ANNIE ZAIDI Reviews C: A Novel by ANUPAMA RAJU: A “poet’s novel”


C: A Novel by Anupama Raju. Aleph Book Company. 5 July 2022. 248 pages.


Annie Zaidi

I

f a piece of fiction were to be compared to a human body, ‘place’ is at least one vital organ if not its beating heart. Where a novel is set determines the dank air (or sun-bleached, or charcoal-smokey or tarred or lemony clean air) its characters breathe, their compulsions and neuroses, and ultimately, the course of their destiny. If Oliver Twist needed to travel to London in order for him to be entrapped by a life of petty crime with its near-fatal nineteenth-century implications, Jane Eyre needed the isolation of Thornfield Hall, the tenuous safety afforded by employment in a wealthy household and the presence of only one prospective romance for miles around. Jane would have been an entirely different character had she been raised in the back alleys of London. ‘Bertha’, however, is impossible and therefore mainly invisible, because she belongs neither to London nor to the countryside; indeed, she cannot be understood at all when she is located within England. Jean Rhys breathes life into her in Wide Saragasso Sea by taking us to the place that does explain ‘Bertha’: Jamaica and the fortunes built by European traders on plantations that thrived on slave labour.

There are also those novels where place is foregrounded not as a formative influence on character nor as the venue for the unfolding of a plot intrinsically tied to maps, but as an exploration of a life’s possibilities, or as a journey that is internal as much as it is external. Anupama Raju’s C: A Novel belongs to this last category. The ‘C’ of its title refers to both, an anemic place – “Cimmerian as crow feathers, stark and sunless” – where an unnamed protagonist is on a writing sabbatical, and its striking opposite, another ‘C’ the poet has left behind, a city filled with temples, statues and carved stone, “where the hot, golden sand burns her feet.”

Is the latter Chennai? Is the first ‘C’ Canterbury? While neither city is named as such, the author drops ample clues so that the knowing reader may identify the location with a degree of certainty. One C is an ancient town with temples and inscriptions and the narrator describes Tamil as “the language that’s nearly my mother tongue”. Another C is cold and dark with a great cathedral. A further hint comes from a rare instance of nomenclature: the poet writes a letter addressed to ‘Doris’ of ‘icy hands’ and Medusa-hair.

“Who else could hunt like lions?
Man down with every breath.
It had to be you to make
the earth sweat.
Is that really you, Doris”

This piece of writing appears as a continuation of a series of poems, prose-poems and other experimental forms the narrator works on during her sabbatical. It comes on the heels of a storm, and hurricanes or cyclones are often given feminine names. A ‘Storm Doris’ had hit the U.K. in 2017 and given the context, one may reasonably locate ‘C’ in the U.K., somewhere near a sunlit megapolis where people go:

“eyes down, nose up,
these are the citizens of
the underworld”

If the megapolis is London, it is not unreasonable to suppose that C is Canterbury. The final clue emerges in a poem with split and jumbled-up place-names, including Chennai and Canterbury.

The novel’s characters aren’t named either. Mother and Father and Sister are as such, capitalized and hazy to the reader’s eye. The narrator herself remains undescribed except as ‘poet’, ‘writer’, ‘foreigner’. To what extent is the lack of nomenclature, or partial naming so that the reader must identify clues and undo the mystery, essential to the narrative? That question is never entirely resolved, but it is evident that the two C’s are points of reference on a journey – one represents the narrator’s past, the other, her possibilities.

The narrator writes mainly about a man who ‘gets distracted’, and to whose ‘reluctant love’ she clings. Although she recalls a friend’s remark that ‘I love cities more than people’, the poet’s relationship to place appears to be determined by a romantic relationship which dominates her psyche, her writing, and ultimately, this novel. Even as she wonders if ‘the white sands’ were more memorable than her first kiss with the lover, the city does not consume her the way ‘he’ does. In fact, her lover’s hold over her endures across cities: “The white city, the big city, the small city, the rainy city, and the dry city…all the cities he and I have managed to meet in.” Much of the narrative centres on her own fractious feelings although the narrator admits that she thought there was ‘something insincere’ about him. Yet ‘C’ concludes that no other man has been “as extraordinary as the storyteller makes her man out to be.”

