Voice of The Rain Season

By Subrata Dasgupta

On a September Saturday afternoon in 2011, Martin Shawncross and Joya Bose in perfect synchrony surrendered their respective virginities. That Martin, a twenty-one-year-old American, had waited so long for this momentous personal event would have scandalized his friends and family were they to know about it. That Joya, a twenty-five-year-old Bengali, did not wait longer for this same experience would no doubt have scandalized her family had they come to know of it. Thus begins this gossamer tale of love and discovery, reaching back to a past spanning four generations and two continents. Narrated through the seemingly banal story of a young couple falling in love in present-day America, Voice of the Rain Season explores by way of memory, history and old letters, the life of a family in a pre-Independence Bengal. It unearths through Joya' s discovery of the family' s long forgotten secret, notions of identity, homecoming, language and loss. The heart of Dasgupta' s novel, however, lies in the glory of Tagore' s Rabindra Sangeet and the beauty of classical music, as it surpasses geographical boundaries and seeps effortlessly into the hearts of a people far-removed from the Bengali landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9789387779624

Book preview

ONE

ON A SEPTEMBER SATURDAY afternoon in 2011, Martin Shawncross and Joya Bose in perfect synchrony surrendered their respective virginities. That Martin, a twenty-one-year-old American, had waited so long for this momentous personal event would have scandalized his friends—and perhaps astonished his family—were they to know about it. That Joya, a twenty-five-year-old Bengali, did not wait longer for this same experience would no doubt have scandalized her family had they come to know of it. But the anxiety Martin and Joya shared before, during, and immediately after their coupling that afternoon had nothing to do with loss of virginity per se; it was, rather, a question of ethics, for Martin was an undergraduate and Joya was, or had been, his teacher.

Neither knew precisely what the university’s rules were about students and faculty sleeping together. But at least, Joya reasoned silently as they lay afterwards still curled in each other’s arms, there was no conflict of interest. The course she had taught which he had attended during summer school was over, and grades submitted before they went on their first proper date. Besides, she told herself repeatedly, she was not really a member of the faculty; she was not a professor of any rank, not even an instructor or lecturer. Like Martin she was a student, albeit of a superior kind, a doctoral candidate, who had temporarily and transiently assumed the mantle of a university teacher in return for a graduate fellowship and free tuition. She was cheap intellectual labour of the sort colleges and universities across the country thrive upon.

HOW THINGS DO HAPPEN! I began this story with a double loss of innocence but this isn’t the true beginning. That Joya and Martin came to know each other, in the biblical sense, that autumn afternoon may never have happened had it not been that the academic study of English literature was swept up in the wave of postmodernism some thirty or so years earlier. The man who was then the head of the English department in Huntington University—his name was Jarvis De Soto—mindful of the direction English studies had taken in campuses across the country, attentive in a mildly alarmed kind of way to such terms as deconstruction and postcolonial and discourse and multicultural which were peppering articles, essays, books, and lectures in the field he knew as English literature, realized that his department must also flow with the current of academic fashion. A writer by the name of Salman Rushdie had suddenly leapt into international literary fame with a novel which won the Booker Prize; and while Jarvis De Soto, in late middle age and a specialist on the American Transcendentalists, having struggled through the first thirty or forty pages of Midnight’s Children, could make no sense of it, he reluctantly recognized that English literature was no longer as he knew and loved it. After earnest discussions with his most trusted colleagues in his department, and many phone conversations with colleagues on other campuses—this was well before electronic mail and the Internet had invaded the consciousness of professors of literature—he decided that their best bet lay in expanding the scope of his department to embrace the literature in English of countries other than Britain and America.

And so, with some fanfare, the name of the department was changed to DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH, AMERICAN AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE IN ENGLISH; and was immediately and mischievously abbreviated by Jarvis’s junior colleagues to DEBACLE much to his consternation. The name change and what it implied was a paean, Jarvis De Soto felt with some complacency, to the progressiveness, the liberalism of a Deep South university, although the vast majority of its students being American had small inkling of who or what Commonwealth was—a few bewildered ones thought it meant the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or of Virginia—let alone what its literature might look like.

