JOIN USSouth Haven
Hirsh Sawhney
Harper Collins
2017, pp 295, Rs 399
Hirsh Sawhney’s debut novel, South Haven, adds to the existing body of diaspora fiction, handling the everyday living of an immigrant family. Alongside this concern with how people live as Indian Americans, there is a past to reckon with and a contemporary India to make sense of.
Siddhartha Arora is the Buddha of suburbia here, of the suburb of South Haven. The story is his, and his family’s, and the way they drift apart after his mother dies. The accident begins a process of grieving. The loss affects Siddhartha, his older brother Arjun, and their father Mohan Lal, differently. While Arjun is away at college, a new family begins to take shape when Mohan Lal comes closer to another woman, and Siddhartha to her son. The passage of time changes everybody and everything else — friendships, mindsets, loyalties and ideas about love.
The use of generations as a situation to play out the dynamics of location and movement constitutes one of the basic strategies of immigrant writing. Siddhartha and Mohan Lal are on the opposite sides of how to behave, how to speak, or how to eat. Mohan Lal’s accent bothers Siddhartha and he is embarrassed by it. It bothers him that his father does not add ‘the’ before ‘media’ or says ‘walletility’ for ‘volatility’. The father’s vocabulary has words like ‘bloody’ or ‘serpent’ which Siddhartha does not connect to. Mohan Lal’s increasing interest in India bothers his son because, for him, it is a ‘dirty country’, and worse, a place where people ‘shat on train tracks’. On the other hand, the father feels bitter about the way the West blames everything on the parents. The generational nuance of language and psyche is a huge presence in the novel.
The perspective of the child, the inner life of Siddhartha, adds a streak of complexity to the processing of the events in the narrative. As a 10-year-old, as someone with Indian origins but American by birth, and as someone who has lost his mother, he is uncomfortable everywhere. His thoughts and his words do not match, and this kind of dissonance is very disturbing. For him, his father is a ‘jerk’, his teacher is ‘the biggest loser in the world’, or music is for ‘losers’. At one point, Sawhney says it very directly, “If people could read his mind, they would think he was crazy” (91). He is unable to make sense of India: he finds saris ugly, turbans silly, Indian gods feminine. The name Romila sounds ‘ugly’ like Attila or Brunehilda to him. The thoughts are even more horrible because he is unable to express them freely. He thinks his father looks like an ape while teaching because of his gesturing, but calls him the greatest teacher in the world.
The novel is set in the 1990s, the time when cassettes were around and the discman was making its appearance. There are references to the Clinton campaign, the Gulf War, the rise of the BJP, and the attack on the mosque. Sawhney has some interesting insights into that period. The popular music, the sitcoms, L K Advani and the two references to Donald Trump become landmarks to make sense of how things have turned out today. Hindu fundamentalism catches on with Mohan Lal, as does his past, with the Partition.
The novel begins and ends with deaths — the four years spent with Siddhartha tell us about how he is coming to terms with his mother’s death and his own guilt about wishing for that death. The death at the end of the novel is not very different. We leave Siddhartha with the thought that it is not his fault this time. The approach of death-as-beginning is an apt framing of thinking around time and past, hybrid identities and roots and origins.
Food in its avatars of eating at restaurants, warming ready-to-eat processed foods, or cooked meals flavour the relationships among the characters.
Siddhartha is a scary character. With him, we rethink how children grow up with a very skewed understanding of what it means to be an adult. The scarier part is that maybe the adult world is really too skewed to communicate better. This Buddha, in his struggle to know and understand better, faces failure, guilt, doubt, loneliness and humiliation at different turns in his journey of moving into his teens. The kind of clarity that he comes up with is that he is possibly a ‘cruel and demented freak’. He hesitates about the right thing to do. He wonders why his brother reads about India and not America, especially since he is an American. He has heard of categories like ‘refugee’ or ‘single-parent family’ and is upset when the same begin to apply to him.
The facticity of life’s phenomena as in how 50% of marriages end in divorce, or how we grieve twice after a closed one’s death (once for the dead, and once more for the living in their loneliness and suffering) is a crucial perspective on how the West, and increasingly the rest of the world perhaps, absorbs the truths of life. Hirsh Sawhney’s is a commendable attempt to observe all this and more. South Haven’s Buddha, in his childhood innocence and confusion, hopefully becomes a type to be explored even more in immigrant fiction.