MANOJ DAS’S “CYCLONES”

Humour at the Service of Realism

P. RAJA

“Humour is odd, grotesque and wild

Only by affectation spoil’d;

’Tis never by invention got.

Men have it when they know it not.”

–(Jonathan Swift To Mr. Delany. Oct. 10, 1718)

Long before Wodehouse (let his tribe increase!) built an invincible house of humour for humour’s sake in the realm of gold, Herbert Read in his Lectures in English Literature spoke of “the happy compound of pathos and playfulness which we style by the untranslatable term humour.”

The range of the short stories of Manoj Das is wide and it contains purely realistic stories of men and mice apart, a rich variety of fantasies, fairy tale-like allegories and satires. They abound in humour and wit. But in his solitary full-length novel published so far, Cyclones, humour meets the reader in such an unobtrusive manner that later we enjoyed it in the Swiftian sense – when we knew it not. Employment of humour in Cyclones also brings to our mind Read’s classical analysis of it – that it is the happy compound of pathos and playfulness–though may be of something more too.

In order to appreciate the art with which the element of humour has been handled in Cyclones, we have to remember its theme as well as a brief outline of its plot. The backdrop of the story is a remote village. A couple of years preceding the country achieving freedom along with the partition constitute the time.

But it will be wrong to describe this novel as one based on the aforesaid events. They only serve as the physical contour of this remarkable work. What the reader receives is a series of knocks on his consciousness – some sweet, some surprising and some rude. The sum total of the effect is, he emerges enriched by a new awareness of human potentiality, of a wider range along which life can be lived and, above all else, of the law of transcendence that governs our life, enabling us absorb shocks of experience and to grow with them.

It is the protagonist of the novel, Sudhir Chowdhury, who leads us to this kind of awakening. We meet him as the scion of a ruined feudal family of Nijanpur, though his birth remains shrouded in mystery for a long time. He is called from his romantic college life when the bankrupt landlord who had adopted him suddenly disappears in a dramatic but entirely credible situation. That is when the first man in the village who gets drunk at the newly cropped up colony of outsiders building a war-time jetty on the outskirts of the village, approaches the hapless landlord to offer him a half-bottle of whisky and desires to become his chum!

The young Sudhir, though fresh from the town, begins to love the naive villagers, after a terrible cyclone leaves them in the lurch. He is dreaming of a peaceful, settled life when communal riots rock the ‘city’ (the reference is obviously to Calcutta) and its echo disturbs the peace of Nijanpur and Lalgram, two nelghbourly villages dominated by Hindus and Muslims respectively.

A series of interesting events oblige Sudhir to abscond for a considerable length of time and to spend a period in jail during which he meets a number of, characters, constituting a shockingly different yet entirely convincing bunch, giving us an absorbing variety.

Time may move at its own pace, but events in India move very fast during that eventful period of the country’s history and by the time Sudhir is back in his village, it is metamorphosed into a hick town. His last action in the novel is dramatic; it has to be read in the novel, in order to be properly appreciated in keeping with its denouncement and it is likely to cast a spell on the reader, a combined effect of the empathy, bewilderment and tension it creates, though all culminating on a grand note of peace in the protagonist’s heart – a peace that can come only through a sublime process of transcendence.

There are a number of situations in the novel remarkable for their individual charm: the old eccentric Roy who announces this unilateral decision that the one who can kill the man-eating crocodile in the river should be deemed fit to contest the limited franchise election of 1947 and is himself carried away by the crocodile in a moonlit night, the fight between two angry bulls who fall into the landlord’s pond notorious for its fathomless mire and sink as the helpless villagers look on and weep and so on and so forth.

The title Cyclones is significant. There is the absorbing description of a physical; Cyclone there is the political turmoil sweeping the country which is another kind of cyclone and there is the cyclone raging in Sudhir’s mind. A great feature of the novel is its authentic portrayal of rural India on the eve of freedom, in a style that is at once lyrical and real.

“A great novel can combine in itself all the breadth and sweep of an epic, the tension of a drama, the emotional drive of a lyric and the intellectuality of an 0bjective essay” wrote a distinguished Indian scholar, the late Professor Taraknath Sen. Cyclones fulfils these conditions incredibly well.