Raju gives the sabbatical-city its own voice. C calls the visitor ‘my’ storyteller, making her both observed and the observed. In italics, the city speaks to itself, reflecting on the ‘storyteller’ and her writing capabilities. As the storyteller reflects on her past, the city reflects on its own. It remembers being happy when “the sun rose and shone through the stained-glass windows of my cathedral.” The reader may infer that it is unhappy in its sunless state, which was triggered by a woman who arrived centuries ago: “Beautiful, daring, loud, and cheerful, without a care…everything and everyone seemed to be under her spell.”

The poet spots this woman in a bookstore. A ghost of her former self, she is pale, grey, ‘nearly transparent’, wearing a faded red dress. One is immediately alerted to the woman in scarlet who had plunged C into ‘perpetual night’. The city wants these two women to meet, and for the poet’s curiosity to lead her towards ‘a better story’. On her part, the storyteller feels the need to justify her writing sabbatical, to make herself accountable to those who worry about her. In their voices, she drops words like depression, medication, struggle with alcohol, self-harm. The narrator’s self-esteem is at stake as much as her sanity is. Struggling against self-loathing, she experiences herself as being ‘out of control,’ akin to a forest fire. She is simultaneously ‘constantly asking, demanding, beseeching’ and ‘giving too much, getting very little’.

The uncanny and the psychologically stressed blend in the narrative once the narrator sees the ghost of the city’s ‘adopted daughter’ and strikes up a friendship. The writer conjures up not only a fantasy of impossible love connecting two continents, her two ‘C’s, but also a cure for loneliness in the form of a safe friendship. Whether ‘Alice’ is a figment of imagination or emerging from the recesses of a medicated mind, she is need made manifest. The narrator suggests as much, calling her ‘mirage of a woman’, someone who appears at critical moments to tell her that she is strong and beautiful but must not repeat her mistakes. The narrator needs a well-wisher to tell her what she already knows about her obsessive devotion. She also needs someone to validate her, to say she ‘writes beautifully’ as a counter to her suspicions about her own ‘mediocrity’. The writer mentions hallucinations and the woman in scarlet who has also suffered for love, is perhaps one that she is conscious of.

The character’s creativity is integral to her relationships. She writes poems for ‘him’ and if he fails to notice, “it’s like I’m lying on the operating table with bits of my body missing.” The poems in this novel also reveal crucial bits of information, such as the fragility of the poet’s mental health, with lines like:

‘The tide is high, the tide is low,
the river runs bipolar, from shore to shore.’

 The prose merely affirms what the poems are already suggesting. We don’t learn much more about ‘him’ except that he is a ‘showman’, and insists on a clandestine affair. What we do learn is revealed with a rare delicacy through poems where the poet-narrator says:

‘scanty as god,
sporadic as the monsoon,
infrequent as sanity,
if I could become scarce
then you would value me, I said.’

She moves to the more prosaic revelation that she cannot counter a man who says the right things but does not give her what she needs. While other details of space and location do pull the narrative in other directions, it arches back to the question of a relationship that is intense but unfulfilling. Aside from this theme, much of this novel is about the struggle to create. The city and the storyteller want to go ‘go for the kill’, to capture some essential truth. The writer’s self-doubt is projected onto the voice of the city who observes: “Have I chosen the wrong storyteller?”

Most chapters read like a writer’s journal. They describe her determination to make her time abroad add up to something, her experiences in libraries, admiration for Sylvia Plath, and her pondering experiments in writing from a male perspective. Through her struggle to live a creative life and to resolve her complicated relationship, the reader gains insights into the formation of the narrator’s literary self – exposed to seminal literature in at least two languages – as well as to a wounded self, the one that was mocked and knuckle-rapped by teachers, sexually assaulted, romantically involved with ‘scumbags’, and guilty. As the ghost says, “What you’re writing is who you are.”

