Some Malaysian reading was definitely overdue...

Published in 2008, this is by Preeta Samarasan (born in Batu Gajah, schooled in Ipoh, university-educated in the US, and now resident in France). It's her first novel.

She invites us to take a long, sad look at the Rajasekharan family. They're Malaysians of Indian descent (Appa's grandfather arrived in Penang in 1899); they're well-to-do (Appa's father, Tata, ended up owning a shipping company, and had fingers in various other commercial pies; Appa is a lawyer who works on quite high-profile cases); they live in a big house in Ipoh, which Tata bought from a departing Brit in the 1950s.



We open in September 1980, but all the stuff I've just mentioned will not come up until the next section.

In this first chapter, we focus on Chellam, an 18-year-old servant to the family, who is about to depart in disgrace. "A year from today," we're told, baldly, "Chellam will be dead." Her father drinks, and takes all her wages; this job with the Rajasekharans had rescued her from sex work, but now it has fallen apart.

Chellam's counterpart is the apparently very successful Uma, the 18-year-old daughter of the family. She left to study in America the previous week.

Someone has also died. She's Paati, Appa's mother, the elderly widow of Tata. And we meet the other children of the family. There's Suresh, aged eleven, and Aasha (who sees ghosts), aged six. We learn that Aasha has been hurt and bewildered by the change in her big sister over the past couple of years. From warm and supportive, she suddenly switched to remote and uninterested. And now she's gone.

There's a lot that's left unexplained in this first chapter, and the rest of book -- with the narrative hopping energetically back and forth between the recent past and the more distant past -- gradually peels back the layers to expose the many mysteries that haunt this family. I understand why this zigzag structure was chosen. You want to keep your reader guessing, after all. But it does require a considerable degree of attentiveness from the reader, and it does mean that much of what we read gains significance only with hindsight. So, consumers of the story need to be prepared to go back through it to really get a grip on the chronology, and to grasp the double meaning of certain actions and utterances.


Ipoh, 2011

Bit by bit, we learn about Raju's brother, Balu (generally referred to as Uncle Ballroom, because he was at one time a professional dancer). And we get to know Raju's wife. She's Vasanthi, but she's almost always referred to as Amma. Throughout, you feel there's something off about this family, and Appa's choice of bride is the first indication of this general slight screwiness. He's educated, and knows many similarly educated women. But he doesn't want to marry someone who is his equal... Amma, who's from a lower social echelon, and lives in a fairly crazy family herself (mum has abdicated all domestic responsibilities, and withdrawn to her room to be solitary and religious), is grateful to be singled out, and Appa likes gratitude.

Predictably, this goes horribly wrong. Paati looks down on Amma from the get-go, and makes her life a misery. Appa rapidly loses all interest in his wife, and starts spending more and more time away from home. And poor Amma claws her way up the social ladder, but at the expense of devoting her life to superficiality. Uma, also bright, ends up siding with Appa, and chumming up with Paati, isolating Amma even further.

Chugging along in the background of the story is Malaysia's socio-political situation. The colonial period made it possible for smart ethnic Indians to do very well (eg Tata); but Appa looks askance at independence because he fears the overturning of these opportunities. Suresh, somewhat symbolically, is born in the midst of the May 1969 race riots, which pave the way for the New Economic Policy (specifically designed to promote Malays). It's partly as a result of this that Uma is keen to study abroad (but there's a personal dimension to this desire that we find out only later). Appa obviously continues to do well, but other sectors of the Indian population (eg Chellam) are left far behind in the social pecking order.


Ipoh railway station, from which Amma and Uma left for their KL visit in 1969

***

From here on in, there are major spoilers. So read the book first!

We have, left over from the first chapter, two main questions:

1. What happened to Paati?

Paati, you realize with considerable discomfort, is an abused elder. She's not a nice old lady, but you shouldn't have to be nice to be safe from slaps, pinches, and pushes. Of course, Amma is getting her own back, after years of humiliation. But it's a little surprising that Chellam -- drafted in after Paati's rapid physical decline over the last couple of years -- is also disrespectful and uncaring whenever she can get away with it.

On the fateful day, there has been lots of kerfuffle because Paati has soiled herself, and has been left for quite a while on her own in the bathroom. Chellam has been there, and Amma has been there. But the last to see her is Uma, who takes her some warm water. She hears Paati extolling Raju: "Such a good boy... such a good son." She sees the marks on Paati's body.

