happy ending to a tale like this. Yet, despite the almost claustrophobic despair, crystalline visions of beauty breakthrough occasionally in Shree’s story. Whether it’s observing the madhumalti creeper Hanif and Shruti plant, which soon attracts birds and insects, or the poetry that Daddu quotes, Shree points the reader towards what still can be cause for hope: love and the wonder of the natural world.

Our City That Year could also be read as Shree’s treatise on the art of writing fiction. As Daddu points out to Shruti, a story “…is not in the details of an incident…It creates a new and distinct world.” While this novel doesn’t have quite the poignancy and power of Tomb of Sand, it showcases Shree’s nascent prowess at depicting the depressingly familiar fault lines of this country in new and startling ways.