Thus were introduced courses on Canadian and Australian literature, the literature of the Caribbean, of South Africa, of some of the African countries; and of South Asia, more particularly the clumsily described genre called Indian Literature in English (ILE for short). New authorial names appeared in course descriptions in the syllabus, many of which were of a distinctly exotic flavour to students, and so all the more exciting, and even to some of the faculty: Achebe, Atwood, Césaire, Coetzee, Gordimer, Ghosh, Jacobson, Keneally, Naipaul, Narayan, Ondaatje, Roy, Rushdie, Rhys, Walcott.

It was not enough to introduce new courses; there must be people to teach them, and teach them with authority. The existing DEBACLE professors—nurtured, nourished, and suspended in a traditional broth of British and American writings—were in no position to teach these strange courses. New faculty positions had to be created, argued for with the dean and the provost, approved by them, advertised and, after appropriate sifting through the applications and interviews and job talks, filled.

How things do happen! A prominent and wealthy citizen of Scotiaville, wherein Huntington University was located, an oilman named Francis Mahadu, whose ethnic origin was a veritable pastiche—part Mauritian, part Sri Lankan, part Argentinian, part American—had been mulling over the endowment of a new professorial chair to the university. As an oilman his natural inclination would have been to donate the chair to the department of petroleum engineering. But he was a highly unusual oilman, as his fellow oilmen knew. His Argentinian grandmother had once talked to him about her compatriot, Victoria Ocampo, an heiress, and her platonic relationship when she was in her thirties with the much older Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in the 1920s. Fascinated by the story, Francis Mahadu was led to read some of Tagore’s poems in translation, and then his short stories and his novels; and then his philosophical writings.

He became, in short, while still an oilman-in-the-making, a Tagore aficionado. While fellow Americans, even fellow-oilmen, went to Puttaparthi in southern India to seek darshan of the mystic and spiritual figure Satya Sai Baba, Mahadu travelled to eastern India, to the city of Santiniketan, so named by Tagore, where the poet had lived and founded his great, idealistic university. There, he saw Tagore’s dark, brooding paintings, which had been first exhibited in Paris, largely through Victoria Ocampo’s efforts. Through much ingenious effort, he managed to purchase two of the paintings, which were added to his collection of Tagoreiana—translations of his Bangla writings into French, Spanish and English and the poet’s considerable original writings in English. Frances Mahadu had two regrets: that he could not read Tagore in the original Bangla; and that he could not appreciate the poet’s huge ten thousand strong corpus of songs, Rabindra Sangeet, Tagore music, whose lyrics and tunes he had both composed.

When Francis heard of the creation of DEBACLE, when word came to him that the department needed new faculty in such areas as Commonwealth literature, he seized the moment. To the chagrin of the dean of engineering and the disgust of the head of the petroleum engineering department, with that whimsical turn his employees were all too familiar with, he announced his decision: he would endow a very handsome chair, he informed the university foundation’s director, responsible for managing Huntington’s endowments, but it would be on Indian literature in English. The foundation’s director, the board, and the university’s president were quite taken aback. This was not a subject within their normal frame: almost without exception, Huntington’s endowed professorships were in the sciences, biomedicine, business, engineering, and law. No one had ever wanted to create a chair in the liberal arts. That an offer was on hand on what they thought was an outlandish field left them nonplussed. A few delicate probes, a few tactful attempts to steer the chair into something of more economic value to the university, to the community, to the state were met with implacable and amused silence. It would have to be Indian literature in English or nothing.

And so it came to pass that for the first time in its hundred-plus year history, Huntington University appointed someone to teach English literature whose surname was not Anglo-American, who was not of the Christian or Jewish faith, and whose native tongue was not English.

