In Bronte territory via Ranikhet

The Folded Earth
Anuradha Roy
Hachette
258 pages
Rs495

A fourth Bronte sister surfaces in the form of The Folded Earth.

Anuradha Roy may be a couple of centuries and a few continents apart, but the formula at the heart of her novel is both familiar and much loved. Her landscape is rolling hills and near-wilderness, her theme is a variant on Bronte concerns: A young woman Maya, devastated by her unsuitable husband’s death, and alienated from her family, packs her frugal belongings and abundant grief, and takes up a teaching position in a remote hill town. She works with genuine concern for her charges and suffers privations under a domineering headmistress with all the humility of a Victorian governess.

The social life of the town is beyond her limited sphere. She spends her time reading newspapers with, and typing for, her eccentric semi-aristocratic landlord Diwan Sahib, while he swirls rum in a glass. Her life appears settled, if joyless, until his mysterious Byronic nephew Veer arrives, with an agenda she cannot conscience.

Interspersed with her story are rural meditations, on the character of the cowgirl Charu and her family, as well as on the harbingers of change in town election politics and administrative development. The language is cultivated and time-proof: “However foolproof our stratagems, the young widow’s liaison with her landlord’s relative very quickly became the talk of the hillside. Within days I felt gossip eddying around my ankles.” So far so good, you want to draw your chair by the fire and put away your knitting. But Anuradha Roy makes it better. She manages to mix Romantic rumination with postcolonial melancholy, and the result is a novel that is firmly grounded in its Ranikhet soil.

Roy has an enviable eye for the lushness of a Himalayan town, and an ear for the gaggle of daily small town talk. Into this she mixes Kipling, the love affair of Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, the scourge of fundamentalist Hindu politics, and pickle making, with delicious results.

Working against the novel is the twist to the tale at the end where Maya and Veer’s relationship hinges on rather a narrow coincidence. Another quibble is that Roy’s description runs ahead of her too much in the opening chapters, leaving one floundering in the thicket of green. But The Folded Earth is eminently readable, a literary novel that feels timeless and authentic.