The Song of Kahunsha
By Anosh Irani
Doubleday Canada, 307 pages, $29.95
Anosh Irani's writing shows that, although India has a well-established social and cultural life, the subcontinent breeds stories that are turbulent with extraordinary anomalies. Irani's recent play Bombay Black (which had its debut in Toronto in January) confounds many critics by its seemingly intemperate indulgence in shock elements and melodrama. The plot concerns a beautiful dancer and her mother (a woman of blood-curdling, murderous hate for her estranged husband), who forces her to dance for a blind man and who threatens to feed her to hungry eagles. Sensuous, lyrical, mysterious, sordid, grotesque, romantic and highly emblematic, it is a melodramatic parable in the best and worst senses of the word.
Irani's acclaimed first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans (2004), creates a strange, often disturbing world of violent lepers, battling cockroaches, an eccentric coffin-maker, a lady who sells rainbows and a narrator who goes in search of his missing arm. It also displays a mordant humour and, though embellished by poetic legend, it is a frequently bizarre mixture of surrealist fantasy, Indian melodrama and existential absurdity. Irani dares to write of the freakish, the ugly and the bizarre, but without being empty of significance. However, the play and his first novel do seem smartly contrived as extreme examples of aspects of the human condition within a specific society.
The Song of Kahunsha, set in Bombay in 1932, delineates the geography of an Indian hell with fleeting relief through fantasy, but the idyllic fantasy is that of a 10-year-old boy who runs away from his Bombay orphanage in search of his long-lost father. Chamdi's only solace is kind Mrs. Sadiq, who runs the orphanage and cares for him as the child she has never had. It is she who presents him with the single link to his absent father — a blood-stained white cloth that he wears like a scarf around his neck.
The orphanage and its courtyard are the first extent of the boy's known geography, along with his fellow orphans — especially asthmatic Pushpa and Dhondu, the boy who sleeps with one eye open because he is terrified of ghosts. However, once Chamdi flees his refuge, he experiences a Bombay that is a seedy, squalid, vicious underworld of beggary, thievery, prostitution, exploitation and religious violence.
Trouble brews almost at the very beginning of the novel, following a Hindu assault on a Muslim mosque in a faraway city, and there is an expectation of reprisals. Narrated in the present tense and from young Chamdi's oppressed point of view, the story moves quickly through suspenseful complications. Irani's Bombay is a whore, a scarred monster of legend. It is also Dickensian (though without Dickens's art) in its array of beggars, prostitutes, thieves, gangs and child victims, who are often orphaned and old beyond their years.
Chamdi quickly meets streetwise Sumdi, a boy with a lame leg, and his sister Guddi, recruits in the gang of beggars run by vicious Anand Bhai, an Indian Fagin of more than malevolent nature, who is quick to mutilate or kill whoever dares defy him. Sumdi (who has had his right ear sliced by Bhai) and Guddi introduce the boy to further indignities. Their grief-stricken, widowed mother, burdened by a starving baby, tears out the hair of her head. The retinue of beggars includes a blind boy and a grotesquely dismembered cripple.
Chamdi, who sees no evidence of love or tenderness in Bombay, wants to invent a language with only positive words. His spirit is sustained by his dream of a paradise he calls Kahunsha, "the city of no sadness."
Chamdi's dream is bolstered by a second fantasy: He wishes for "police-tigers" to burst out of police stations, and he romances the ribs that almost protrude from his emaciated body into powerful tusks that could kill his enemies. Neither fantasy is realized in the play of calamitous and cruel incidents, which includes a badly foiled attempt by Chamdi and his two friends to rob a Hindu temple, various acts of terror initiated by Anand Bhai, blackmail against Chamdi and an awful mob attack on an innocent Muslim family trapped in their room.
Direct and simple rather than elliptical, literal more than metaphorical, The Song of Kahunsha addresses the awful savageries and indignities of India within the focus of Bombay, but it escapes being overwhelmed by what it depicts because of its moral impulse. The end of the tale is accompanied by small acts of forgiveness, love and celebration that don't seem false or unlikely.
Rather than being bound by the prescriptions of traditional Indian philosophy — that becalming creed of karma — Irani's novel remains true to its own psychology of childhood innocence. Chamdi, who has always felt that thinking makes things possible, is given his epiphany in a beautiful final scene by the sea, and the novel, while far from technically sophisticated, vindicates the fragile but triumphant scope of childhood imagination with touching grace.
Keith Garebian posts reviews at www.stageandpage.com.
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