"The story of you never begins with you..."

I just finished reading Manreet Sodhi Someshwar's The Long Walk Home, and it's been a long time since I have felt a connection with a story so much. My regret: this is like the story i wanted to write, or had begun to write and left midway due to lack of inspiration, and now someone else has beaten me to it! (I almost felt the same wth Unaccustomed Earth) I am to blame - I don't take my writing seriously, or take it way too seriously. I'm a bundle of contradictions..

The book is centred around an ordinary Sikh family living in a border town in Punjab, tracing their history within the larger history of the Punjab. For a writer or reader in the 21st century, Punjab's history begins at the moment of partition. It is ridden with angst at a world forcibly cut off from their being.. "Jinne Lahore ni vekheya au jameya hi ni" - but the hostile border has ensured that at least two generations of Punjabis have been deprived of the fervour of life. This book deftly takes the reader, who is present in the narrative as a silent witness-observer, through the Nehruvian years of territorial betrayal, land fortification and agrarian reform, to the profits of the Green Revolution and the emigration flux. It deliberates on the ideological contingencies that plague Punjab to this day, especially as it tries to represent the cause and effect of militancy in the region. It records instances, especially of violence and hints at the pogrom, of the like which go unaccounted for in the regular or mainstream representations. As Bitta remarks in the text: "You children can write an essay on the Holocaust. But on your own history you come up short. Why?". To which Noor retorts: "No Sikh producers in Hollywood?" But Neymat offers a better answer: "Noone really speaks about it...reluctant to talk"(213). This exchange to me sums up the problem of dissemination of information, the apathy even among the university educated, and the general glossing over of political stance in favour of a single-minded pursuit of prosperity. The last part of this exchange, however, raises greater issues of expression - can there be a suitable vocabulary to talk about painful incidents, trauma? Why do people choose not to engage with uncomfortable questions? Why are future generations shielded from the baggage of both personal and political history?

The narrative is sensuous - you can touch, feel, smell, taste and hear the elements that ooze out. And most of all you can visualize - the narrative functions with a cinematic consistency, almost as if the writer has consciously constructed it as a film's screenplay. In no way does it take away from the "aura" of the written text since the influence of one form of representation over another can be taken as a given, especially since film as a medium dominates the postmodern consciousness. The language reads as if affected in many places, in a harried and beaten expression, but the essence it seeks to capture is fairly fresh. It falls into the Rushdie-an trap of "magic bilingualism" (or multilingualism) as it tries to seamlessly fit proverbial phrases into the idiom of English. It works, as in Rushdie's case, but for a non-native readership.

The title is inspired by Tagore's translation of "Ekla chalo re", "Walk Alone", which serves as the latent motif through the text. The blurb also carries a sher by Gulzar especially written for the novel..."ye faasle  teri galiyon ke humse tey na hue..."

All in all, a definite read. Especially for those who engage silence and unknowability. But don't conceive of the text as a lesson in history. It is not. It is a novel written with care for context, as it spills out of the ramifications of its own literary intertexts.