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Literary Review
Stray broodings
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For five years he tussled with his characters, inflicting wounds on them, and they on him... NIRMAL VERMA talks about some of the impulses behind The Last Wilderness.
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IT always makes me slightly uneasy to speak about my own work. It is well nigh impossible for me to fathom the intentions which led me to write it, nor can I explain the reasons why I chose to write this type of book and not any other. The difficulty becomes even more painful if the novel has been published not long ago, like my last novel, Antim Aranya. It is too close to give any comfort. The wounds I have inflicted on my characters — and in turn, they possibly on me — are too fresh and searing to be clinically examined in the cold light of reason. I don't have distance enough, nor perhaps the patience to pierce through the mist of my self-doubts and inner vacillations about what to do next in the novel, not knowing what awaits me at the next turning.
Writing has never been easy with me and what Thomas Mann rather half-wittingly said about writers, "the people who find writing most difficult", is unfortunately very true in my case. This was particularly applicable to my last novel, which apparently has no plot, and where nothing happens. For five years I lived with the characters, who lived with nothing except their pasts, brooding in solitude or interrogating one another, trying to come to terms with the "absence" of those who were once so close and dear, becoming increasingly desperate as they neared death, meaning eluding them like a mirage. By a queer twist of logic, the "narrator" in the novel, who is trying to trace a destiny out of the incongruent incidents in the life of the main character, Mehra Sahib, becomes the secret interrogator of the "author" himself, who is nowhere present in the novel.
As time passes, the characters themselves become burdened with age and guilt-ridden about the past, slowly turning into shadowy projections of the author (in this case, myself), whose own life was becoming increasingly unreal. Writing became for me a search for my own vocation, as elusive as the search for "meaning" by the characters of the novel, whose lives had criss-crossed each other by accident.
Not an autobiographical novel, but a mirror biography in which the "I" of the writer is trying to piece together the fragments of his memory in the myriad reflections of the novel's characters.
As I proceeded in the novel, I realised that I was dimly trying to explore what happens to people who have already "retired" from active life, living in an afterlife as it were. But unlike a novel, there are no last chapters in life, still something is left to be done before the accounts are finally closed and the dusk settles into the dark of night. There is a Russian proverb that "the human soul is a dark forest", and incidentally it is the forest (aranya) that is the key metaphor of the novel whose mystery is unravelled in the inner recesses of its characters — the German refugee Annaji who comes to India during the war and chooses to spend her last days in the obscure hill resort; the erstwhile professor of philosophy, Niranajan Babu, who owns an apple orchard, who neither feels at home here, nor down in the plains where his family lives, desperately trying to find his "true place" in the world; the cynical Dr. Singh who finds hills and rocks the fossilised epitome of aeons of times past, where they, who are living at present will become as extinct as the sea creatures who once lived here millions of years ago. So, in his clinic, facing the mountains, he consoles the narrator: why amid such vast absences grieve the death of the woman who is lying buried in the cemetery at the top of the hill? As one character says, "It is only when one nears death that life unlocks its secret, which remains unknown to others because one takes it with oneself to the grave."
The narrator himself is passing through what he calls "the crisis of middle age" before he comes to this obscure hill station. His assignment is modest — just to be a companion of a retired civil servant, but as time passes, he becomes something more than a companion — a friend, a trustworthy confidant of his reminiscences, secrets, memories. Beyond a certain point, it ceases to be a one-sided confession, but a painful dialogue between two persons brooding over the mysteries of love, betrayal and death. As one perceptive critic of the novel noted, it becomes impossible beyond a point, to distinguish between the young man listening, taking down notes, and the old man wandering through the maze of his memories. "One begins to wonder whether they are two distinct individuals or the same", one merging in the other.
I would hesitate to call this a "philosophical novel" as some critics have done, nor a novel of Hindu mysticism except in the broadest sense of the term. I have always considered it a great impoverishment of narrative art when, in our secular fanaticism, we banish religion or philosophy to escape from the deep existential questions. My attempt in this novel has been to bring into sharp focus those riddles of human life which one tends to overlook in the humdrum "business of living". Paradoxically, it is only when one "retires" from the business that one's life confronts oneself in the most naked glaring light of truth which one was trying to avoid all through one's life.
Or may be this is an afterthought on my part as the novelist, which readers should forget while reading the novel itself.
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Literary Review
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