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 


Comments

  1. Great post!

    Useful information worthy of thanks ,


    http://ixgram.com

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

      Delete
  3. 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

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some