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by Githa Hariharan Penguin Books, 1992, ISBN 0 14 012843 3 |
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The Thousand Faces of Night, Githa Hariharan's first novel, was published in 1992, and was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for the best first novel. That fact acted like a kind of recommendation for me to pick the novel up. The curiosity soon turned into surprise as it was difficult for me to plough through the chaotic nature of the novel. Rather than being called The Thousand Faces of Night, it should have been called The Thousand Thoughts of Githa Hariharan. Well, I have not counted whether there are really thousand thoughts here, but there are certainly quite a few thoughts, and it is not easy to recognise any kind of order amongst them. There is chaos even in the way the story is told, which in fact is a pity as it could have been a very good novel. The greatest degree of chaos is in the development of the characters - of Devi, her mother, Sita, and the servant, Mayamma. When the book starts, Devi is in the USA. If she did any thing else there apart from getting into a relationship with Dan, a fellow black student, then it is not talked about. The justification given for this relationship, which was never meant to be anything but a temporary one, is that "Dan was Devi's answer to the white claustrophobia of an all-clean, all-American campus"! Well, Devi returns soon home, to Madras, to her mother, Sita. The Devi one meets after her journey back to India, is not even a shadow of the Devi whom one comes across at the beginning. This Devi is one of the most boring, most colourless characters ever created. She has no initiative, no urge to do anything, and waits passively for others to arrange her life. Well, there are many people like her in the world. The question is then what was the necessity of sending her to US when that experience left no trace at all on her personality? Hariharan hints that Devi's character developed as it did as a consequence of the many mythological stories told to her in her childhood by her grandmother. So stories after stories are told in this novel. At the beginning it is very interesting to read them. But soon they loose their meaning, perhaps the only time I ever got such a feeling reading our mythological stories. |