I was clearing out my old books bag recently and came across the screenplay of In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, the film Arundhati Roy wrote and that won a National Award in the 1980s. I was seeing it after a long time, so I decided to go through parts of it again. And as I turned the pages, a familiar feeling of another world – nice, innocent, gently sad – hovered over me. A world so richly brought to life in Ms Roy’s The God of Small Things (GOST) in which tragedy visits the best people and death takes away the brightest, the most radical, the avant garde.
But today, that also happens to be my problem with both Annie and GOST. Annie is set in an architecture school where two sets of people are clearly distinguishable — the bourgeois, middle class types exemplified by Lakes (played by Divya Seth) who worry about women’s modesty et al. And the other, the bohemians, populated by the likes of Radha (Ms Roy herself) who dope, booze and generally have fun all over. In a telling scene, Radha overhears a conversation that Lakes is having in the next counter in the loo (which, to be fair, does roil in its screechiness) and simply stands atop her seat and pushes down the handle of the flush in Lakes’.
Back when I was in engineering college and first read Annie, this chic, damn-with-world-crowd held special attraction. These people, including Radha’s boyfriend, Arjun, seemed the perfect embodiments of all the love, craziness and – that word again – gentle sadness looking down on me. When at the end of the book Radha dies by drowning and Arjun returns to the back of beyond to become a commercial farmer, it was the end of the other-wordly glamour that had touched these lives in their youth. It was all too much.
Too much what? Too much dramatisation. Too much artiness. Too much running away from life. Yes, both Annie and GOST suffer from a lack of messy, dirty living. Characters in these books, Ammu and Velutha in GOST for instance, suffer grand tragedies, elaborate hurt and harrowing emotional pain. And they always die heroes. Always! Not for Ms Roy’s characters the grubby everyday task of raising children, running to office and living life one day to the next and locating joys therein. Not for them the reconciling of a terrible past with the need – no, necessity – to negotiate life day by day.
When I shared this view with a journalist who writes on literature, he disagreed: “It’s true, isn’t it, that there is nothing grand in a regular, ordinary bourgeois life?” he said. “Are you saying that the characters in Annie and GOST are less real because they are not shown engaged in, or going back to, messy dirty living?”
Yes, I am saying precisely that. If I was Ammu and I fell in love with a low-caste man, how convenient it would be for my creator (in this case Ms Roy) to kill me off and not live to see the future of my relationship develop with all its attendant problems. If GOST was set in Haryana and Ammu had been, like Velutha, knocked off for reasons of honour, that would still make sense. But to present a story of caste and to dress it up in exquisite prose and then to just leave it at that belie the real work that was called for on Ms Roy’s part.
Frankly, I just got tired of the easy endings. Ammu gets killed, so does Radha. Why kill your characters after a blaze of rich storytelling? Because you don’t know how to bring them back to ordinariness? Well, tough luck. For, that is literature. The real, the ordinary, the messy (Lakes in Annie marries a mosquito repellent manufacturer, and I am certain Ms Roy’s choice of the husband’s profession had some relation to her dim view of bourgeois life).
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I like to cite the example of The Hours in this context. After Richard kills himself, Clarissa realises she has spent the better part of her life caring for a man she was deeply in love with but who could not reciprocate because he was homosexual. Now he is dead; she is free. She feels free — free enough to return to life with her partner, sealing her resolve with a kiss and, in the closing scene of the movie version, walking through the apartment, switching off the lights, a beatific smile playing on her lips.
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