As we will see, the theme and the plot outline of the novel are grim. From the second one-third of the work tension begins to grow and hold the reader in its grip till the release comes at the end. But only a very careful reader – or a critical mind – will detect the subtle role humour is playing in keeping the narration sweet and lively. On the outskirts of the village, Kusumpur, on the seashore, some war-time activities are going on and a small colony of officials has sprung up. How do the villagers, rarely exposed to the world beyond the shy river flowing by their habitation, react to this unexpected development? “It was rumoured that the outsiders eyes betrayed unbridled lust the moment they fell on a woman. This was confirmed when one summer evening a fellow strayed into the village and mistook a short-statured veiled grandmother for a shy girl – that is how the elders interpreted it – and was bold enough to make as romantic an overture as saying, “Will you take me home, girlie, for I’m thirsty?” (2)

It was a pity if the villagers read an allegorical meaning in the stranger’s thirst; it was no less a pity for the stranger, particularly if he had a sinful motive, to mistake a granny to be a girlie. But the irony is in the situation proper over which nobody has any control.

Humour in the guise of an irony remains threaded in the whole texture of the first chapter. Rajni, the vagabond who has explored the colony of the outsiders, returns to the village drunk, but with half a bottle of alcohol which he must offer to the scion of the feudal house, Mr. Chowdhury. Rajni’s subconscious, his great desire to be considered an equal to Chowdhury, comes out through his incoherent blabbering. While it stuns the villagers (who have never seen a drunken man before and on the other hand who nurture a silent reverence for the elderly Chowdhury), it amuses the reader. But the irony of the situation culminates in pathos when it is found that Chowdhury has clean disappeared from the house in order to avoid the embarrassment.

What happened to Chowdhury? His traditional rival, Roy of Lalgram, kills a crocodile and salvages a gold ring from its stomach which he declares to be Chowdhury’s. But Chowdhury’s manager, Brindavan, and servant, Jay, who should have identified it, refuse so much as to glance at it. “Roy bagged a turtle and mistook it for a crocodile,” is their final pronouncement on Roy’s claim. If Brindavan and Jay are trying to take revenge on Roy in their rustic way, the officer-in-charge of the police station is absolutely confident of his government’s wisdom in the steps it is taking to forestall a Japanese invasion:

“It is good that the cyclone played havoc in this area,” the officer observed cryptically.

“I don’t understand you.”

The officer lowered his voice. “How can you? Is this not top secret? But you are a gentleman and so am I. Perhaps I can confide a thing or two in you. A Japanese invasion on our land seems imminent. The coast along the forest near Kusumpur could prove most suitable for the enemy to land, our Inspector Sahib disclosed to me. In fact, we are planning to get hold of all country-boats and destroy them so that the enemy cannot use the river-way. We have already done something more too come and see for yourself!”

The officer hobbled into a dusty room, signing to Sudhir to follow him. Four or five bicycles lay heaped on the floor, their tyres deflated.

“We have made him immobile, completely, ha! ha! And look here for still more!”

The officer drew Sudhir’s attention to four or five rickety torchlights.

“We ordered the Chowkidars and Duffedars to collect these too, lest the Japanese should use them to find their way,” he explained.

Shaking Sudhir by the arm, the officer whispered in confidence, “Within our jurisdiction we are doing our best to forestall any enemy design.” The officer bit a hair of his moustache and spat it out.

“But hew could the cyclone have been so helpful?”

“Ha ha! You are puzzled, eh? Didn’t I say that these matters were not so easy to comprehend as your text-books? You see, if the Japanese arrive now, they will hardly get any food or shelter. How can they operate? Ha ha! We did our best, Providence in his prudence did his!” (32-33)

How unceremoniously can a well-planned function be spoilt by a totally unforeseen factor! The cyclone-hit area is visited by a sophisticated relief party. A meeting is arranged. The villagers listen to the speakers with rapt attention. But when the most revolutionary speaker in the team, Shyam, begins to speak, behind him, unknown to him, appears a lunatic.

