Lives in search of a narrative

Walking from the Gallows is the story of the rise and fall of one man and his family fortunes. The novel, epic in dimensions, still fails because it is a family saga masquerading as a novel, says ABRAHAM ERALY.

"PROVE your name: conquer the world," his mother had told Biswajit Datta when he set out from Mandaile, his hamlet in Bengal, to seek employment and fortune in Calcutta. But there was nothing for him in Calcutta, only grubby toil. He then moved on to Rangoon, but hardly to a better life, and had to suffer even the humiliation of having to serve for a while as a hangman in the Central Jail there. "Work is work, it has nothing to do with our life," a colleague in the jail consoled him. "Life is about dreaming and making one's dream come true."

Biswajit heeded the advice, and hunkered down to tackle life. A country bumpkin in the city, he didn't have anything much going for him. He had no money, had very little education, and was not even personable, being short, dark and ugly. But his will to succeed was indomitable. First, he changed his hangman's job to become a jail clerk, then resigned the job to become a construction contractor, and gradually, in slow stages and by sheer dint of hard work, he lifted himself out of his drab, mean world, to become one of the richest businessmen in Burma.

Then suddenly and unexpectedly his world crumbled. Stock-market speculations bankrupted him, his brothers, whom he had loyally nurtured, deserted him, and the scores of Dattas, whom he had brought from his village to Burma, scattered.

His fair and beautiful wife, who had always despised him, now banished him from home, screaming, "Get out and stay out, you slow-witted, ugly old man." Broken and grievously ill, Biswajit finally returned to Calcutta, as empty-handed as he first set out from there many decades back, except that he now carried his meagre possessions in a tin suitcase instead of a cloth bundle.

Biswajit died a forlorn death in Calcutta. This, however, was not the end of the Datta clan. They would rise again from the ashes, overcoming many other adversities.

This is the momentous family saga that Krishna Datta tells in Walking From the Gallows. It is a story of enormous potential, but this potential is not fully realised in this book, perhaps because this is, I presume, a family chronicle masquerading as a novel. The chronicle does not quite crystallise into a novel. The Dattas are a large clan, and scores of its members are obligatorily mentioned in the book, but most of them only cursorily, so that they merely clutter up the novel without adding anything to its substance. The book should have been expanded to at least three or four times its present length of 397 pages, to give Tolstoyan depth to all its characters - or else, it should have been pruned by about a third to stay focussed on its main story and to give it the tonal unity and emotional depth it deserves. As it is, the book is neither here nor there.

If my assumption that this is a fictionalised family chronicle - an assumption reinforced by the family group photograph on the book's front cover - is correct, then Datta would have been in quite a quandary while writing it, torn between the novelist's need to take liberties with characters and events, and the family chronicler's need to mention all the relatives and to be considerate in the treatment of all. Though Datta does imaginatively recreate quite a few scenes - these are the best portions of the novel - their effect is nullified by large, bland chunks of merely logged events.

This is not the only problem, either. The last third of the book, dealing with the adventures of Biswajit's brothers, are not integrated at all with the novel, but merely patched on. These stories are fascinating in themselves - especially the trek of one of the brothers from Burma to India by the Death Valley Route, during the Japanese occupation of Burma in the 1940s. This could have been made into a novel by itself, and it was indolent of the author to have treated it as a mere addendum.

Datta's narrative style, because of the nature of the book, is grandmotherly - rambling and anecdotal - and does not do justice to her surging epic theme. Her language has the advantage of being simple and clear, but unfortunately it lacks energy. Perhaps because of this, there is a curious and disturbing emotional flatness about the novel. Had she taken a little more trouble in revising and tightening the novel, this could have been an outstanding book. The material was there. It only needed tobe worked on.

Walking From the Gallows, Krishna Datta, Srishti, New Delhi, p.397, Rs. 295.

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