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Book review: 'The House With A Thousand Stories'

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Book: The House With A Thousand Stories
Author: Aruni Kashyap
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 226
Price: Rs339

Aruni Kashyap's novel is set in Assam in the late 1990s-early 2000s, at a time when the armed separatist movement in that state was at its bloodiest. The cycle of violence unleashed by insurgents and the brutal repression of it by the Indian armed forces had so scarred the people that fear had become a part of their daily lives. It determined what they did, when and where they went, and whom they talked to. Adding to the general disquiet were all the factions into which the ULFA, the principal insurgents' organisation, had broken into. As one character puts it in exasperation—"ulfa-sulfa-manta-santa-kanta-and-whatnot".

These groups vitiated the atmosphere with their competitive killings, extortions and kidnappings and all of this cast a shadow of imminent tragedy over life and the events of the novel, in this case a wedding. In Kashyap's The House With A Thousand Stories, the wedding becomes the occasion for dark secrets to come tumbling out and even the romance that gets sparked here is far from the happily-ever-after kind.

The story is narrated in the first-person by Pablo, a young boy just out of school in Guwahati, as an account of two visits, separated by four years, that he makes to his ancestral home in rural Mayong. The first in 1998 was the death of an uncle. The second in 2002 was the wedding of his Moina pehi (aunt), who at 32 had despaired of ever marrying.

The wedding, however, turns out to be anything but joyous — a stray rumour about the groom's brother being a member of an insurgents' group scares Moina so much that she drinks phenyl on the night before the wedding. But she doesn't die — her family manages to flush the poison out. But Moina is found dead on the morning after the wedding in her husband's home — lying naked in the bedroom, with flowers strewn around her.

It is through details like these, tidbits of information that are evocative and somewhat surreal, that Kashyap brings home the reality of the terror that his characters live with.
One such detail is the patch of land around and under an electric pole next to the main village road that Mridul, like everyone in the village, avoids stepping on. It was here where the horribly mutilated corpse of the brother of an ULFA member, whom the army had tortured, killed, and strung up on the pole to terrorise the people of Mayong, had fallen.

The history of contemporary India is strewn with such random and pointless killings. It is the dark underside of Indian democracy, a cat and mouse game that is even now being played out in several parts of our country, especially in Kashmir, and that has implications that go beyond the immediate violence, scarring for ever those like Moina pehi and the others in Mayong, who fear being caught in the middle.

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