Victor Rangel-Ribeiro. Loving Ayesha World Literature Today, Jan-April, 2004 by Peter Nazareth
New Delhi. HarperCollins India. 2003. 223 pages, ill. Rs250. ISBN 81-7223-446-5 VICTOR RANGEL-RIBEIRO was born in Goa in 1925 and emigrated to the United States in 1956. A journalist, teacher, music conductor, and music stringer for the New York Times for several years, he published many books on music, including Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer (1981), which was praised by Yehudi Menuhin. His book Tivolem (1998) was listed by the American Library Association as one of the twenty notable first novels of 1997-98. In an interview in Goa Today (April 2003), he says he began an earlier novel in 1953, The Fires of Gangapur, which he has nearly finished revising for publication. Loving Ayesha is a collection of twelve stories set in his hometowns (New York, Goa, Bombay, et cetera) at various times. Two stories are in Indian English. "Lonely Ageing Chinese-American New York Neighbour Lady" begins, "Very lonely my aging Oriental Chinese neighbour lady must be. One month now I've been watching her, ever since Ganpat brought me to stay with him in America after his father died." Feeling is communicated through rhythm and gaps between words: the protagonist learns to communicate with her neighbor, though neither can speak the other's language. "Of course, with relatives sometimes there are misunderstandings, and with him misunderstandings we were having plenty when we were in India," is the second sentence of "Uncle Prabhu's Special Y2K Party." In "Peter and the Ants," a scientist who works in a lab has a wife who studies literature: "He, a red-blooded American male, had married her because she was a gentle Indian woman, anachronistically ladylike in her demeanour. He had not expected her so quickly to acquire such abrasive Western ways." She leaves him after he tells her to kill the Brazilian army ants behind their fridge. He begins killing the ants and is precise about their numbers, mindful of Powell and Schwarzkopf in Desert Storm, until we realize he is going crazy. The clue is that she was doing research into "an unlikely oxymoron--the emergence of unreal realism in contemporary world literature." To use the categories of Roger Dawson in The Secrets of Power Negotiating, he is an Analytical (coldly logical, precise about details, long attention span) and she is an Extrovert (emotional, imaginative, not concerned about details, short attention span). Dawson says two such people drive each other crazy. "Keeping in Touch" is a letter typed by an Indian father in Jackson Heights to his son in Paris. H and another letter are missing on the boy's typewriter, so the father figures out how to work around them. But Mataji (grandmother) drops the typing ball and things get worse: e goes so he uses ; a goes so he uses @--until the letter deconstructs our conditioning by letters. The typewriter goes crazy. Music has a less unmediated impact. In "The Specials of the Day," Jerome the writer invites a would-be Indian writer to a French restaurant. He plans to sing his proposal of marriage to her while the restaurant plays a canned selection from Faust. But the timing goes wrong because of constant interruptions by the servers--or does it go right? Still, the commitment is to writing, as revealed in the final, title story. The narrator takes in the movement for Indian Independence as he goes through college. He was in love with fellow student Moira, but through her Jesuit advisor, she found her calling as a nun. He segues to her sister Ayesha. Father Burgoyne fishes for him. He blocks him with, "Surely writing--and literature--can be a prayer as well." Agreeing, the priest names Catholic writers (St. Teresa of Avila, Thomas a Kempis, Cardinal Newman). He counters with novelists (A. J. Cronin, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Leacock). But the spiritual thinkers leave a mark--in New York, happily married with children and grandchildren, he communicates in dreams with Ayesha, now a nun working with "a forest-bound tribe" in India. Illustrations by the famous Mario Miranda pinpoint the humorous side of the characters, as with Lazar, the Tivolem village thief who always spins his way out of trouble through fantastic stories. But there are other sides, too. Boys seek to grow to their sexual and manly potential, people trip over cultural stereotypes, lonely people find ways of communicating; success depends on the ability to understand and negotiate power on a political and personal level, and love is found or lost because of courage or cowardice. Peter Nazareth University of Iowa Peter Nazareth "Victor Rangel-Ribeiro. Loving Ayesha". World Literature Today. FindArticles.com. 17 Aug, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5270/is_1_78/ai_n29065345/
