With the ever-widening rift between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘this’ and ‘that’,‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, ‘here’ and ‘over there’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the already existing borders, both literal and metaphorical, have become all the more rigidified, penetrating the individual and collective psyche more deeply than ever before. The imposed borders do not merely limit themselves to the territorial landscape, rather the boundaries limit the movement of the body and all that is bodily, setting limits to what is and is not permissible, the borders imposing themselves on language and stories, on what can and cannot be told and said aloud.
Geetanjali Shree’s novel, Ret Samadhi, recently translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, is a thorough exploration of not just the violence that borders and boundaries inflict on the individual and the collective self, but also of ways in which the violence of the borders can be resisted, overturned and its limits questioned and transcended. Traversing the novel, one is struck by the ways in which language itself becomes a subversion of the limits that boundaries impose. The story or rather stories that together form the narrative in Tomb of Sand are without an end, flowing into each other, out of each other. In Shree’s own words from the novel, “A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are […] The story’s path unfurls, not knowing where it will stop, tacking to the right and left, twisting and turning, allowing anything and everything to join in the narration.” The language of the novel is unconventional, irreverent, self-reflexive, deploying humour and magical realism to push forth the limits of the walls of the discourse on language itself, of what can be said, unsaid and reversed, inverted. To quote a line from the novel, “but what are words, really, hmmm? They’re mere sounds with meanings dangling from them. They have no logic. They find their own way. Arising from the squabble between the sinking body and a drowning mind, they grab hold of antonyms.”
The osmotic, porous nature of language in the novel questions the fixity of language, its definitions and meanings, challenging us to look at words and stories differently, outside the normative, and often authoritative domain of definitions and binaries within logocentric order. This osmotic quality of language also flows into the characters of the novel and their stories, into the walls and doors that surround them, so much so that the entire novel acquires a porosity, one that is neither passive nor dormant, rather is marked by an active assertion of its own porous nature.
The novel tells the story of an octogenarian, who, in her family’s view, has lost the will to live after her husband’s death, but who sheds away the conventional roles and codes of behaviour assigned to her by her family members, and takes on a path of self-discovery, freedom and a reunion with the lost past. She starts living at her daughter’s house, stops wearing saris, instead switching to loose gowns and spends time with Rosie every day, a transgender person, who embodies the very idea of non-fixity and crossing the boundary. As Shree describes the transition in Ma, “as though she’d removed all layers, one by one, wife mother aunt this that, now at least she was simply herself, laid bare, apart her own, untouched by the thoughts and concerns of any other. At eighty Ma had turned selfish.”
Ma’s desire to go visit Pakistan, which is met with apprehension on the part of the family, is another crossing over, going on the other side of the border which for ‘Ma’ is not the other side but home itself. On being confronted by the authorities in Pakistan for having travelled without a Visa, Ma’s answers to the confrontation are witty and subversive, questioning the very basis of such territorial and ideological divisions. In Khyber, her past comes back to her, as she narrates the ordeal that partition put her through, the lost love that she wishes to reunite with, and the land and its people who she claims her own, undermining completely the hold of the borders on the definition of the self, identity and love.
Towards the end of the novel, Ma’s body’s response to the bullet that she is hit by is not to fall down on her face but to flip her body over and lie down facing the limitless sky upwards in a land that she claims her own irrespective of what the legal-political discourse of the day has to say. Her defiance, then, is alive even in her death which is not really an end, for in Shree’s words it is “the tale unhampered. Ma unending. Women in new beginnings.”
The unhampered tale of Shree’s novel is as vast as the sky, embracing not just Ma, her life and her family but also the lives of inanimate objects, of the walls and the doors, of birds, of crows and of the tales they tell, of the possibilities they hold for undermining of the rigid borders, identity and relationships. But the novel is not a simplistic tale of partition or of cross-border love, rather by weaving together complex issues related to feminism, ecology, capitalism and communalism, the novel speaks for our times, reminding us of the invisible web of borders that we are trapped in and the ways in which we can refuse to fall down on our faces, rather just like Ma, we can learn to flip over, step over the border and face the sky in all its limitlessness.
The possibilities of resistance that the novel offers are immense, especially, when seen in the context of contemporary India where curtailment of individual freedoms is being accompanied by increased polarization, where borders and boundaries are legitimised through means of institutional violence, where crossing over an imposed boundary is suppressed violently and the historical past is constantly distorted to suit certain dominant interests.
By weaving the past into the present, the over there into here, life into death, this side into that side, inside into outside, Tomb of Sand creates a world full of subversions where even in her death Ma is alive, embodied in a tomb, remembered, just like her story which will continue to flow in many directions endlessly, defying time, space, borders and censorship!
Hunardeep Kaur is a third year student of English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She is interested in looking at the world through the lens of art, literature and culture. She finds solace in poetry and sunsets.
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