Hari Lall, the first incumbent of Francis Mahadu professorship in Indian literature in English was, his new colleagues learnt, originally from Delhi—a city in northern India, he clarified to those who, like most of their American compatriots, were somewhat vague about such matters—and a Punjabi, a community whose existence no one in DEBACLE knew of before his arrival. As for his name: ‘No, it’s not Harry,’ he told them firmly when he came for the interview, ‘you should pronounce it as Hurry with a short Huh, though even that isn’t entirely correct but phonetically it’s the closest you can get in English’. ‘It’s Hurry with a short Huh’ became a mantra with the people in Huntington, whenever the matter of how they should call him surfaced; for the students it became his nickname, behind his back, of course.

At any rate Hari Lall came with impeccable, indeed brilliant credentials. He had two undergraduate degrees, one from Delhi, one from Oxford, and his Ph.D. was from Columbia where he had been mentored by the likes of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, names most of the DEBACLE faculty were unaware of before they read Hari’s curriculum vitae, before they scanned the Internet and discovered their intellectual stature; he had taught at one of the New York colleges, and had written two books, one on postcolonial literature in general, dedicated to Edward Said, the other on the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan—whose name the DEBACLE faculty had not heard of before; they had to consult Wikipedia to know what he had achieved.

Mindless of the advice of his friends and colleagues in New York, New Haven, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Chicago, and Oxford, who thought he was quite out of his mind to move from New York to a small university-and-oil town in the depth of Cajun Louisiana, he accepted the offer. A named endowed professorship in the humanities, he told himself, was hard to come by in this day and age when whatever budget-cut-price-funds there were in higher education were being directed to support technology, biomedicine, and the applied sciences. And the salary that came with the chair, the discretionary funds which guaranteed adequate travel support, and the promise of a secretary all of his own were additional compelling factors. The decision was only his to make for he was divorced and his children were living with his ex-wife.

SEVERAL YEARS HAD PASSED since Hari Lall’s appointment. The perks that came with the Mahadu professorship had two consequences: he recruited the secretary promised to him; and he had ample sources for travel.

The secretary’s name was Carmen Rodrigue, she was part Cajun part Cuban, a self-confessed lapsed Catholic in her early thirties, flamboyantly attractive, given to wearing long pendulous earrings, gaudy bangles, and a plethora of rings on her fingers, with a divorce somewhere in her past. Within a few months of her appointment Hari and Carmen were sleeping together. Within a year she had moved from her apartment into his commodious four-bedroomed home near campus. Late into their second year they discovered she was pregnant; they hastily married and soon after Carmen became a first-time mother and Hari Lall a father again after a dozen years.

The affair, when it began, was cause for much gossip, in DEBACLE initially, then across campus, spread through the secretarial grapevine, but the excitement died down soon enough, for there was no scandal in this liaison, both being divorced and single, and there were no rules against university employees romancing each other. Besides, a much more interesting scandal erupted when it was revealed in the Scotiaville Advocate that the director of the university’s parking and transit department and his assistant director, who was also his mistress, had systematically filched over a hundred thousand dollars over the past several years from the pay-parking revenues, that a senior university official, a vice-president no less, had been warned of it by the department’s book-keeper but had done nothing about it, that, instead, had so intimidated the book-keeper that she had resigned.

In the meantime, and through the years, Hari’s international reputation as an interpreter and critic of colonial and postcolonial writing in English grew. Several more books came forth, one of which on the relationship between literature and imperialism in the 19th century became an international bestseller, translated into twenty-six languages, and a standard text in graduate degree programs of all kinds in the humanities.

As with Midnight’s Children, Jarvis De Soto, head of DEBACLE, could make neither head nor tail of the contents of Hari’s books. The terms, the jargon, the sentences, the substance itself completely eluded him. He even wondered sotto voce to intimate friends and colleagues whether these postmodern critics were taking everyone else for a gigantic ride, whether they were perpetrating a huge joke on the intellectual community, a suspicion hardened by his reading of an article about his beloved Walt Whitman by a young postmodernist. (He had asked himself in bewilderment whether this author and he had read the same poet.)

