The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan

First published in India in 2018; published in translation by Grove Press/Black Cat on December 10, 2019

An anthropomorphized goat named Poonachi thinks human thoughts, or perhaps her goat thoughts happen to coincide with those that are common to humans. Her simple life as a goat opens a window on human behavior and attitudes. Poonachi experiences love and desire, loss and depression, jealousy and bitterness. She relishes freedom and resents limits that are placed on her behavior. As do many people who have little control over their simple lives, she bemoans her fate.

The story is set in an arid stretch of land called Odakkan Hill, presumably in or near the state of Tamil Nadu in India. An old man receives a black newborn goat as a gift from a tall stranger in a loincloth who predicts that the goat, as the last kid from a litter of seven, will give birth to seven kids of her own. The stranger is looking for a kind heart to raise the goat, knowing that “men of fortune are as plentiful as fruit worms, but a kind heart is rare.”

The old man’s wife names the malnourished kid Poonachi and raises her as if she were a daughter. The couple’s own daughter lives in another village. They see her only once a year when they travel to the daughter’s village for a festival.

The old man and his wife graze goats and grow a few crops, barely surviving from year to year but living serene lives. Poonachi’s life is equally difficult. Soon after the old man brings her home, Poonachi is nearly carried away by an eagle and is later threatened by a wildcat. She suffers a fever after her ear is pierced by a vindictive bureaucrat. When she is older, Poonachi becomes lost in the forest. Exhilarated by the richness of her new environment, however, she isn’t sure she wants to be found.

Poonachi earns a reputation as a miracle goat, particularly when she fulfills her destiny by giving birth to seven kids. But later, in a year of no rain when the couple faces starvation, they wonder whether she is a curse.

While the story creates sympathy for the kindly old man and his wife, the reader’s most tender feelings will be devoted to Poonachi. Mixing with other goats, Poonachi is bullied by an old buck and feels like an outsider. Still, she slowly makes friends and develops a sense of security, a knowledge of her place in the world. That changes when she is taken to visit the old couple’s daughter. The trip is frightening but it opens Poonachi to new experiences and gives her the opportunity to meet Poovan, a buck who kisses her gently and makes her tremble “at the slightest touch of his horn on her body.”

Poonachi feels despair when she must leave Poovan and again when she must leave the forest. Being bred against her will makes her hate the world. She cries when her kids are taken from her and sold. She sees other members of her herd killed for their meat or as a sacrifice to the gods. Eventually she wonders whether life is worth living if everything that matters is sure to be lost. Only her memories of her second encounter with Poovan, who “helped her learn the secrets of her own body,” sustain her.

The novel’s lessons about the joys and hardships of life come from Poonachi and the old couple, but the novel offers some collateral lessons, as well. Farmers and goatherders impart their wisdom in bromides like “only the egg-laying hen knows the pain of an inflamed asshole.” The novel imagines a ruling regime that is a bureaucratic nightmare, one in which government officials carefully regulate the purchase, sale, and registration of goats. People are encouraged to inform on their neighbors if they do not report the birth of a goat. “The regime had the power to turn its own people, at any moment, into adversaries, enemies and traitors.” In the presence of officials, people have “mouths only to keep shut, hands only to make obeisance, knees only to bend and kneel, backs only to bend, and bodies only to shrink before the authorities.”

I don’t recall when I last read a novel that was quite so charming. The story is sad but enriching. Writers often anthropomorphize animals to illuminate the human condition. I wonder if Perumal Murugan anthropomorphized goats to give them a voice. He may be inviting the reader to consider whether animals are like humans in fundamental ways. Why do we assume that goats do not love each other, do not suffer when we separate them from their lovers or offspring, do not feel abused by owners who dictate their limitations?

I live near some goats who, when I pass them, stare at me with utter malevolence — or so it seems to me. Perhaps this story explains their animosity. It certainly reminds us how simple people, and simple goats who think like people, experience love and pleasure while enduring pain and loss in the course of lives that, in the end, are never simple.

