The land not promised

In Eve Out of Her Ruins, Mauritian writer Ananda Devi has created a sensitive narrative outlining the lives of four teenagers — Eve, Savita, Saadiq and Clelio — growing up in the appalling environment of Troumaron in Port Louis, which is a ‘sort of funnel where the island’s waste waters ultimately flow’. They are refugees in their own land, cursed to live a doomed existence. An impenetrable wall separates Troumaron from the rest of the island. ‘From here we can’t see the rest of the island... and their eyes all dazzled by the sun can’t see us’.

It is a world where the living are dead. Parents have neither authority nor any talent for nurturing. The only language they speak is the language of violence. It is a world lacking joy, lacking purpose, lacking hope, and though these are only teenagers, they are already weary of life and living. A weariness that finds expression in aggression and violence against the outside world, or is turned inward and eats away at the owner.

The detailing of these lives is like dabs of paint on a watercolour canvas which grows and spreads, hinting at incidents, creating an atmosphere that hangs heavy. We are willing collaborators. We know and know not. The narratives lie side by side. Eve, whose story this is, has nothing to offer except nothingness — ‘the nothingness in her bag, the nothingness of her apartment, or the nothingness of her parents not seeing, not speaking’. Very early she realises that in all this nothingness she has something to offer. Her body becomes her currency. This trade-off increasingly creates a sense of deep disassociation from her own self. She is abandoned by society, by her parents, and most cruelly by her own self. She is beyond love and beyond despair. Contemplating death, she asks, “Am I prone to life?” She senses Saad’s love for her but has no room to let it in. Saad is an acrobat walking a tightrope between classes in the day and gang activities at night. What he feels for Eve is a boundless love of a 17 year old. “Eve is my fate, but she claims not to know it.” While hormones pound his body, an immense tenderness fills his soul with poetry and protectiveness towards Eve. He declares bravely, “For her, with her, for one season or many, I am ready to go into hell.” The middle-aged teacher who spreads Eve out on a table in the biology room, drowning his incompetence and inadequacy in her fragile body, is attempting to overcome frustrations of his own kind. A chance encounter draws gentle Savita to Eve. They are like two notes in a piece of music, and offer each other some respite from the world outside.

Clelio is simmering anger. He cannot help himself as he commits acts of deliberate delinquency. His brother Carlo has gone and left him. He promised to come back but hasn’t. At a phone call from Carlo and a mouthful of false promises, his mother’s face lights up ‘like a Christmas tree’. Clelio, despite his rage, is the most clear-eyed of the four. He sees his mother worked to a bone in a sweatshop and cold rage fills him when she comes home bearing defective sweaters as hard-won prize for her son. Yet, globalisation comes and snatches away even this meagre job, leaving them bereft. Naturally, with his pugnacious temperament, Clelio is the most natural choice when a murder takes place in Troumaron. Even Clelio knows and passively accepts that a murder needs a perpetrator.

But in prison, he experiences an awakening. His rage ebbs away, leaving behind a fertile ground where new thoughts, new feelings can grow. Towards the end of the book there is a softening of contours. Eve’s mother holds her shaved head between her hands and feels a regret of never having been a mother to her, and Eve, in turn, feels a first faint stirring of warmth. Clelio wishes for another chance at life, and Eve lets Saad hold her as she awaits her uncertain future.

Ananda Devi has written a book with almost no dialogues. Each character is imprisoned in his own world of thoughts and action. It is a book of violence, aggression and rage. But couched in a language so lyrical that it almost makes one forget the ugliness. The book has been translated an amazing 10 years after it was published. And it is just as relevant today. The dance of the hormones, the helplessness of the disadvantaged, the violent fury of teenage. A word of praise for the excellent translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, who has kept the music and the rhythms intact so that nothing is lost in translation.