So with Hardy and the classics being reserved for quiet summer afternoons I tried some binge reading. de Souza’s Dangerlok and Winterson’s Written on the Body formed a major part of the whole “binge-reading” plan, out of which only the former could be completed obviously because of its sheer slimness. As it turned out “binge-reading” did not quite hit my taste and Winterson too was reserved for another day. But “binge-reading” seemed to have whetted my appetite for more and some fiction had to be read, for poetry had left me with an almost bad heart. I wasn’t too keen on picking up anything new since that would include the added burden of worrying about the composition and not to mention the initial threat of being blown away by contemporaneity and losing all reverence to the dead (read classics). So I settled with an old favorite, Arun Joshi, the man who wrote The Strange Case of Billy Biswas.
It was somewhere around this time of the year in 2008, whiling away some good hours of my time amidst the shelves of my college library I found Billy carelessly stuffed in the American section screaming the name of an Indian writer never heard before. Call it serendipity or kismet, the paperback was of the first edition! It had a green binding (read cello tape) and the frontispiece had pictures that looked like water-color paintings of a man with sunglasses and a bright kerchief round his neck (which was also probably green), and two women, one on the left and the other on the right. The dusky one, though clad in a sari was bare shouldered and there was most likely a flower in her hair which was most certainly tied into a bun. The other woman too was clad in a sari but unlike the former was not bare shouldered and her hair was fashioned into French bouffant, or so it seemed. I don’t remember if there was a blurb, for I certainly would have remembered reading it. It looked like a cheap fiction in all aspects and assuming it to be some sort of a passionate love triangle, (for I was still high on Wuthering Heights) I got it issued.
For two years since then, darling readers, all my expeditions to streets and shops and fairs where books are sold, have always been in the hope of finding an auld neglected edition of Billy Biswas, for the book had long been out of print. The Alchemist philosophy eventually worked and Orient Paperbacks in its endeavor to revive some of the lost classics of South Asian Literature put Joshi into print again in 2009 and I finally got my copy of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas in February 2010, courtesy Flipkart. And after three years, I slipped into my favorite chair to read my favorite book at my favorite hour of the night, to bring back the same relish that I once had for fiction writing.
There is primarily one reason that explains my obsession with this book. There was “something” in the narrative that had struck a chord with me although I did not know what it was when I had read it for the first time. This time however, I could feel the weight of that “something” pressing on me right from the start, and like reading poetry, I was magically persuaded to believe that this too shall leave me with a bad heart. But a bad heart is much better than a broken heart. A bad heart is empty, it waits for nothing, it expects nothing, and like all doors, it locks one in and locks the world outside too. That “something” was ‘Silence’, and it is in silence that all bad hearts take refuge in. The narrative operates on two levels of acoustics, one being the eerie silence that accompanies every word, and the other being the pale sound of a storm buzzing somewhere so far, that although one fails to hear it, one does not fail to feel the power of it. There are real storms too. Storms that make Billy say, “Things might have been different, Romi, if that wretched storm had not come up when it did. You see what I mean, don’t you?”
It is Billy’s restlessness that makes him so enduring and separates what looks real from what isn’t. The narrative proceeds in a magic space in which one lives for a moment, holding one’s breath in some measure of wonder while being fully aware of the wretched silence that seems to be catching up with a primitive pace, ready to devour Billy into the dark mazes of the unexplained. The novel ends in a kind of waste dumbness and one closes the book with a pitiful hangover of silence and a faint reminiscence of Bilasia’s anklets echoing in the hills of Satpura.
My Verdict: You can avoid it for its sheer brilliance.
P.S: The writing looks obsessively sentimental but that’s exactly how I feel for certain books and that’s the only honest way in which I can write. Reserving my thoughts on Joshi’s The Foreigner for some other day, until then, happy reading!