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Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

First published in Great Britain in 2019; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 10, 2019

Dinanath “Deen” Datta is a dealer in rare books and antiquities, a profession that does not help him attract the attention of women. He lives in Brooklyn but maintains a residence in Calcutta. When Deen was a student, he did doctoral research on Indian folklore, particularly the story of a conflict between a Merchant and Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes.

An elderly aunt who founded a charity asks to see Deen as he is nearing the end of a trip to Calcutta. A marine biologist named Piya helps the aunt when she is not living in Oregon. Deen is immediately attracted to Piya, but as his therapist has told him, the hope of romance impairs his judgment.

Deen’s aunt tells him a story of the Merchant as she heard it from the caretaker of a shrine to Manasa Devi that stands in the middle of the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest in the Bay of Bengal. Paralleling the ancient story of Manasa Devi’s wrath, the story tells how a Merchant took refuge in a place devoid of snakes known as Gun Island, was later captured by pirates, and struck a deal with Manasa Devi to save himself. In return for freedom and prosperity, the Merchant built the shrine to Manasa Devi.

When Deen visits the shrine, a boy named Rafi fills in more of the Merchant's story. Bad luck befalls Deen, Rafi, and a boy named Tipu during the visit. With the help of a knowledgeable acquaintance and having examined markings on the shrine, Deen later reinterprets the legends that surround Gun Island.

The heart of the story begins when Deen is asked to interpret for a filmmaker who is making a documentary about migrants in Venice. He is surprised to learn how many residents of the Venetian Ghetto speak Bangla. He is also surprised to find Rafi working in Venice. When Piya contacts him to report that Tipu has disappeared from the Sundarbans, Deen suspects that Rafi knows more about Tipu’s whereabouts than he is willing to admit.

Snakes, spiders and legends about Italian sea monsters and the possession of souls begin to trouble Deen during his Venetian adventure. Yet other monsters are a more immediate threat, including worms that are eating the wooden foundations upon which Venice is built, a threat directly rated to warming seas caused by climate change. The story also draws interesting parallels between dolphins, who are forced to search for new hunting grounds when pollutants create “dead zones” in oceans where no fish survive, and people who leave the Sundarbans because the sea no longer supports fishermen. “No one knows where they belong any more, neither humans nor animals.”

In addition to addressing the impact of climate change, the novel focuses on refugees who are trying to make their way to Italy by boat. They encounter resistance from Italian authorities. That story, like the harrowing journey that Rafi and Tipu take from India, smuggled into Iran and running from shots fired by Turkish border guards, is a timely reminder of the dangers faced by unwelcome migrants everywhere. How the developed world treats impoverished refugees is one of the novel’s key themes.

The story’s weakness is its attempt to make events in Italy echo the legend of the Merchant, including creatures converging on the refugees from the sea and air. I won’t give away the ending, but it the kind of moral climax that might be found in a parable. Gun Island is too complex to classify as a parable, but it strains to combine elements of legend with the realities of the modern world. Still, Amitav Ghosh tells a moving story in graceful prose, making it easy for readers to sympathize with unfortunate characters and to admire characters who behave decently despite their financial success.

Transplanting symbols of the legend into Deen’s life is a clever concept that doesn’t quite work. I find it difficult to invest in stories that depend on elements of fantasy while making clear that the narrative is not a fantasy. Perhaps readers who are more willing to accept the miraculous will have a different opinion. Nevertheless, for its well-developed characters and its juxtaposition of the two most pressing social problems in the modern world (global warming and hostility to migrants), Gun Island is an important and intriguing novel.

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All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

First published in Great Britain in 2018; published by Atria Books on November 20, 2018

Abhay Chan, known to most as Myshkin Rozario, finds trees and dogs to be better companions than humans. He is an old man who faces ridicule, yet the reader comes to understand him as eccentric in the best way, shaped by good intentions and disappointment with the human condition. Like everyone, has been shaped by his past. Unlike most, the details of his past have been concealed from him. Only later in life does he appreciate his need to fill in the missing pages.

