Book Review: The Moor's Last Sigh

If I had even the slightest doubt about Salman Rushdie's writing prowess (not that I had), I knew it will disappear as soon as I found myself flipping the pages to see the da Gama-Zogoiby family hierarchy of The Moor's Last Sigh.

By the time I reached the end of this book it struck me again, that Salman Rushdie is definitely a magician. Once in his hands, the words flow like a stream. Smooth, yet turbulent. Clear, yet enchanting. Simple, yet complex. Easy, yet profound.

Magic Realism at its best!

The Moor's Last Sigh is a multi-faceted epic, a family saga packed with high-intensity drama, rich descriptions, vivid recollections and razor-sharp satire. The Portugese-Indian Christian-Jewish family of traders, businessmen (and women), artists and (eventually) gangsters, moves from Cochin to Bombay to Spain, spanning over four generations. Throughout the generations, the only thing the family could strongly boast of were powerful, proud and imperfect women who raised the family's grace and profits by leaps and bounds. As daughters, as wives, as mothers, their manifestations of love varied from being absolutely protective to utterly destructive. In this family lineage is born an unfortunate, helpless, flawed man, Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby.

Moor traces his family roots to when they arrived in Cochin as spice merchants, when the family disputes turned ugly, when rebellion and murders became the way of living, when his Jewish father and Catholic mother married amidst spices, when after three sisters he was born as the last heir to the da Gama-Zogoiby family, when he fell in love with Bombay and when he realized he wasn't like others. He explains his situation as- "If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.", and a half-life is all that he gets. Being in his mother's womb for just four and a half months, aging twice as fast, wrinkled at the age of thirty, with a hammer-palm, he pens down the entire journey taking us through all the generations, their successes and failures, their love and hatred, their strengths and weaknesses, their strategies and lunacies, their morality and its decay.

All the characters have been sketched beautifully and the power associated with each of them is a marvel. Abraham, Mainduck, Uma and even the characters that popped up from Rushdie's previous works, Zenny and Adam, all leave their mark. A special mention, however, for Moor's mother and the artist, Aurora da Gama. She is perhaps the strongest 'Rushdie' character I've read till date. Her spirit, her sharp tongue, her charm, her struggle, her peppery romance with the then Prime Minister of India, her art, all added to make her as phenomenal as she was, making it absolutely believable that people around her would definitely consider her the centre of their universe and would readily dance to her tunes without questioning her motive even once.

Written during the time when Rushdie was in hiding on account of the 'Fatwah', The Moor's Last Sigh depicts the rise, fall and decline of a powerful family; as if subtly indicating the apprehensions Rushdie had towards his own predicament, saying towards the end (via Moor) "Here I stand; couldn't have done it differently."

Inspite of the situation he was in, the controversial tidbits have not been ignored at all. A stuffed dog named Jawaharlal, Raman Fielding (read Bal Thackeray) playing petty politics on Marathas and non Marathas, digging down the Gandhi-Nehru association, bringing forth the then prime minister's love life and the possibility of a by-blow, and ofcourse the list goes on!

Rushdie's word play, the rhyming jargon and the linguistic jokes add another appeal to the story. There are several parenthetical descriptions throughout which got me chuckling; one of them as he describes the origin of the name 'Sorryno' for a Bombay Iranian restaurant -

"(so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming With Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume - It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request - All Melodies Selected Are to Taste of Prop)"

Just for the sake of complaining I would have liked it if the climax of the book was as delightful as the 400 odd pages before it. It seemed a bit too rushed in as if wrapping up a widely spread yarn just to get the covers on. Other than that, it's incredibly alluring. It wouldn't be the first time that I say, Rushdie's writing and narration is absolutely astonishing. The way he puts profound and philosophical thoughts so effortlessly is a sight to behold. As it happens with all of his books, one can never know if it's history giving way to his story or if it's his story paving way for history to occur.

Dazzling and heroic. Plain art.

"I sigh, therefore I am. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning."

Book Review: Gifted (Nikita Lalwani)

Written by the UK based Indian author Nikita Lalwani, Gifted explores several themes; the intensified importance of education for Indians - all the more for Indian immigrants, the pressures of adolescence, the confusions creeping in the second generation immigrants where they fight to strike a balance between their social life and their roots. 