First he made faces. Then, delighted and inspired by the speaker’s histrionics, he began to dance. While Shyam raised his voice, scale by scale, to its highest in an effort to wake the dormant conscience of his listeners and to transform them into rebels, the audience looked more and more amused.

Shyam knew nothing of the performance going on behind him. Perplexed, he made frantic efforts at driving his point home. It was also a trying time for Sudhir who was moved with pity for Shyam but was helpless. The head-pundit sneaked away from the audience and tried to entice the lunatic away by offering a banana. The result was that the lunatic ended the silent phase of his act and began to laugh and scream.

Shyam gave a start and stopped, leaving a political analogy incomplete and looked back over his shoulder. He sat down as if under the burden of a world of disgust. The audience gave out an enthusiastic applause.

“For whom is the applause meant – for Shyam or for the lunatic or for the head-pundit?” Reena softly asked Sudhir.

“I think for the entire performance, but I doubt if the applauders themselves would know!” (42)

While a situation appears humorous to the reader, the author is only portraying a typical character. A villager narrates a complete story in his bid to find out whether his listener knows it or not:

“You want me to believe that you know nothing about the ancient Chowdhury who, by reciting a secret mantra, could change himself into a tiger – though he did so only occasionally – whose wife – she was innocent as a babe but you know how stupidly whimsical women can be – of course not the memsahibs of the towns but our women folk – insisted one night that her husband turn into a tiger for her to see the fun? Didn’t Chowdhury try his best to impress upon her that it was sinful to perform the miracle just for fun – that it was done only with the particular purpose of propitiating the goddess of the tigers! Do you mean to say that the world does not know how the woman wept over her husband’s refusal? Didn’t he at last agree to fulfil her desire? But didn’t he instruct her to stand alert and to sprinkle on his head the holy water from the Ganga and at the same time utter a small hymn so that he could safely return to his human form? Wasn’t she required to do so as soon as he gave out his first roar? But didn’t she get terror-stricken at her charming husband changing into a huge tiger and din’t she, in her nervous stammer, fail to complete the hymn? Could she sprinkle the holy water properly either? Didn’t the poor Chowdhury-tiger roar and howl in great anguish till the household, nay, the neighbourhood, was awake? Wasn’t he obliged to smash the window and escape into the forest? Didn’t he for several years thereafter dwell in the cave yonder till a kind hermit – God bless the great soul – cured him of his tigerhood? Didn’t Chowdhury himself then turn into a hermit and leave for the Himalayas? Do you want me to believe, Babu, that you din’t know all this?”

“Now we know,” said Sujan. (49-50)

There is the need for the hero, Sudhir, to escape in the guise of a woman, Duryodhan, the villager, is asked to act as the escorting husband: Duryodhan looked at Ravi quizzically. “Do you mean to say that Babu will leave the village in the guise of my wife?”

“You are quite clever!”

Duryodhan’s face looked as if it would melt with humility and embarrassment.

“Ravibhai, I’m hardly better than a buffalo. Babu is an angel. Would it not be in the fitness of things that he heads me as the husband and I follow him in the guise of his wife?” Duryodhan folded his hands in supplication.

“Don’t grow cleverer than is good for you.” Ravi laughed and tweaked Duryodhan’s ear.

Duryodhan put out his tongue and slapped himself, indicating his realization that a change in the scheme would not work. ( 93-94)

Sudhir is in the city which is in the grip of the communal riot. Circumstances push him into a brothel where, in that moment of utter distress, he meets Lalita and finds in her an oasis. Soon the brothel is raided by the police because it harbours some would-be rioters. Along with them Sudhir too is arrested. Sethji, a symbol of the power that was going to govern India, comes to the prison with the order to secure Sudhir’s release.

Sethji hugged Sudhir and then continued thumping his shoulders till he dropped into a chair.

“Shame, shame!” said one of Sethji’s companions. “Freedom is knocking at the door and ....” He mimicked Sethji with remarkable accuracy. From the chubbiness of his face, the style of his smile and dress, he looked like Sethji’s dummy.