Myshkin tells the story of his youth, but it is really the story of his mother, Gayatri, who (unlike most Indian women of her time) was raised not to catch a husband but to nurture her gifts for art and music. Gayatri’s father traveled abroad with her until, after his death, her brothers began the task of finding her a husband who was willing to tolerate a sharp-tongued woman who had wasted her youth by crossing oceans. Finding Gayatri a husband meant exhibiting her as livestock while suitors and their families drank tea in the drawing room and inspected her hair. The family’s choice boiled down to the only man who would have her, a Northern Indian twice her age whose scandalous contempt for caste and religion did not overcome the family’s desire to rid themselves of Gayatri.

It is in chapters like those narrating Gayatri’s arranged marriage that Anuradha Roy captures the India so familiar to readers of UK fiction and that so often wins (or is shortlisted for) Booker prizes. It is an India that awards only such freedom to women as self-congratulatory men choose to give them, that refuses to abandon a caste system even as it rebels from British colonizers with grand speeches about the importance of equality and self-determination.

Myshkin recalls a German writer/artist/musician named Walter Spies who appeared in search of Gayatri, having met her years earlier in Bali. Spies is accompanied by Beryl de Zoete, a scholar of dance who once rescued Jewish dancers from Germany and now sees Gayatri as worthy of rescue. Gayatri has felt stifled since Myshkin’s birth, as if the beginning of his life put a stop to the rest of the world, and it is knowledge of that fact that shapes Myshkin’s memories of his childhood.

Indian history is central to the novel in other respects, as well. While mostly hiding in the shadows, Myshkin’s father claims to follow the spiritual leader Mukti Devi in her nonviolent resistance to British rule. Myshkin’s father views Mukti Devi as an exemplar of women’s liberation. Gayatri can only wonder why his enlightened view of women’s role in society does not extend to his own home. Later, Myshkin can only wonder about the fated moment when his mother leaves home without him. From her perspective, Gayatri had no choice: obedience and propriety were the top entries on her personal list of deadly sins.

The novel’s first half sets up Myshkin’s life as a child abandoned by his mother. The story then moves through his father’s efforts to cope with his loss of Gayatri, the impact of World War II on India and on Myshkin’s father, the evil nature of governments that define protest as sedition or homosexuality as a crime, the different attitudes toward women in Indian and Balinese society, and Myshkin’s evolving understanding of his mother. The novel invites a sympathetic response both to Myshkin (who yearns for a lost mother) and Gayatri (who abandons a child to avoid going mad but must live with the maddening consequences of that decision).

A couple of lengthy sections comprised of Gayatri’s letters home create a lull that is the novel’s only misstep. The letters illustrate Gayatri’s growth and they add new insight into Gayatri’s decision to leave her husband, but Gayatri’s anxiety-filled travelogue lacks the immediacy of the narrative that precedes and follows the letters.

One letter accuses someone in Gayatri’s past of “feckless self-indulgence,” a criticism that might seem hypocritical given the choices that Gayatri made. The novel’s value is that it invites the reader to weigh Gayatri’s choice and to consider whether, on balance, it was the right choice to make. I appreciate Roy’s decision to allow the reader to judge Gayatri, or not, rather than insisting that only one judgment is possible.

In any event, judgment is not the point of All The Lives We Never Lived. As the title suggests, all lives involve choices. Each choice sends us on a path that forecloses other paths. With graceful prose and compelling characters, Roy reminds us how the same choices can be both liberating and confining as they lead to unknowable futures and cause unforeseeable consequences.

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Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

Published in the UK in 2016; published by Scribner on January 3, 2017

Selection Day seems to be a light comedy about a father, his two sons, and their passion for cricket until it becomes a more serious coming-of-age novel. I didn’t think much of the last Aravind Adiga novel I read, but I’m giving this one full marks.

Radha Krishna Kumar is the finest young batsmen in Mumbai, and his brother Manjunath is nearly as good. That, at least, is the opinion held by Parmod Sawant, the head cricket coach at an international school, although Pramod must defer to Tommy Sir, the best talent scout in India. Plans are afoot, not all of them legitimate, to invest in the two brothers, as Anand Mehta proposes to act as agent for (and owner of) the two cricketeers while pocketing the profit from their success.

