Book Reviews

Claming Home, Missing Home

Rachna Gilmore (Author)
A Group of One. Fitzhenry & Whiteside
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Tariq Malik (Author)
Rainsongs of Kotli. TSAR Publications
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Reviewed by Paulomi Chakraborty

Rachna Gilmore’s novel for teenagers tells the story of 15-year old Tara Mehta’s negotiations with her identity as a Canadian of Indian origin. The strength of the novel is in its willingness to explore the difficult issue of race in a multicultural classroom or society without observing conventional pieties. Tara takes on her well-meaning white teacher’s assumption that she, who looks “different,” is not a regular Canadian; thus, she confronts the presumption that only white Canadians are regular Canadians. Tara catches the teacher off-guard, exposing the tacit prejudices within Canadian multiculturalism.

Given the courage of the novel, its politics seems compromised by an assimilative impulse. Although it squarely challenges the notion that regular Canadians are white, the protagonist through whom the novel conveys the message, Tara, is a convenient candidate for “different but regular.” Her difference is of the right degree: not too much. Tara cannot wait for Halloween but finds Diwali boring, has no connections to India, has a two-syllable user-friendly name (as do her sisters Nina and Maya) and English is her mother tongue. Tara is a regular Canadian all right, but what about her Somali peers in her school who speak English with accents? What about other Canadian children, who, unlike Tara, indeed have different mother tongues or inconveniently long, difficult-to-pronounce names? What about Canadians who miss another home? According to the novel they are regular Canadians as well, but somehow the novel does not seem as convinced of their claim to regularity. Nor does the novel ask the bigger questions: if Canada is truly a multicultural country, why must Tara need English as her mother tongue in order to be regular, why should she not get Diwali breaks or have access to her family’s history in the school curriculum? Furthermore, why must all models of collectives that Tara can access fail her individuality, so that she is destined to be a group of one? I am left with a sense of loss for Tara: do her white Canadian classmates ever have to feel this lonely?

A Group of One has great potential to raise important questions for its target audience. If read in multicultural classrooms, it will provide an excellent platform for necessary discussions. The biggest bonus of the book is that it is a delight to read. In spite of handling a difficult topic, it never turns dry or didactic. It is crisply written with both sensitivity and humour, captures a teenager’s world ably, and has a captivating plot that alternates between family drama and school drama. Tara’s story is compelling and sometimes surprisingly poignant. I think young readers will like to hear Tara’s story; and if Tara is not really a group of one, then some young readers will find hers an enabling voice.

If Gilmore’s novel is about claiming Canada as home, Vancouver-resident Tariq Malik’s collection of stories, The Rainsongs of Kotli, offers another narrative of home, that of homesickness. The home imagined and missed in Malik’s book is not Canada but the home the author left behind, Kotli, a small town in Pakistani Punjab. Memory threads the stories together to form a short-story cycle. Loss and nostalgia inform each story: delirious homesickness, Partition trauma, lost childhoods, forced maturation, frustrated journeys back home, and obsessive quests for lost and forgotten objects are the subject matter of the stories. In the final story, “Malhaara Moving to the Sound of Water,” the faqir Malhaara, named after the soulful Monsoon-raaga Malhaar, roams through the streets, lamenting Kotli’s “tragic diaspora” and the pain of losing the “loved ones” for those “left behind.” The lament also echoes the author’s own sense of loss and nostalgia.

In spite of the unifying mood, the stories are quite different from one another in plot and treatment. Both content and structure may challenge Western literary aesthetics and expectations. The writing style is more affiliated with Punjabi and Urdu literary traditions, and the language is rich and poignant, woven with evocative quotes from Punjabi folksongs and poetry. These long and episodic stories are complex and personal. Although the stories betray a strong impulse to remember Kotli in minute detail, and while the world of Kotli is more male focused, there is a refreshing restraint from fashioning the collection as a “third-world” story meant for a cosmopolitan audience. In this context the rather selective policy of translating Punjabi words should be understood: sometimes the author translates the lines he quotes, sometimes not. He does not translate the Punjabi words that he uses himself, leaving the reader to guess the meaning from the context. Curiously, he provides a list of characters with some humorous cultural glossing at the end but not the usual glossary of non-English words. Finally, I must add that for a book so lovingly written and produced, the cover is unfortunate. The picture of a sari-clad South Asian woman has no resonance with the world of Kotli and damages the politics of the book by marketing the ethnic other as exotica.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #190 (Autumn 2006), South Asian Diaspora. (pg. 114 - 115)

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