A sketchy effort that leaves you wishing for more

SOMETIMES THE simplest questions are the hardest to answer. Say I ask you, why do you feel at home in your home? There could be a multitude of answers you could offer. Comfort, familiarity, security, history, etc. However, I could as easily toss them aside; not a single factor in those answers is unique to your home—my house is just as comforting, familiar, and secured—to me. Because some things are hard to define, we lazily label them as ‘X factor’. Your home has the X factor—it offers your brand of comfort, familiarity, security, and it is your inheritance not mine.

For Beloved Strangers I should ideally take refuge in the X factor explanation to understand why it did not quite leave that profound effect despite the familiarity of circumstances reflected in the writing. The act of reading may be an equal process but comprehension is personal. What may cause one person to tear up, may lead to heartburn in others— I mean the kind which appears after consuming soggy bread pakoras.

Beloved Strangers managed to give me unequal measures of both—a lot of post-pakora-type heartburn and some poignant moments. Beloved Strangers is Maria Chaudhuri’s attempt at writing a memoir. The first-half is a look at a world of frustrated, restless adults trapped in a fractured domestic space of expectation versus reality. Those who have grown up reading modern Bengali literature would be all too familiar with this brand of sometimes meaningless grown-up angst, one that leaves an imprint or leaves one frightfully bored.

We meet Chaudhuri’s mother; a woman who wishes to be a celebrated singer and manages only to be the latter. A “distant” father. Parents who might have loved each other (and themselves) once. We skim over the first erotic experience, pornography, and fleetingly read of people coming in and leaving; all through the eyes of the child protagonist. A child who allegedly bears the heavy weight of expectations, protocol, discipline and shame—a lot of shame if we are to believe her. Shame in school, shame while caught masturbating, shame when not fed the right kind of food and after a tantrum thrown; shameshame. I do believe her deep shame; the circumstances are all too familiar to be dismissed. However, what leaves one baffled, and a tad bit alienated, is the voice. It is one which lacks inherent, dismissive humour which humans—especially children—use to negotiate human shame and guilt which society, religion, protocol or life tries to pile on most of us.

In the first half, it is apparent that Chaudhuri is laying the blueprint of her adulthood. Then there is that niggling feeling that the child is already too disillusioned, angst ridden and complicated to grow more so. If the child can not wait to grow up, neither can we so that the narrative would change.

Certainly in the second half of the memoir, Chaudhuri does begin to tighten what has been so far a rather insipid narrative. The idea of the author’s sense of lack of emotional allegiance to any one place does strike a sympathetic chord. The most brilliant moment happens right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, when a lady approaches the protagonist on the street and yells at her to go back to where she came from—to where she belonged.

“By pointing her finger at me to banish me from her world, she shows me how I have been executing my own exile.” This happens to be one of the most honest glimpses into her heart.

The memoir ideally navigates two continents and had the potential for an emotional exploration of families and friends who become families. But Beloved Strangers lacks two elements needed to hook: unbridled intensity and/or humour. On one hand Chaudhuri seems a little scared to delve too deep into her characters—or her own thought (there are so many sentences that literally end with a question mark)—and neither does she treat it with humour to say “look, it meant nothing so think less”. Chaudhuri’s debut is not the most impressive one, but there is a hope that the day when she truly opens up her heart, there will be enough from her pen to leave us pondering.