“Only twenty-nine days more to freedom, to be exact,” observed the other companion.

“Sudhirji, meet my friends, my secretary and treasurer; I mean of the district committee of the party.”

Sethji patted one of his friends on his back and then the other, when he almost turned round to present his back.

“We are blessed to have Sethji as our President!” the two hastened to complete the information.

A warden brought tea.

“This is not from any shop, sir, but from my wife. Even the milk is her own, I mean, from the cow she maintains!” announced the jailor handling the first cup to Sethji.

“Your own wife, eh?” Sethji commented absent-mindedly, quite absorbed in some other thought. His two lieutenants caught his mood instantly. They too looked grave and undecided regarding their tea – whether to begin sipping it or to wait. (159-160)

Sethji has different plans for Sudhir, but Sudhir rushes to the brothel to trace Lalita. But the house is now totally deserted. Then follows his encounter with a character that makes one laugh as well as angry.

“Could you please tell me what happened to those girls living in that yellow house over there?”

“What were they doing there?” the man asked in turn as he came out.

“They were prostitutes. I suppose.”

“And you expect me to know the goings on of prostitutes, do you?” the man growled as he rolled up his sleeves.

Sudhir retreated.

A passer-by stopped to light his cigarette. In a flash of the matchstick Sudhir noticed a kind face.

“Any idea about the inmates of this house?” Sudhir asked the man drawing his attention to the deserted building.

“What exactly do you want?”

“I wish to meet one of them–Lalita.”

“Follow me.” The man gave Sudhir a light tap on the shoulder and blew a puff of smoke into his face. Sudhir also saw him bare his teeth in the dark.

Was the fellow a pimp? Sudhir did not mind his being anything as long as he could lead him to Lalita.

He led Sudhir into a well-furnished room on the second floor of the small hotel. A bright lamp on a table at the centre showed the walls crowded with paintings and photographs of mystics.

“Take your seat. Tell me what I look like!” the man ordered, occupying a chair himself.

Sudhir stared blankly at the man clad in immaculate white silk pyjamas and kurta.

“Come on, speak! Don’t feel nervous. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain from my contact. What do I look like?”

“You look like a good man.” Sudhir was rapidly losing hope.

“Correct. Here is your chance for another guess! Why should a good man, a retired Under-Secretary to the Government, take up residence here?”

“I don’t know, sir, but surely not because of its proximity to that yellow house!”

“Why not?” the man sounded mysterious. “I am here precisely because of that. Surprised, eh? Ha! Are you an old bird of that tree?”

“I was there only once!”

“If that is true, you have a good chance for redemption. Your face shows that you are of noble stock!”

“I am not!” cried out Sudhir. “I’m a bastard, for your information. Now, will you please tell me where Lalita is?”

“I don’t know. And I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew. My mission is to save the misguided from their clutches, not to push anyone into their arms! I wander along the street and look for lost souls like you. So far I’ve redeemed a dozen of them. At the beginning some of them had reacted exactly like you!”

Sudhir was overcome with disgust. He stood up and barely managed to check himself from taking hold of his saviour by the collar and knocking him down.

The retired Under-Secretary went on, his eyes shut, “I was about your age when I lost my first wife. I resisted twenty proposals for a second marriage. After years of celibacy when I condescended to marry again, I took a vow never to touch my wife unless she approached me! True to my vow 1 wouldn’t even stir unless she took both my hands into her entreatingly.”

“To hell with you, you hypocrite, you rogue!”

Sudhir’s yell scared the saviour. He blinked, his hands pressed against his chest. (163-165)

Humour, always subdued, remains so diluted in the 31 chapters of the novel that it is not possible to sift it from the serious elements. Nevertheless, one feels its presence and one can observe how it helps in the unfoldment of a character and delineation of a situation. The novel demonstrates successfully how humour can be an intrinsic aspect of realism, even when the level of realism is quite high and the message the work conveys is profound.

Note: All page references are to the 1987 edition of Cyclones published by Sterling Publishers P., Ltd, New Delhi, Facet Books International, New York, and Orient University Press, London.

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