‘Our City, That Year’: The many tangled happenings that form the psychic context of communalism
The rhythms of Geetanjali Shree’s words move the sentences, narrative, and readers. Daisy Rockwell pilots the English translation with her characteristic ease.
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So this was the novel. Our City, This Year.
No, That Year. Our City, That Year.
That year? This year?
This is no story of 1998, the year of the original Hindi novel’s publication. Or of 1992, the year of the masjid demolition, the tremors before and after which provoked this novel. This is the story of a year. A year we will spend with three characters who are “determined to bring everything to the fore,” as they strive to be unequivocal witnesses to the changing winds of their city: Sharad, Hanif, and Shruti. Sharad and Hanif, professors in the university next to the swelling, mutating ashram that spawns cults of Devi devotees, their “Jai Jagadambe!”s and cries for national revival. Shruti, the “writer who writes a lot if you don’t count that year.” And Daddu, too, whose laughter cheers the divan, whose words float, whose watchful ears catch the stirring of any breeze. Oh – and that narrator. Who is she, this “I”?
A year in which everything changes – so swiftly, so indefinitely, but so incrementally.
Hoarding her ink and pages, the narrator ferociously copies a scene, a thought, a dream, “whatever caught my eye, wherever.” Gathering them as fragments before they slip into the widening cracks of the city.
Not an academic like...
