“The extraordinary is what art is about,” Mary Oliver wrote in her 2016 anthology of essays, Upstream.“In creative work – creative work of all kinds – those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labour requires a different outlook – a different set of priorities.” And yet, in art, as in real life, the extraordinary often finds its genesis in the ordinary, the commonplace.
Whether in Wendy Cope’s poetry about oranges and bottle-openers or Søren Solkær’s stunning monograph of starling migrations, the creative work that nudges the human condition forward, can never quite distance itself from the ordinary. Sarmistha Pritam’s Beneath the Simolu Tree, written in Assamese and translated into English by Ranjita Biswas, is a book about the ordinary.
Set in rural Assam, it tells the story of Paridhi, a young woman who has grown up in the shadow of alcoholism, abuse, and violence, and is searching for meaning in the minutiae of every day. The village she lives in is one of those many shifting spaces in early 21st century India – chained to regressive traditions that assert gender and patriarchal norms, while also inclined towards modernity through access to the internet and mobile phones, and aspirations of upward mobility. It is in this space of ordinariness that Paridhi’s complex relationships with art, love, grief, and beauty unfold.
The tree, the tree
There is a small railway station in Paridhi’s village, a bare structure with a single platform, a waiting room, a ticket counter, and a few makeshift benches. It has the sleepiness of ennui, but it also has a strange hold on Paridhi, who visits it often, hoping for but never clearly articulating her desire to get away from the village and the life of sameness it offers her. On the edge of habitation, the station is surrounded by wilderness. On the other side of the railway track is a simolu tree – semal, or silk-cotton – with its flaming red flowers, its pods of cottonwool, and a rich undergrowth. The tree is hope to Paridhi. It is hope and it is beauty and it is something she wants to always be able to protect, even as she expects shelter and protection from it. The tree is also a site of hauntings. There are stories of ghosts, as there often are, in places that feel abandoned and isolated, but it is also haunted by memories and the past.
What lies beneath the simolu tree is Paridhi’s tenuous sense of safety. Nature, unfiltered, untamed, is Paridhi’s solace. She takes comfort in the warmth of the sun and wants to address the sun as deuta, her father. She has a friend, Mayur, who researches butterflies and seems oddly integrated into the natural world. Mayur, unlike Paridhi’s fiancé, Bondeep, brings stability to her life, supporting her art, making no claims on her, showing her that loving nature can only happen when one discards ego and selfishness. There is sentimentality in this portrayal of Paridhi’s kinship with nature, but the effect is impossible to miss.
The living spaces
In her writing, Paridhi wants to tell the stories of very ordinary women. She wants to “search in people’s hearts… (and) bring up their stories from the unexplored depths of their hearts.” Writing is a compulsion, she says. She writes not for success but from the inability to escape. Stories are an atavistic form of communication for Paridhi. Having grown up with stories from folklore and mythology, told by her bordeuta, her father’s older brother, and her best friend Juroni’s mother, Paridhi sees stories as a portal between generations. This orality of transmission keeps narratives alive in constantly changing cultural spaces. Unlike the stories of everyday truths that Paridhi wants to write, the stories she has had handed down to her speak of great loves and great losses. Like that of the mortal Nabakumar, who fell in love with a mermaid, a water princess, a story hauntingly akin to Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid”, only, in this version, it is the human who meets a tragic end.
Stones are an unending source of stories in Assam, the author tells us. She then goes on to give us the stories of Chand Saudagar and Goddess Manasa (made famous in recent years by Amitav Ghosh in his Gun Island), the love story of the Ahom king, Gangadhar, and the Naga maiden, Dalimi, of King Baan of Tezpur, and of the great romance of Baan’s daughter, Usha, and Krishna’s grandson, Aniruddha. While these stories hark back to the past, they also subvert extant narratives of Brahmanism and gender normative.
Paridhi’s world, despite its reassuring familiarity, is an unstable one. A poem that she writes as a teenager is evidence of the same: “Please sing me a lullaby/ And shut the door of grief/ Or, take me away from here/ Somewhere far away/ Open the path to your womb again, Ma/ Keep me hidden in your womb, in its darkness, Ma/ There’s no other place safer than here/ Nowhere else.” There is no safety in this uncertain flux, she seems to say. Paridhi’s hometown has seen turbulence caused from within intimate spaces as well as violence performed on it from the outside.
Sarmistha Pritam writes of the spectre of addiction that has haunted the community. Paridhi’s father is an alcoholic with a history of abuse directed primarily at his wife and then at his older child, Paras. His addiction destroys his family, causing ruptures that have consequences reaching into a dark future. Pritam writes another minor character into her story, struggling with the demons of addiction and total loss of control, symptomatic of a system that does not value small lives. The novel also takes note of other forms of violence – of agitations that pulled in young men, of unnamed “sangathans” that feed the youth a diet of dreams and turn into instruments of caste and gender oppression themselves. This is not a world that offers tropes of redemption and healing. It has jagged edges and makes no promises of change.
As an advocate for people with spinal muscular atrophy, Pritam writes with sensitivity about the role of caregiving. Paridhi takes care of her bordeuta who has always been more paternal than her biological father and has supported her choices and her dreams. In his ailing condition, Paridhi becomes a custodian of the lives of her uncle and her mother, as well as of their rapidly ageing home, a structure of clay that reminds Paridhi of her grandfather’s love for the land of his origin. Pritam brings a lightness of touch to difficult questions of human fragility and the futility of human decisions. Paridhi’s story anchors itself to her lived spaces – her home, the railway station, the simolu tree – even as she struggles with conflicts between writing and painting, romantic and platonic love, hope and despair.
Ranjita Biswas’s translation captures the heartbreak of Pritam’s narrative and it also, like all politically conscious translations, makes its reader do the hard work, incorporating words from the source language, capturing local flavour in its rendering of colours, images, food traditions, and social relationships. Pritam’s subliminal message seems to be one of hope. “Time grinds stones to fine particles”, she writes. “But do they disappear? No, they take another form, making them stronger, more enduring.” Paridhi, in this matrix of acceptance and re-formulation, makes herself afresh, from caterpillar to butterfly, transitioning from grief to self-acceptance and a gradual, edifying metamorphosis. If the possibilities of the ordinary catch your fancy, Beneath the Simolu Tree might just be your cup of tea.
Beneath the Simolu Tree, Sarmistha Pritam, translated from the Assamese by Ranjita Biswas, Simon and Schuster India.
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