Sleeping on Jupiter- Anuradha Roy
Sleeping on Jupiter’s curvature is dripped with a social commentary personified through characters who each represent a suppressed emotion or unease. The book begins with a violent flashback of Nomita’s childhood when a civil strife kills her father and brother — “ When the pigs were slaughtered for their meat they shrieked with a sound that made my teeth fall off and this was the sound I heard sppn after my mother cut the grapefruit, and the men came in with axes… they flung my father at a wall. The whitewashed wall streamed red, they threw him to the floor and kicked him with their booted feet. Each time the boots hit him it was as if a limp bundle of clothes was being tossed this way and that”
Anuradha Roy centres the plot around child sexual abuse that Nomi faces in a guru’s ashram and homosexuality through Badal- the tourist guide’s unrequited love for an errand boy thus setting an allegory on contemporary Indian issues. Roy uses intermittent flashbacks throughout the text to provide contours to the ensemble cast’s present behavior and purpose through the course of the story. Therefore, the reader is introduced to Nomi’s childhood where she is orphaned, rescued, and then abused by a god man, “Guruji,” in an ashram from where she escapes and is adopted into a Norwegian family, and returns to Jharmuli to make a documentary about temple festivals.
The text explores the idea of homosexuality through a lucid undertone, bereft of any extravagance and treats it through the lens of Badal in a matter of fact way, a treatment usually the preserve of an urbane heterosexual love story. The novel also introduces us to Sooraj who acts as Nomi’s assistant on the trip and sets forth another allegory in the form of a progressive modern Indian man who is still hiding a tinge of patriarchy and its residual violence within. Sooraj’s frustrating exchanges with Nomi provides a much needed heft and tautness to the narrative which otherwise feels like tepid linear story of a women coming back to her native country in search of past to make peace with.
The writing is luscious and composed but while Roy tries to create a tight tale using the limited number of days in which the story pans out as a tool, it fails to lift off apart from the instances when the three old women that Nomi encounters on the train — Latika, Vidya and Gouri are centred and their past interwoven with their present individual longings. It is their mental analysis of Nomi and the difference in their interactions with the people that they meet on their vacation typified by the roles that they played in a sepia layered era that is a treat to read.
Roy explores the treacherous hypocrisies of Indian society: bare-bodied priests who make a fuss about women’s clothing; tourism that celebrates erotic carvings on temple walls while remaining in denial about the sexual abuse of children; holidaying old women tired of domestic drudgery who jump at the first opportunity to pass harsh judgment on each other and everyone else; the “progressive” man who can share a cigarette and whisky with a woman but is still ready to hit her when an argument gets out of hand. While the book viscerally captures the quintessentially nauseating Indian atmosphere: a train sways and moves faster, “as if lighter from shedding the girl”, what it fails to do is find a deserving conclusion to the almost lyrical composition that she sets up. The characters seem to go haywire at the slightest touch and the embossed setting of an Indian village while brings out of the book, rustic images and rekindles the senses in the form of a sea-side tea stall falls short of transforming the allegory into a sumptuous fictional offering. The whole attempt seems magnanimous in intention yet blithely rudimentary in execution.