But as head of DEBACLE Jarvis De Soto knew a golden goose when he saw one. Hari Lall drew a new population of graduate students to the department, whose demographics was pronouncedly different from what had been, for the students in the old English department were almost entirely white, almost entirely Southern, whereas the new DEBACLE found itself admitting whites and African-Americans from the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, even from the East Coast and—a dazzlingly novel experience for the older faculty—from abroad, skins of many shades, from tanned Antipodean white to Arab swarthy to Indian brown to African black, bearing unfamiliar surnames. They came from the West Indies, Australia, from Nigeria, Ghana and the Ivory Coast, from Tunisia, from Egypt and Syria. And they came from the South Asian subcontinent, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. This multiculturalism, this internationalism, Jarvis De Soto recognized, was largely Hari Lall’s doing. They flocked to him. He was the Pied Piper of Huntington.

And Hari Lall travelled. In the summer months, during the Christmas break, in the Mardi Gras interlude—in the Deep South, Scotiaville was only second to New Orleans in its celebration of Mardi Gras—during Easter, Hari would rarely be seen on campus. Leaving his wife to tend to their daughter—though in summer they would occasionally accompany him to the more interesting destinations—he went all over the world, to deliver keynote addresses at conferences and seminars, or invited lectures at universities in all the continents. As his reputation grew, the invited lectures became more prestigious, more exclusive; at first distinguished lectures and then endowed, proper-named lectures, the Honeycomb Lectures in London, the Barrett Lectures in Berkeley, the Torres Lectures in Barcelona, the Rossi Lectures in Pisa, and so on. Keeping in step with these invitations came the honorary doctorates, degrees honoris causa. They rained upon him fast and furious. Hari Lall began to collect honorary degrees like a child collects stamps or baseball cards.

Of course the greatest universities of the world beckoned. Offers came from the Harvards and the Yales, the Princetons and the Stanfords, the Oxfords and the Sorbonnes, and from his alma mater, Columbia. To the bafflement of all he turned them all down. They were not to know the reason. The fact was that Hari Lall was immensely grateful to Huntington for awarding him the Mahadu chair when they did. He was thankful for the free rein they gave him to pursue his own brand of teaching and scholarship. They had left him alone. He was mindful that this was where he had met his new love and had a new daughter, a new family. He enjoyed this community, its peculiarly unique culture, the Cajun culture he had known nothing about before he arrived on this campus. Perhaps most of all he revelled in being a very large fish in a rather small pond, a pond vastly smaller than those of the Ivy Leagues and their ilk where he would be an eminence among many eminences.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 2007 Hari Lall was in Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, to deliver the Indrajit Roy Memorial Public Lecture, named in honour of the great Bengali film-maker and auteur. Hari was the third of the Roy lecturers, the first being a renowned Bengali historian who lived and worked in Australia, and the second an eminent Tamil poet and translator who lived in France. Of course, it had not escaped the notice of some disgruntled Kolkata citizens that thus far the Roy lecturers were all NRIs, non-resident Indians, living abroad and carrying foreign citizenships. The letters to the editor page of the city’s oldest English language newspaper carried several querulous complaints, the letter writers asking, were there no deserving writers, film-makers, scholars, artists or other intellectuals amidst the billion and a quarter Indian citizens who might have been selected to deliver a lecture named after a person who was, after all, one of India’s greatest sons?

Hari Lall, blithely unaware of such rumbles of discontent, delivered his lecture in Kolkata’s largest and most impressive auditorium, a vast enclave that could hold a few thousand people. That day the auditorium was, if not full, impressively filled. It was, after all, a free public lecture and so along with the city’s academic, intellectual, and creative worthies, a sprinkling of political bigwigs and media celebrities were in attendance, along with students and the general nine-to-five public—office goers, civil servants and the like. For—as the madam chairperson of the Indrajit Roy Public Lecture Foundation remarked to Hari, surveying the scene before them from the stage before the formalities began—Kolkata’s love affair with the life of the mind was one of this harried city’s most endearing traits.

IN THIS AUDIENCE WAS Joya Bose, an M.A. student of comparative literature in Kolkata’s Jadavpur University. And as Hari Lall spoke on his chosen theme, The Magical, the Mythical and the Real, he wove for his listeners’ benefit a many-hued story in which appeared the Hindu epics, the novels of Günter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Isabel Allende, and Angela Carter, and the films of