The book describes the story of Rumika Vasi, a second generation Indian immigrant living in UK with her parents and a younger brother. At the age of 5, Rumi was discovered by her teacher as a Mathematics prodigy. As soon as this achievement is brought forth, her father, Mahesh, takes up the responsibility of nurturing this talent in Rumi, making it the sole aim of his life to ensure that his daughter attains something extraordinary in this foreign land.

Being a Mathematics professor himself, Mahesh plans a rigorous study schedule for Rumi, one which allows absolutely no childhood frivolities. It includes sitting in the library long after school, doing Maths problems and a strict warning not to even touch any of the foolish, good-for-nothing story-books there. Talking to her friends, going out for their birthday parties, watching a movie sometime, indulging in hobbies, reading anything not relevant to Mathematics, childhood crushes or maintaining a social life are already marked off as unimaginable in Mahesh’s rule-book.

Apart from this educational abuse (that’s what I’d prefer calling it), Rumi’s mother, Shreene, keeps adding to the traditional expectations from her daughter- thrashing off the idea of falling in love, trying to raise her daughter like she was raised back in India; all the while adding more pressure on the struggling 10 year old.

Even though Rumi, at the age of 10 years, 2 months, 13 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes and 6 seconds, can solve the Rubik’s cube in 34.63 seconds, finds the number 512 a glowing, friendly number, produced by a simple process of doubling, explains love in terms of mathematical numerical series; she wants a ‘normal’ life. The kind of life she sees her friends enjoying, the kind of life she sees her cousins having back in India. Striving for this normalcy, she yearns for freedom, becomes a rebel, gets addicted to cumin and starts hating her father to the core. As Rumi approaches puberty, her levels of frustration increase exponentially, her clashes with Shreene become more and more frequent and her attempts at rebelling reach disastrous levels. 

Due to her flair for solving equations and algorithms, she finally finds her way to Oxford at a young age of 15 years, 3 months and 8 days. While in Oxford, she starts living the way she always wanted to and when she goes back home, she returns to the set of rules prescribed for her. Inspite of experiencing great difficulty in adapting to this dual life, Rumi feels she has no other option left. ‘It seemed impossible to experience so much, to soak in this world and all its possibilities .... and then to go back to the past like an interloper, wash hands and eat dinner with them as though it was all the same.’

As soon as Rumi smells freedom from the autocracy, she breaks all the rules set upon her, gets as far from her family as possible, the resentment and bitterness towards home knowing no bounds. Wanting to provide Rumi with everything they ever aimed for, her parents end up abusing her, knowingly or unknowingly, ruining her life.

Throughout the book, the flow of writing was absolutely smooth and natural. I would have liked to read more of Rumi’s excellence in Mathematics on a public platform instead of the few figures wandering in her head aimlessly; it would have perhaps made a better impact of the Maths whiz. Additionally, the novel being based in the 80s, Lalwani could have even dealt with the gender based bias quite prevalent in the society at that time, for I am certain that the struggle of living in a foreign land would have been more pronounced on a girl child who would have had to abide by the Indian society’s rules and regulations. The end was perhaps written keeping in context the reality factor of the book; however it left a lot of questions unanswered. Rumi’s attempts at clinging to a normal life and her resultant intense encounters with Shreene were very well written highlighting Shreene's fear and Rumi's desperation.

What makes this story likeable is its proximity to reality. As Mahesh says it often, “Academic achievement is necessary to success. It is the only quantifiable measure of a life of the mind.” , it strikes a chord with the reader almost instantaneously for it would be quite impossible to come across even a single (Indian) child who wouldn't have been on the receiving end of a lecture on the necessity of education for a decent job, a comfortable salary, a social status; in short, A Successful Life. For the immigrants, it becomes even more important to establish themselves in an unknown place, their only tool in possession being education. The dreams and aspirations of these first generation immigrants are thwarted upon the coming generation, giving rise to struggling rebellious minds. With more and more Asians hitting the news everyday for their extraordinary intelligence exhibit in the West on several platforms, one can just wonder about the effects these gifts have on the child’s social, mental and emotional stability.

‘Gifted’ much? Think not.