The spirit of the '60s came to India camouflaged in beatnik rucksacks. On the journey in, the contents usually included one or more of the following: a battered Lonely Planet guide, love beads, ecstasy-inducing substances, anti-malaria pills "" and a copy of Herman Hesse's Journey to the East. Owners and rucksacks often made their way through a succession of ashrams to Anjuma Beach or Manali, spreading their own peculiar philosophy of free love and free (preferably government-sponsored) Mary Jane as they imbibed enlightenment and the mysteries of the Orient.
The backpack brigade pops up occasionally in books about that time "" its members made guest appearances in Jhabvala's Heat and Dust and John Irving's Son of the Circus, among other works. In Anita Desai's latest novel, they occupy centrestage. Journey to Ithaca is probably the first book written by an Indian author to look at the search for peace in India from the point of view of the seekers, Sophie and Matteo.
As their story unwinds, it becomes caught up in and inextricably entwined with that of Matteo's chosen guru, the Mother. In the process, Journey to Ithaca moves from a pristine Italy to the rambling confusion of India, from the suppressed tumult of Cairo to the fragile civilisation of France, from a crumbling, faded Venice to a tense, Prohibition-era New York.
Matteo's personal quest begins when his tutor in Italy presents him with a copy of Hesse's Journey to the East and Siddhartha, neither of which strike his grandmother as acceptable reading for a young, impressionable boy. But for Matteo, as for others of his generation, this is the spark that sets him off. Desai sums up his reaction in one revealing line:
The light was gone from the silver lake, now dull and tarnished, when Fabian stuck the book back into his pocket..." From this moment on, Italy has nothing to offer him that he wants. Desai charts his progress through the various stages of adolescent rebellion clinically, but not without compassion. Then he meets and marries Sophie, attracted to her at first sight because of her disregard for appearances.
Their honeymoon is an unqualified disaster as Sophie's hard practicality clashes with Matteo's often exasperating search for his self. As they experience the nastier aspects of pilgrimages and ashram life, a sourness settles into the marrow of their marriage. For Sophie, the discomfort and the daily shocks that living in India entails build up to a stage where she can neither cope with it nor communicate with her husband.
I want to go to Goa and eat shrimp. I want to go to Kashmir and live on a houseboat. And lie in the sun and eat omelettes all day."
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Matteo was disgusted. 'That isn't India.'"
For Sophie, finally, apathy sets in. The diary she had tried to write fell apart and disappeared without anyone noticing. The pilgrimage through India became suffused with the rich and aromatic haze of marijuana; it clung to her and became her clothing." Then disaster strikes in the form of Matteo's illness and Sophie's discovery that she is pregnant. It is at this critical juncture that Matteo finds the Mother's ashram.
The Mother is not merely a completely believable character but a compelling and entirely persuasive guru. There is nothing in the ashram of the cheap magician's tricks that categorised the gurus the two had met with earlier. The ashram is clean, run on democratic lines, and it actually does exude a sense of peace.
The Mother derives her power from appearing as she is, an elderly woman with a sense of humour and wit flavouring her discourses on spiritual peace. She makes no obvious attempt to capture the loyalty of her devotees; and she does not promise that the way to inner peace is easy. Desai has done extensive research into the life of Mother Mirra, a lady who finds mention in Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay, and one suspects that she is partially the inspiration for the Mother.
Just as Journey to Ithaca is settling into semi-predictability, with the conflict between faith and scepticism as its cornerstone, Desai turns the narrative deftly into something approaching detective story. This time, it's Sophie's delving into the past that shapes the narrative, as flashbacks from the Mother's past life as Laila blend seamlessly into the former's travels.
Laila's life echoes Matteo's in its desperate search for something to believe in. Desai makes the reader experience Laila's intense alienation from her life in Cairo and from her cousins in Paris. When she sees an Indian troupe perform the Krishna Lila, her diffused yearnings come together in a coherent whole. She joins the troupe, entering into a clumsy pas de deux with Indian spirituality in the form of the troupe's leader, a calculating dancer of some repute called, inevitably, Krishna.
Unlike most novels that tackle the tricky subject of belief, Journey to Ithaca never gets bogged down with the weight of its own concerns. The book works at many different levels, and Desai allows the reader easy access to all of them. It is always a pleasure to read Anita Desai for two reasons in particular: her use of the English language and her delineation of minor characters. There are very few authors who use language the way an accomplished painter uses his paintbrush, but Desai is definitely one of them. Her characters, too, recognise the importance of words:
Matteo, bitterly: Food. Bed. Baby. House. Are those your words?'
Sophie: 'Yes. Yes! They are good words and I like them. Say them again. I didn't know you knew them. I thought you had forgotten them.'"
As for the minor characters "" Signora Durante, Montu-da the doctor, Laila's Aunt Francoise, Sophie's two children "" they are delineated as clearly and with as much personality as figures in the background of a Degas painting.
Ultimately, Journey to Ithaca lives up to the promise of the poem by C P Cavafy from which the title is taken. To paraphrase the poem, the reader does close this book rich with all he has gained on the way, not having expected that this Journey would offer him riches.