Did Uma push Paati? At first I wasn't sure. What we do know is that Paati was alive when Uma left the bathroom. For reasons we don't yet know, Uma is angry with the way Paati extols Appa: "Ask your son to bring you your water, then, if he's so wonderful. That's what Uma said." And that's when Paati falls, and hits her head.

Aasha, spying, as six-year-olds will, sees the blood-stained outcome.

A little later, we're following Uma's train of thought, and it certainly sounds as though she pushed Paati...: "But when I left her she was fine."

It's then that we have a kind of Ian McEwan Atonement moment. Because Aasha tells everyone that Chellam pushed Paati... What she recounts is what she saw, but it's transferred from Uma to Chellam. And yes, there was a push... Suresh somehow knows Aasha is lying. But he thinks it's Amma who did it, not Uma... Amma's longstanding low-level abuse is well known in the household, after all. But no-one has ever said anything. Probably Appa doesn't even know. He's out all the time.

But when this accusation drops, it's clear that Appa is adding blame to already-existing anger. Again, it's only later that we find out he's angry with Chellam because it's she who made Amma aware of his extra-marital goings-on (Appa also has this story of a liaison between Chellam and Uncle Ballroom, but it's hard to know if he actually believes this, or whether it's just convenient to say he believes it -- see below).

Uma later rationalizes what it was she felt in the aftermath of the death: "In and out of that bathroom all afternoon, a veritable procession of embittered women, eh? Who else had had a go? Still, why should I feel sorry for Paati? Why should I pity her when she never pitied me?"

Aasha tells the real story to the ghost child. So there's now no doubt: "Only one small push." And Paati didn't fall immediately. "It was only AFTER THAT Paati fell." Aasha is convinced it was a ghost who caused the final fall. Always a good explanation.



2. Why did Uma change?

Two years previously, Uncle Ballroom visited the family in the Big House. Amma is away in KL. He observes the -- then -- close relations between Uma and her little sister, and between Paati and Uma. He remembers as a child seeing Paati with Mr Boscombe, one of Tata's bosses. He never said anything: "What had his secret cheated him out of? Did he even know?"

He teaches Uma -- still lighthearted and fun-loving at that point -- to dance. And Aasha, jealous, concocts a story that Uma is going to New York to marry Uncle Ballroom. Everyone laughs. But...

Meanwhile, Appa is having a terrible time with the char kuay teow lady he has adopted as a kind of permanent mistress. First, she's pressing for a more stable status; and then her husband turns up, and threatens Appa, who's intimidated and humiliated, and retreats to his big house. Where he sees that Uma is still up... He ends up crying. And she tries to comfort him. "How they travelled, in the short space of three seconds, from the purifying sorrow of that moment to the scene that would forever replay itself in their resistant heads... neither of them would ever be able to say."

Uncle B, seeing them shortly after this very brief, arrested, but indelible encounter, realizes that a line has been crossed. "I'm tired," he thinks to himself. "I'm tired of always being the one to see too much." Paati realizes too. But she keeps quiet. She protects Appa, not Uma. Uncle B, on the other hand, tries to talk to Appa, but the culprit throws it all back on his brother's "sick mind". He drives Uncle B away, accusing HIM of corrupting Uma.

So now Uma knows:

A. Paati will not be there to protect her;
B. Aasha, whose self-serving, childish, wrong-end-of-the stick lie has fanned the flames, is a liability she doesn't want to be tied to; and
C. Appa lies.

Amma comes home, and realizes:

A. Suresh is now the favourite, not Uma;
B. Paati is suddenly declining; and
C. Uma is terribly withdrawn.

It's this event -- the final link in the concatenation of events that has led miserable people to do hurtful and treacherous things to each other -- that reverberates down the months to the accusation made against Chellam: "I'm sorry, Chellam, Uma thinks. It's the first apology she's made in two years. And she is sorry: sorry that Chellam had to be the one to do -- and get caught doing -- what all of them wanted to do and any of them might have done... Hadn't she, Uma, herself stood behind Paati, and thought terrible thoughts, and even -- yes -- acted on them that very afternoon?"


Gopeng, 2018. Chellam will be led by her father "from the Gopeng bus station down more roads and more lanes until she arrives back at square minus one, the one-room hut in the red-earth village whence she emerged just a few years ago"

Aasha sees Uma's parting smile as she heads for the aircraft, and believes it is for her: "In that moment she knows where Uma is going and why, and what it means to escape." Uma never writes to the family. All we know of her future is other people's imaginings.