The boys attained their lofty status thanks to their father, Mohan Kumar, a seller of chutney who has devoted his life to teaching the boys useless proverbs, correct posture, and the fundamentals of cricket. The boys, of course, resent their controlling father, in part because he caused their mother to flee. Cricket seems to be their only hope of a better life.

A rivalry between young Manju Kumar and his older brother develops as the novel progresses. But when Manju befriends another young cricket player, Javed Ansari, his thoughts turn to poetry and music and college and everything that is not cricket. Is he being led astray, or is being encouraged to find his true destiny? In the coming-of-age tradition, Manju finds himself pulled in several directions at once as he tries to decide how to live his life.

Many of the characters in Selection Day play familiar comedic roles — particularly the father, Tommy Sir, and Anand Mehta — and much the novel is quite funny. Comedy aside, the relationship between Javed (a Muslim) and Manju (a Hindu) explores serious questions involving religion, sexuality, and social status in India.

Adiga uses cricket to open a window into India’s problems, which he sees as corruption, prejudice, resistance to modernization, and a tendency toward self-delusion, among other issues (including literary offenses committed by Indian authors who meet the shallow demands of the reading public). At the same time, the book has universal appeal, revealing character traits (vulnerability, manipulation, self-aggrandizement, empathy) that are recognizable in all cultures.

Whether Manju makes the right choices in his life is, of course, something that only Manju can judge, but the end of the book gives the reader a peek at Manju’s young adulthood. That invites the reader to ponder how Manju’s life might have turned out if he gone in a different direction. The ending isn’t what I might have predicted and it is all the more satisfying for that reason.

I should add that this is not the first novel I’ve read in which cricket plays a dominant role, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea how the game is actually played. Fortunately, a reader doesn’t need to understand cricket to understand Selection Day. And for those who care, Adiga appended an amusing glossary of cricket terms.

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Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

First published in India in 2012; published by Penguin Books on June 24, 2014

Imelda's son calls his mother Em; his father, Augustine, is the Big Hoom. Em is apparently a suicidal manic-depressive who sometimes hears voices and suffers from paranoia, but in the vernacular of her family, she has "gone mad," a condition that has existed for some time. In their effort to experience a normal childhood, her children "snatched at her during the intervals" between up and down. Other than the two years during which lithium seemed to stabilize her, those intervals were infrequent. We are told that Em's illness often sealed her off from her family.

Em's son, a cultural journalist, narrates the novel, which is partially about the impact Em's mental illness has had upon him and his fear that he has a genetic predisposition to the same disease. The novel is also the story of Em, who talks to her son about her life in uncensored candor. Em's son listens and questions carefully, looking for clues to the origin of his mother's breakdown. The conversations follow a winding and amusing path.

To a lesser extent, the novel is the story of the Big Hoom, as his son pieces it together from stories told by each of his parents. The combined story of Em and the Big Hoom is one of a lengthy but traditional courtship (complete with conniving families), but it is also a story of love and obligation which, from the Big Hoom's perspective, are the same thing.

Jerry Pinto writes effortless prose with a light touch that emphasizes the quirky behaviors and conflicting beliefs of each character. As a general rule, the characters find a way to do what they want, traditions and religions and castes and social opprobrium notwithstanding. They also find, to the extent they can, ways not just to cope, but to find pleasure in an environment of misery. Much of that comes from caring about each other, even when Em's provocative behavior might make it difficult for her family to care about her.

Of course, it helps that Em is delightful, as are her idiosyncratic relatives. Whether in or out of "madness," Em's brash humor is unfailing. That makes the novel a fun read but it also minimizes the tragic aspect of the story. The adverse impact that mental illness has on the family members is less apparent than the humor that bond them. Em's son talks about the anguish he has experienced but the novel did not give me a good sense of his pain. Perhaps this light novel is therefore too light, but that also makes it an easy and enjoyable read.

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