Peaks
‘The Folded Earth,’ by Anuradha Roy
TS
Late in this quietly mesmerizing novel, set in a Himalayan hill town in
the north of India, Anuradha Roy describes the crystalline beauty of
the peaks in winter, viewed long after the haze of the summer months
and the fog of the monsoon, held in secret for those who choose to
brave the cold: “After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the
peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of
the moon had dropped from sky to earth.” In the mountains, one of Roy’s
characters observes, “love must be tested by adversity.”
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Maclehose Press
Anuradha Roy
THE FOLDED EARTH
By Anuradha Roy
269 pp. Free Press. Paper, $15.
It’s the inherent conflict in human attraction — the inescapable fact
that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them
— that forms the spine of the novel. In marrying a Christian, the
narrator, Maya, has become estranged from her wealthy family in
Hyderabad. But after six happy years together, her husband has died in
a mountaineering accident. Rather than return to her parents, she seeks
refuge in Ranikhet, a town that looks toward the mountains that so
entranced her husband. Overcome with grief, she stows away his
backpack, recovered from the scene of the accident, and refuses to
inspect its contents. She can’t bear to know the details surrounding
his death.
In Ranikhet, Maya settles into a routine: teaching at a Christian
school; spending time with her landlord, Diwan Sahib; and observing the
sometimes comic rhythms of the village and its army garrison. Roy
manages to capture both the absurd and the sinister in even minor
characters, like a corrupt local official who embarks on a
beautification plan that includes posting exhortatory signs around
town. (One, meant to welcome trekkers, is vandalized to read “Streaking
route.”) His crusade, inspired by the Singaporean Prime Minister Lee
Kuan Yew, who embraced caning as a punishment, also includes the
persecution of a simple-minded but harmless herder.
Of course, a sedate world exists only to be shaken, and soon enough the
town is disturbed from all sides. An election brings issues of religion
to the fore, threatening to stir sectarian violence. Curious military
maneuvers prompt rumors of Chinese spies and fears of a border conflict
with Pakistan. Diwan Sahib’s nephew, Veer, a mountaineering guide,
moves into the elderly man’s villa, and Maya finds herself drawn to
him, despite the bad habits he encourages in his uncle and, more
alarmingly, his tendency to disappear without warning.
While there are scenes of tension and intrigue — a political goon
attacks a young girl, Veer’s work in the mountains starts to appear
suspicious — the novel’s mood remains elegiac rather than fraught,
expressed through small tragedies like the burning of a valuable
manuscript or the death of a beloved deer. Roy is particularly adept at
mining the emotional intricacies of the relationship between Maya and
Diwan Sahib, which also serves to symbolize India’s uneasy passage from
tradition to modernity.
The novel’s one weakness is its culminating revelation (and its
consequences), which feels strangely insignificant, as if Roy couldn’t
bring herself to commit to the more outrageous implications she has set
in motion. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow
peaks where that sky is,” a character notes of a day when the Himalayas
are shrouded in clouds, “would he believe you? . . . But you and I know
the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and
can’t understand.” Perhaps Roy prefers to keep the heights of her
story, like those mountaintops, shrouded in mystery.
Andrea Thompson is a freelance writer and editor.
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