Robert Raymer, talking with Samarasan about a possible sequel, comments: "Personally I would love to see a novel about Uma in America, heavily burdened with guilt knowing that despite Aasha's assertion, she may have been the one to have killed Paati; guilt for Uncle Ballroom's falling out with her father; guilt for allowing herself to be manipulated by her grandmother against her mother; guilt for abandoning Aasha -- with plenty of flashbacks, further illuminating events that took place in the first book, plus her reaction when she learns of Chellam’s brutal death at the hands of her father..." But we're not scheduled to get such a sequel. Not yet at any rate.


Pulau Pangkor, 2015. Where Appa secretly takes his char kuay teow lady

***

This is a sad, dark book, rife with abuse of different kinds, and with a festering secrecy about what is suffered. It's incredibly claustrophobic.

And there's a political subtext rumbling on beneath the surface, too. Andrew Blackman doesn't see it as an allegory exactly, but argues that it does seem to be pointing to "a country in which truth can never be told for fear of unearthing painful memories, the same problem that imprisons the family. Nothing is said overtly in the novel about race and class, and yet the brief mentions of race riots and killings are enough to set the scene, and the treatment of Chellam is central to the dishonesty of the family."

Is this Malaysia...? Stratified; abusive; silenced; in denial?

Ann Ang certainly sees the Rajasekheran family as "an allegory for the birth of independent Malaysia and the 'selfish materialism' that resulted from a discourse of economic survivalism and interracial competition. Race, gender, and caste divisions intersect and Samarasan’s novel highlights how the truly voiceless, like Chellam, bear the brunt of the hegemonic imposition of fixed identities." Similarly, "To escape [the] toxic realities of gender and class, for which the Rajasekharan household is a microcosm of the nation, Uma has no option but to escape from Malaysia."

Ang notes that we're not left at the end of this novel with much hope for those who stay behind. And, as Melanie Chalil points out, the decision to end the novel with Uma's departure means that all the dreams of the perfect West are left suspiciously intact.



This is always, perhaps, a problematic element in the writing of those who have moved away. We've had quite a few lately: Kaveh Akbar; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Junot Diaz; Megha Majumdar... There's always the Catch-22: If they stay behind, they probably can't write what they write (for all sorts of reasons); if they leave, they're always writing from the point of view of someone who left, and for audiences that are mainly outsiders.

In the interview with Robert Raymer noted above, Samarasan is very upfront about the problems of being a non-white writer in a white-dominated publishing industry. The top and bottom of it is that there's pressure to write to please a white audience, leaving the author with "several awful options: 1) write for white people; 2) refuse to write for white people, therefore condemning yourself to an endless struggle with editors not to sacrifice everything you’ve written for your own people; 3) publish at home and give up the dream of a larger, more lucrative career (of course, there are lucky exceptions who’ve published at home and then had significant success abroad, but they are exceptions)."

Samarasan also wrote a very sad, very insightful commentary on her conflicted love for Malaysia. Like the family in Evening Is the Whole Day, hers had also experienced rapid social mobility. Then came 1969: "Those riots completely changed my family’s expectations, hopes, and perception of their place in Malaysia..." After that, her mother was strategizing how to get her out, and imposing rigid study timetables designed to compensate for the lack of money for privated tuition. It was "not an easy childhood to have", but the plan succeeded. Samarasan won a scholarship to study in the US. But there's a sad little kicker: "The experience of leaving your homeland is different for every person who does it, but there are two main categories of expatriate Malaysians, I think: those who move on and feel no loss or regret, and those who will always, no matter how much time passes, mourn the loss. I’m in the latter category. In the first few years after I left Malaysia, ... I distanced myself completely from my home country... But it didn’t take me long to realise that no matter how much I wanted not to care, I would always care about Malaysia. I would always feel a painful unrequited love, always feel that I had a stake in Malaysia’s destiny. That fierce connection is still there, twenty-eight years on: no other place’s failures and successes elicit as passionate a reaction in me as those of the country of my birth. There is no other place about which I want to write in my fiction, and no other place I think about so much."

I've heard students say similar things...

It's a tough thing for a country to have to grapple with an ethnicized postcolonial heritage. I hope Malaysia manages to battle on through, so that the day will come when no-one feels the need to move out.



***

The title, in closing, comes from the Kuruntokai, a classic collection of Tamil poetry. The context, which is given in one of the epigraphs, is this:

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 great brightening dawn
when crested cocks crow all through the tall city
and evening is the whole day
for those without their lovers.