Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s Sorrows of Sarasvati is a miraculous example of his art and craft. Like a prehistoric archaeologist, he excavates a lost river from under sand dunes and builds a museum that echoes Parushni’s “hoo ... dham ... dham ... hoo”. Like a magical transporter, he travels some four millennia back in time to land us in an unnamed village flanked by the River Ghaghara (Vedic Sarasvati) and marshland. It’s a village where floods foster life; a village where existence is replete with angst from falling birds, falling water levels, invading foreigners; and a river drying up. Sorrows of Sarasvati is a dark narrative about this village populated by bright beings, who ask all kinds of intelligent questions but struggle to reach any convincing conclusions.
Like all great works of art, Sorrows of Sarasvati offers multiple interpretations accessible through a variety of lenses. As a historical novel, it’s a peep into our Dravidian past. Dravidians are being abandoned by Mother Nature and taken over by Aryans. Virchan – a helpless son of the soil – witnessing Ghaghara’s withdrawal and “sharp-nosed” Puran’s arrival with that clichéd colonial excuse: “We came here ... because you were sluggish and worthless. You were neither beautiful nor wise. You were dull-witted out and out … You do not believe in any gods and goddesses.”
As an environmental narrative, it warns us of the horrors of heat and the destruction of climate change. At the same time, it preaches peaceful co-existence since, in Parushni’s words: “We – human beings, animals, trees, and plants – are more alive when we stay closer to each other. When one of us departs, it enervates the others. We are all… like measuring weights that remain constant when we stay together; otherwise, we lose our weight.” In Safeer Awan’s words: “Reading Parushni’s… fate in the closing scene of the novel, one cannot resist feeling that ultimately it is all Nada – nothingness, as far as individual destiny is concerned. The collective, civilisational destiny is more likely to survive if humans live in harmony with nature and their cultural others.”
It brings to life the agency of Dravidian matriarchs: Mati, a mother of three grown-up sons: “She was an earthly incarnation of the supreme mother goddess and they were simply her servants”; Pakli, an artist who believes that “as rivers contain water and seeds contain plants, the artists have these shapes in their bones and these shapes emerge on their own”; Gagri, “the only consummate bird hunter”, whom the whole village “would beg … to hunt [birds] for them, with the promise of a bowlful of wheat for her at the harvest time”; and Parushni, “who would always remain divided in her choice, “‘Virchan or Samroo? Samroo or Virchan?’ She could never determine whose sight aroused her more and made her melt from within. Any other girl would never bother to choose between them; she would go for both and both would be her husbands.”
As a pantheistic story, it sermonises surrender “to the body that includes everything… Everything around us, everything that breathes and moves between the sky and the soil, the rivers and the stars form this all-encompassing body….” In a post-sandstorm scene in the woods, Masa transforms into a tree: “It was Masa or some withered branch who smiled, ‘I’m one among the trees; I won’t go anywhere.’”
还没人写过短评呢