The city’s voice poses a different question: “Is it possible at all to write without travelling beyond the surface in an attempt to discover history?” The city seeks a storyteller, a special one, for there are several who visit and try to tell tall tales. It appears to seek a kindred spirit, one who can narrate it back to itself. If this was the novel’s principal literary objective, it is a project half-abandoned. The history of ‘C’ is never explored beyond its superficial layer, and though Alice does get to tell her story, it is nevertheless a rushed aside to the narrator’s own history, which is a story of trauma, emotional abuse and breakdown, revealed through a mix of poems, memories and conversations with a ghost. This trauma includes parents being summoned to school for her various sins, which could range from wearing a fringe or inadequate socks to cheating in exams. However, there is also the trauma of abuse, gang-rape and the inequity of a clandestine relationship with a man who is not even a great lover ‘given his inattention to detail and casual apathy’. The extent of her shame and her self-abnegation for the sake of the limited affection ‘he’ offers prevents her from admitting the full truth even to a sympathetic ghost.

The pattern of namelessness, however, is disrupted in this section with ‘Alice’. In later chapters, place-names such as Raven Combe and Pickle Wood and Colaba also begin to enter the text. Though the detail does add texture to the text, the inconsistency of this choice only serves to draw attention to the lack of names for characters and the mystery that has been built up around the names of the main city, ‘C’. It is almost as if the narrator remains aware of her readers and is wary of their intrusion into her private life, even as she toys with their curiosity.

This is very much a poet’s novel, filled with startling metaphor and similes such as a beach lighting up ‘like marmalade’. The prose is loaded with sensory detail and sharp images such as ‘the smells of economy class travel’ and trees ‘sprouting letters—black words silhouetted against the yellow’. Parts of the text are clearly writing exercises. A scene in the laundromat leads to an italicised section where the words run together, headlong, each word flashing across the page, offering the briefest glimpse of what is seen and felt in the moment, and where neither poet nor reader may linger. In another section, the reverse trick is used so that each sentence is mirrored, and must be read backwards. It is a clever device that forces the reader to pay close attention to each phrase, refuting the option of skimming, and thus each metaphor appears more viscous, more tactile.

This is also a book that is heavily invested in itself, for it consciously adopts a poet-narrator’s voice that is acutely aware of its place in the world, all the while preoccupied by writerly concerns. In the midst of all her angst, for instance, the narrator segues to note: “I think of all the times the word, ‘night’ has appeared in my writing. It has lent its wondrous onyx-laced shades to the metaphors and images I have laboured over: the sounds, birds, hisses, animals, and chills.”

Raju does not appear to have structured ‘C’ as a novel within a novel. It is an unusual experiment with form that gives us a writer-protagonist who reflects on a turbulent life, demonstrates poetic craft and the self that is attached to its craft, and who has a fragmented view of herself. As is often the case with such books, it is also possible that the writer is playing a sly game, muddying the text so that the fictional narrator, the ‘I’ in the story, is writing another book in the voice of ‘C’. This is a risky narrative choice though, for a reader cannot be certain when a shift of voice indicates a fresh fictional enterprise. Italics are used for poems as well as for the sections told from the viewpoint of the sunless city and since ‘she’ is mentioned as well as ‘I’, it is not entirely clear who is implicated here, and why the city needed a distinct voice and perspective in a novel which is not, ultimately, about itself.

What is clear is that ‘C’ stands in for possibility: gaining clarity, breaking old patterns, becoming the sort of ‘storyteller’ that can release old ghosts from history. The two C’s in this novel signal two states of mind: a dark, sunless, unfamiliar but creative space, and another place that signals ‘home’, an intense, scorching site of passion, trauma and guilt, which provides the material that can be woven into a novel.

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Anupama Raju is a poet, literary journalist, communications professional and translator. She is the author of Nine, a poetry collection. C: A Novel is her debut work of long fiction. Anupama Raju in The Beacon

 



Annie Zaidi writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and scripts. Her published work includes City of IncidentPrelude to a Riot; and Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation. She is also the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing.
Annie Zaidi in The Beacon
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