The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy (Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist)

The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy (2011, MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus, London.)

With its powerful flow of language and vivid evocation of place, The Folded Earth promises a significance that it never quite delivers. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it but wonder if anything more than the atmosphere of the novel will remain in memory six months from now.

The narrator Maya experiences a personal trauma that leads her to give up her big city life and take a job as a teacher in the small town of Ranikhet in the foothills of the Himalayas. She lives there for several years, trying to heal, with only a few people in her circle of friends and acquaintances. Her landlord, the 87-year-old Diwan Sahib had held an important job in the provincial government at the time of Indian independence and numbered Nehru among his associates. He drinks all day and works on a manuscript about the naturalist Jim Corbett, enlisting Maya as his assistant. Maya helps a former student named Charu, who never learned to read, decipher letters from a boyfriend now living in the city. Charu lives with her aged grandmother and uncle and spends her days herding cows. A distant relation of the Diwan guides trekkers into the high mountains, and he unexpectedly pops in and out of the Diwan’s house. A collection of the small town’s residents give the story personality and incident. These are friends of the Diwan’s, Maya’s supervisor at the Catholic school where she works, municipal functionaries, army officers from the town’s military installation, candidates for office. Tensions arise between individuals and groups, but the dynamics of these interactions ebb and flow without much development.

Well into the narrative Maya describes trying to avoid thinking about the past or future. “I would negotiate each day as if I were riding a leaf in a flowing stream: enough to stay afloat. I would not ask for more.” This image serves as an apt description of the whole novel. As a reader I felt as if adrift on a stream, but unfortunately I did ask for more, even though the flow of language was lucid and held my interest. Still, I kept hoping for the work to become something more than the sum of its parts, as interesting as those elements might be. Glimpses of different characters, involved in a variety of activities are interesting, each and every one, but altogether the variations create low impact. When a few surprises occur at the novel’s end, they resolve mysteries the reader has not been pining to clarify.

The novel’s greatest strength is the narrator’s steady, true, calm voice and the sense of accurate observation she conveys. The descriptions of environment are especially immediate and rich. The town lies in sight of the high Himalayan peaks and aside a mysterious forest where cattle stray and leopards roam. Anuradha gives us plants, animals, streams, rocks, trees, sky, and clouds. We visit the bazaar and the ancient temple. We experience the daily life of the people in general and the concerns of a few people in particular. In a memorable style, the novel presents a slice of life in a small town and a woman’s efforts to create a new life while coming to terms with memory and loss.

The Folded Earth has been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and because of its aesthetic beauty, because of the high degree of literary achievement at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, I would not be surprised if the novel made the short list in January. On the other hand, it would a be big surprise if the book won the award. The Folded Earth is a good read; I will read Anuradha again, even though this novel does not in my judgment rise to the level of great literature.

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