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Emotional peak

Last Updated 16 June 2012, 12:00 IST

Late in this quietly mesmerising novel, set in a Himalayan hill town in the north of India, Anuradha Roy describes the crystalline beauty of the peaks in winter, viewed long after the haze of the summer months and the fog of the monsoon, held in secret for those who choose to brave the cold.

In the mountains, one of Roy’s characters observes, “love must be tested by adversity.”

It’s the inherent conflict in human attraction — the inescapable fact that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them — that forms the spine of the novel.


In marrying a Christian, the narrator, Maya, has become estranged from her wealthy family in Hyderabad. But after six happy years together, her husband has died in a mountaineering accident.She seeks refuge in Ranikhet, a town that looks toward the mountains that so entranced her husband. Overcome with grief, she stows away his backpack, recovered from the scene of the accident, and refuses to inspect its contents. She can’t bear to know the details surrounding his death.

Maya settles into a routine: teaching at a Christian school; spending time with her landlord, Diwan Sahib; and observing the sometimes comic rhythms of the village and its army garrison.

Roy manages to capture both the absurd and the sinister in even minor characters, like a corrupt local official who embarks on a beautification plan that includes posting exhortatory signs around town. His crusade, inspired by the Sing­aporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who embraced caning as a punishment, also includes the persecution of a simple-­minded but harmless herder.

This sedate world exists only to be shaken, and soon enough the town is disturbed from all sides. An election brings issues of religion to the fore, threatening to stir sectarian violence.

Curious military manoeuvres prompt rumours of Chinese spies and fears of a border conflict with Pakistan. Diwan Sahib’s nephew, Veer, a mountaineering guide, moves into the elderly man’s villa, and Maya finds herself drawn to him, despite the bad habits he encourages in his uncle and, more alarmingly, his tendency to disappear without warning.


While there are scenes of tension and intrigue — a political goon attacks a young girl, Veer’s work in the mountains starts to appear suspicious — the novel’s mood
remains elegiac rather than fraught, expressed through tragedies like the burning of a valuable manuscript or the death of a beloved deer.

Roy is particularly adept at mining the emotional intricacies of the relationship between Maya and Diwan Sahib, which also serves to symbolise India’s uneasy passage from tradition to modernity.

The novel’s one weakness is its culminating revelation (and its consequences), which feels strangely insignificant, as if Roy couldn’t bring herself to commit to the more outrageous implications she has set in motion. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” a character notes of a day when the Himalayas are shrouded in clouds, “would he believe you? But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” Perhaps Roy prefers to keep the heights of her story, like those mountaintops, shrouded in mystery.

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(Published 16 June 2012, 12:00 IST)

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