Advertisement

The Top of the Raintree
Author: Kamalini Sengupta
Publisher: IndiaInk
Pages: 293
Price: Rs 295

The difference between a historical novel and a novelwith a historical backdrop is similar to that between a wildlife conservationist and a game hunter. The props may be common but the purposes are wildly dissimilar.

Kamalini Sengupta places her sprawling novel in the historical, rather than the geographical, setting — settings, actually, considering it flits back and forth decades — of Calcutta.

At the epicentre of the drama is the Rajmahal, a mansion on the thoroughfare of Chowringhee that sees various kinds of people inhabit it and imbue it with life up and down the years. There is the Sikh patriarch, Sardar Bahadur Ohri,who moves with his wife Inderjeet Kaur, from far away Saidabad to live in the mansion bought from the family of its first owner Raja Sheetanath.

Approaching the end of his life, Sardar Bahadur sells the house to the Mallicks, the Ohris retain the ground floor, the rest of the house is let out to Jack and Myrna Strachey, the Russian Petrov and his stage actress wife Reema Devi, the alcoholic ‘polo-widow’ Maudie Jessop and her brother David Norman, and other delectable characters. What seems like a Noah’s arkful of tenants is actually various generations of Rajmahal’s inhabitants jostling for space in time.

Sengupta uses the characters of ghosts flitting in and out of her novel — some of them like Inderjeet Kaur appearing early on as living inhabitants of Rajmahal — passing comments (“It’s shocking, a disgrace!” they whispered. “She’s not observing the smallest of the requirements, just look at her!”) on their ever-failing successors. The swirl of characters does lend a shimmering quality to both the Rajmahal as well as the novel. But sometimes the gear changes are a bit too mechanical.

So instead of an ironic, almost comic version of Tagore’s Khudhito Pashan (The Hungering Stone, in which ghosts permeate another decrepit mansion), The Top Of The Raintree becomes a series of skits with an unchanging set. Sengupta is good with the many situations with which she peppers her novel.

Early on in the story, the son and daughter-in-law of the Stracheys who have ‘stayed back’ in India, Martin and Gwendolyn, are taken out by their fellow tenant across the landing, Proshanto Mojumdar, to a theatre. The choice of
entertainment is Neel Dorpon, a historic and controversial play showing the British as whip-wielding despots sucking the lifeblood out of indigo growers. While Martin watches with glee, his bride, Gwen, seethes inside.

Oh! Calcutta

Sengupta provides the atmospherics. “When the dastardly English planter, played with a combination of bombast and lasciviousness, threatened to rape her [the victim played by Reema Devi Petrov], the laboured breathing of the audience turned the hall steamy.” It is when a member of the audience, worked to a frenzy by the ongoing performance, throws a shoe at the actor playing the role of the nasty planter that Gwen, the ‘civilised’ Englishwoman in post-Independent Calcutta can’t take it any more. “‘How can you sit and watch this, this...!’ She couldn’t finish her hissing sentence and turned towards poor Proshanto Mojumdar.”

What gives the situation — and the novel — an edge is that individuals transcend the pat public-historical terrain of a former ruling class being scandalised by the ‘act’ of free Indians. For Sengupta goes into the psycho-profiles of her characters, telling us, for instance, that Martin was not as excited about watching Neel Dorpon as much as he was excited—“indulging in the erotic prospect of teasing her”—about the reaction it would drag out of his wife.

The Top of The Raintree could have been a more sophisticated, edgy book if it its more descriptive ‘let’s-put-in-more-historical-markers’ parts were excised. But then, perhaps the editors knew more about reading tastes, which seem to favour historical novels, than those curling up with a book that could have been a genre-bending classic.

Ishan Chaudhuri is a freelance writer based in Kolkata