Skip to main content

The Blind Lady’s Descendants


Book Review

Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants
Author: Anees Salim
Publisher: Penguin India 2015
Pages: 301
Price: Rs 399

A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive. 

Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example:

How reckless Akmal was!  Sleeping with his mouth wide open right under a bunch of ripe jambus.  Suppose a wind ruffled the tree, a jambu from the bunch dropped straight into his mouth and choked him before he could sit up and say his final prayer?  Then Jasira’s marriage would have to be put off, by at least six months from the moment Akmal dropped dead.

The family has seen many a tragic event already.  After all, bad luck is an invisible offspring of the Hamsa-Asma couple.  One of the many tragedies is the suicide of the narrator’s uncle, Javi, the day the narrator was born.  Amar, the narrator, turns out to be a natural descendant of Javi sharing many characteristics with him including a trace of insanity.

The novel is the autobiography of Amar who has reached the age of 26, at which his predecessor committed suicide.  Amar is a half Muslim since he ran away when only half of his foreskin was sheared.  As he grows up he loses faith altogether and declares himself an atheist. 

The novel is about the usual conflicts faced by people: identity crisis, meaninglessness, fractured relationships, religious fundamentalism, etc. The blind lady of the title is Asma’s mother who is physically blind.  But most other characters in the novel are metaphorically blind: unable to see beneath the surfaces of existence.  The novelist succeeds in narrating the tale with ease and grace.  The dark humour is the ideal buffer for all the absurdity that underlies the lives of the characters, the absurdity of life itself.

Related post: The Blindness of Superficiality 


Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 25, 2016 at 7:27 PM

    Great post!

    Useful information worthy of thanks ,


    http://ixgram.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. wingsMarch 26, 2016 at 2:05 PM

    True. We are the descendants of the blind lady!
    (How light hearted you look in the profile picture! Put on your thinking cap!!!! :) )

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 26, 2016 at 10:06 PM

      Clown's cap, that's what life has given me :)))))))

      Delete
  3. SujithMarch 26, 2016 at 8:58 PM

    nice post

    ReplyDelete
  4. Murthy K v v sMarch 26, 2016 at 11:07 PM

    Review intrigues one to try this book...!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

  Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make...
4 comments
Read more

The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...
10 comments
Read more

The Covenant of Water

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...
12 comments
Read more

Koorumala Viewpoint

  Koorumala is at once reticent and coquettish. It is an emerging tourist spot in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. At an altitude of 169 metres from MSL, the viewpoint is about 40 km from Kochi. The final stretch of the road, about 2 km, is very narrow. It passes through lush green forest-looking topography. The drive itself is exhilarating. And finally you arrive at a 'Pay & Park' signboard on a rocky terrain. The land belongs to the CSI St Peter's Church. You park your vehicle there and walk up a concrete path which leads to a tiled walkway which in turn will take you the viewpoint. Below are some pictures of the place.  From the parking lot to the viewpoint The tiled walkway A selfie from near the view tower  A view from the tower Another view The tower and the rest mandap at the back Koorumala viewpoint is a recent addition to Kerala's tourist map. It's a 'cool' place for people of nearby areas to spend some leisure in splendid isolation from the hu...
30 comments
Read more