When I started reading Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day, I couldn’t help but compare it to V. V. Ganeshananthan Love Marriage. The human mind likes to do that: group two things together at first glance just because they have a few things in common. They were both published at the same time, are first novels by South Asian women authors of my generation, and are about the Tamil diaspora.
V. V. Ganeshanthan’s novel Love Marriage explores the ramifications of decades of civil war in Sri Lanka through the lens of one family’s journey. The protagonist, Yalini, is a college student, the daughter of immigrant parents who had a ‘love marriage’ in the U.S. Years later, the uncle who had most staunchly opposed their marriage arrives in Toronto as a terminally ill refugee. One of the Tamil Tigers’ leaders, he is in the last days of his life. As Yalini and her family care for him during his last days, she explores what it means to be a terrorist, family secrets, violence, and forgiveness, and the ways in which black and white must give way to gray. It is written as a series of vignettes and is a political novel as much as it is a novel about the personal struggles and triumphs of a particular community. [read my interview with Ganeshanthan here]
Evening is the Whole Day is set in Malaysia of 1980. I expected it to be more about Malaysian history, and it did touch upon that, but for me, this novel was at its heart, a family drama, a psychological study of why and how people change and become who they are, about promises made and not made.
Its slowly unfolding narrative takes us from the present to the past of the Rajasekharan family, in reverse chronological order. When the story begins, we know that Uma, the sullen and silent genius daughter of a wealthy and successful lawyer Raju and his wife Vasanthi has just left home in Malaysia for Columbia University. Patti, Raju’s mother, recently died – a tragic death, we know but how we’re not sure — and inside the family home on Kingfisher Lane, Chellam the rail-thin maid servant is being “sent back” to her village, where we are told her life will soon come to an end. Raju’s son Suresh is a mocking and silent child who tolerates the wistful mumblings and ghost stories told by the youngest child of the family, Asha, one of the most vivid characters, who has been abandoned by her sister Uma and whose best friends are the ghosts (including Patti) who she sees and talks to.
As we enter the world of the inhabitants of the “big house” on Kingfisher Lane, we discover their individual stories. There’s Vasanthi or Amma who was born into a poor and family; her mother gave up the household life when Vasanthi was a teenager and it was her charge to bring up her siblings, manage the household, and empty the chamber pot. There’s Raju, the Oxford-educated lawyer who returns home to Malaysia to take care of his widow mother after Tata, his hardworking father who had emigrated from India to Malaysia (and became a wealthy success story) passes away. Despite his mother’s admonitions, Raju woos and marries Vasanthi, a simple girl, and brings her into his house only to find that she is never going to be who she wants him to be:
“He tried to summon up the old exhilaration of taking her out into the world: she’d been like a kitten let outdoors for the first time … He’d found her tentativeness charming then; now, not having heard a complete, worthwhile thought from her in months, he felt himself turning to dust every time he looked at her across the dining table. …” (p. 97)
There’s Chellam the maidservant whose father takes away all her wages to buy his booze. Poor thing, her hopes for a better life dangle at the mercy of her employers for whom she becomes a pawn in their game of tit-for-tat, I’ll hurt you because you hurt me. And, there’s Uncle Ballroom, Raju’s younger brother, a once-upon-a-time professional dancer who returns every now and then, when he runs out of money, to find his childhood home ever shiny from the outside but filled with clouds of dusty memories, sadness, secrets, and lies. Alongside the family drama is the fascinating subplot of Malaysian politics and the history of Indians in Malaysia.
Samarasan deftly writes in the third person limited, allowing readers to view the events in a troubled household from the point of view of each of the main characters. Though the mystery of solving Patti’s death dragged for me (I have a hard time reading serious books in the summertime), the novel hit the right notes once that question was answered and then, pulled me along.
The book’s title comes from a stanza from Kuruntokai, a classical Tamil poetic text that deals with matters of love and separation (this text is also the source of the line “red earth and pouring rain”):
The sun goes down and the sky reddens, pain grows sharp,
light dwindles. Then is evening
when jasmine flowers open, the deluded say.
But evening is the whole day
for those without their lovers.
No doubt, there’s a bit of a poet in Samasaran. Her language is lush – adjectives and verbs, metaphors and setting sing together to create a mood not unlike the raga in Indian classical music, which slowly unfurls and pulls you along with it in small waves until it reaches a moving crescendo where everything comes together.Setting matters and the author brings the house and the town of Ipoh alive with sensitivity as in this small line: “A quiet benevolence cups the morning in its palm” or “The house expands with accusatory female breath.”
The New York Times compares Samarasan to Eudora Welty, “another woman who knew how to write about family and race and class and secrets and heat.” Readers at sepiamutiny compare Samarasan to Arundathi Roy, and I can see why. It’s the way the sentences move and dance, the zigzagging of storylines, and the darkness of a family life.
c work that screams for public participation. Raymond has been standing next to it all week long, encouraging pedestrians to inscribe their thoughts about Obama and the presidential race on the canvas, using color-coded magic markers (Blue for Democrats; Red for Republicans; Black for Independents). At the end of the week (Sat., i.e. the end of the DNC). , the artist will close his current auction on eBay.
