Excerpted here are the opening pages of The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay’s widely acclaimed debut novel, which has been announced as the winner of this year’s JCB Prize for Literature.
I am thirty years old and that is nothing. I know what this sounds like, and I hesitate to begin with something so obvious, but let me say it anyway, at the risk of sounding naïve. And let it stand alongside this: six years ago, a man I knew vanished from his home in the mountains. He vanished in part because of me, because of certain things I said, but also things I did not have, until now, the courage to say. So, you see, there is nothing to be gained by pretending to a wisdom I do not possess. What I am, what I was, and what I have done—all of these will become clear soon enough.
This country, already ancient when I was born in 1982, has changed every instant I’ve been alive. Titanic events have ripped it apart year after year, each time rearranging it along slightly different seams and I have been touched by none of it: prime ministers assassinated, peasant-guerrillas waging war in emerald jungles, fields cracking under the iron heel of a drought, nuclear bombs cratering the wide desert floor, lethal gases blasting from pipes and into ten thousand lungs, mobs crashing against mobs and always coming away bloody. Consider this: even now, at this very moment, there are people huddled in a room somewhere, waiting to die. This is what I have told myself for the last six years, each time I have had the urge to speak. It will make no difference in the end. But lately the urge has turned into something else, something with sharper edges, which sticks under the ribs and makes it dangerous to breathe.
So let me be clear, here at the start.
If I do speak, if I do tell what happened six years ago in that village in the mountains, a village so small it appears only on military maps, it will not be for reasons of nobility. The chance for nobility is over. Even this, story or confession or whatever it turns out to be, is too late.
—–
My mother asleep. The summer afternoon, the sun an open wound, the air outside straining with heat and noise. But here, in our living room, the curtains are drawn; there is a dim and deadly silence. My mother lies on the sofa, cheek pressed to the armrest, asleep.
The bell rings. She doesn’t open her eyes right away, but there is movement behind her lids, the long return from wherever she has been. She stands, walks to the door.
Hello, madam, hello, hello, I am selling some very nice pens—
Good afternoon, madam, please listen to this offer, if you subscribe to one magazine, you get fifty percent—
A long-lashed boy with a laminated sign: I am from Deaf and Dumb Society—
“Oh, get lost,” my mother says. And shuts the door.
Somebody once described my mother as “a strong woman.” From the speaker’s tone, I knew it was not intended as a compliment. This was, after all, the woman who cut off all contact with her own father after he repeatedly ignored his wife’s chronic lower back pain, which turned out to be the last stages of pancreatic cancer; the woman who once broke a flickering lightbulb by flinging a scalding hot vessel of rice at it; the woman whose mere approach made shopkeepers hurry into the back, praying for invisibility; the woman who sometimes didn’t sleep for three nights in a row; the woman who nodded sympathetically through our neighbour’s fond complaints about the naughtiness of her five-year-old son, then said, with every appearance of sincerity, “He sounds awful. Shall I slit his throat for you and get it over with?”
This was the woman whose daughter I am. Was. Am. All else flows from that.
When she died, I was twenty-one, in my last year of college. When I got the call, I took an overnight bus back to Bangalore, carrying nothing but a fistful of change from the ticket. Eleven people came to her funeral, including my father, me, and Stella, our maid, who brought her youngest son. We stood near the doorway, wedged between the blazing mouth of the electric crematorium and the March heat. The only breeze came from Stella’s son, who kept spinning the red rotors of a toy helicopter.
The evening after the funeral, after everybody had gone, my father shut himself into his bedroom, and I left the house and walked. Between the two of us, we had finished several pegs of rum and a quarter bottle of whiskey. I found myself standing on a busy main road with no recollection of having arrived there. People flowed around me, shops and bars glittered and trembled, and I tried to think of the future. In a few days, I would return to college; my final-year exams were just weeks away. After that? I would pack up my things and return to Bangalore. After that? Nothing.
A bus rattled past, mostly empty, only a few tired heads lolling in the windows. A waiter in a dirty banian dumped a bucket of chalky water onto the road in front of a restaurant. Earlier that day, while a gangly priest droned on and on, my father had overturned my mother’s ashes into a scummy green concrete tank, and then he had continued, somewhat helplessly, to hold on to the clay urn. Without thinking, I snatched it from his hand and dropped it onto a rubbish pile. It was something my mother herself might have done. The look on the vadhyar’s face was of shock and faintly delighted disgust. I waited for my father to bring it up later, but he didn’t.
I stood in the same spot until the waiter, now with two other men, emerged from the restaurant. They were dressed to go out, in closefitting shirts lustrous as fish scales. They passed right before me. I heard a scrap of their laughter and tensed, ready for a fight, waiting for the leer, the catcall, the line from a love song. But instead they crossed the road and were gone.
Excerpted with permission from ‘The Far Field’, by Madhuri Vijay, published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins