Devi S Laskar's debut novel is a "searing meditation" on race and gender

Book: The Atlas of Reds and Blues
Author: Devi S Laskar
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 272 
Price: Rs 550

The Atlas of Reds and Blues, is a deeply moving, searing meditation on race and gender, on what it means to be brown, a woman, and a mother in America today. It is set for a March 8 release.

A woman, identified only as ‘Mother’ and sometimes as the ‘Real Thing’, has been shot and lies bleeding on the concrete driveway of her home in an upscale suburban development outside the city of Atlanta. She has been shot by armed ‘agents’ – the state police, one learns – who’ve raided her house, presumably for something her husband has done. What was this infraction, or whether her husband, who remains unnamed and is referred throughout the novel as ‘Hero’ or ‘man of the hour’, is truly guilty, is something the reader is never told.  

The narrative, instead, follows Mother’s thoughts on her life so far – on her Bengali immigrant parents; her school mates and teachers; her three young daughters – identified simply as Eldest, Middle and Youngest Daughter; Greta, her beloved German Shepherd who died two years ago; her husband who’s forever away on “business trips”; and the local newspaper where she works as an ‘obituary writer’.  

At one level, this is a deeply political novel – given the present rhetoric against immigrants in USA – about the everyday racial prejudice and discrimination that people of colour must deal with. In a passage not too far into the book, Mother lists a long barrage of questions strangers generally ask her – “How long have y’all lived here? Do you even speak English?... You stick out like a raisin in a big bowl of oatmeal… Is it true y’all are poor and beg in the street…. I watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I heard someone on TV say it was based on a true story. Do y’all eat monkey brains?...” The tone is angry, funny, and so very believable.  

Often, such ingrained racial prejudice skirts the danger of causing real harm. As when Middle Daughter is bullied in school and Mother takes her to the hospital emergency, only for the doctor to refuse to do an MRI. Or how the patrol car manned by a young cop with “fuzzy translucent blond” hair picks on her every now and then for violating a non-existing traffic light.

The personal is also the political, and not immune to bias. The marriage of Mother and Hero – surely the monikers are ironic? – seems, on the face of it, to be a happy one. He’s white – Laskar artfully weaves this telling detail into the narrative – they’ve married the traditional Indian way back in Kolkata. He’s supportive of her when she miscarries their first baby seven years into marriage, and she organises surprise birthday parties for him. But he’s never around, leaving her alone to shoulder the never-ending drudgery of household chores and child-rearing. The result: her own career is on hold, as she’s downgraded from crime reporter to obituary writer to junior hack, good only for cold-calling strangers to ask what they were doing on the day JFK died. It’s a feminist nightmare, and Laskar underlines the theme with references to Barbie, and how the many avatars of the iconic doll reflect the wonky political ideas of race and gender that have moved people in different places, at different times.

The Atlas of Reds and Blues is a novel in prose, but it has the feel of poetry. A lot of it has to do with the way Laskar experiments with form, with chapters of alternating length – some of them no longer than a sentence – similar to a poem with lines of alternating lengths. But it also runs deeper, having to do with the poetry-like economy of language, the way she uses words to allude rather explicate, the way some words, themes and images recur, gathering meaning, and changing context with use. Much like life, or art.