| The Suragi Tree is a novel that works at many levels. At one level it tells the story of Sudhakar Rao, born in an orthodox Brahmin family in a remote hamlet in South Canara; of his early childhood spent in a sprawling ancestral house; of the way he grew up, listening to and telling stories; of his strong attachment to his uncle, a widower whose selfless love sustains him through life; of his difficult relationship with his loving but overbearing father; of his student days, and his love for literature; and the years spent in Bombay studying and teaching English literature; of his loves and heartbreaks, and his growing sadness and feelings of alienation. It is a long journey, with breaches that are never properly bridged, from his infancy in the late Thirties to 1995, when, at the age of 58, he sits down in his flat in the crowded metropolis of Bombay, reviewing his life and trying to turn it into a novel.
The novel traces Sudhakar’s growth in a fast-changing fragmented world. It explores the many worlds Sudhakar grew up in: the old world of large joint families living in isolated villages where boys entertained themselves, and others, by staging their own versions of yakshagana plays; the market-town world of Kantheshwar; the provincial town of Udupi where Sudhakar went to College; the cosmopolitan whirl of Bombay, exciting at first but soon growing bewildering and nightmarish. The novel also explores Sudhakar’s inner world, shaped by his readings and experiences.
At another level, it is a symbolic story of crime and punishment, of sin and expiation. The crime is the cutting down of a Suragi tree at Kantheshwar by Sudhakar and his younger brother. Sudhakar in his schooldays loved that tree; he used to spend hours sitting in its green shade, dreaming and reading and writing. His brother wants to build a house on that spot, but his workers are too scared to cut the tree because they believe that it harbours a Yakshi, a deity they worship. Sudhakar, who has come down from Bombay for his mother’s funeral, helps his brother to cut it. And then begins to feel that he has cut his own roots.
The novel is also about Novels: about reading novels and writing them, and the relationship between the fictional world and ours. Sudhakar was an avid novel-reader in his youth, feeling more at home in the world of fiction than in the complex world of everyday life. When he starts reviewing his life, his purpose is to turn his life into a novel and be the reader of his own life - so that "that corrosive feeling of self-pity can change into compassion and remorse can be cast out." In turning his life into a novel Sudhakar is trying to gain control over the events of his life, though only in retrospect.
The novel plays with perspective, and its perception of reality keeps changing. Sudhakar can distance himself from his childhood experiences – even the more painful ones – and look at them with an amused, indulgent detachment. This gives the early scenes a pristine quality. The review of the novel in The Hindu says: ‘The rural milieu provides the author with a fertile source of original and felicitous metaphor. Memories of past happiness long buried in the subconscious mind float suddenly to the surface "like butter churned by the gopis for little Krishna to steal"; and moments of ecstasy are as fleeting as Godhooli, that magical moment when the dying sun turns to gold the dust raised by the cows as they come home. Analogies like these are movingly eloquent and leave a lasting resonance in the reader's mind.’
But the Bombay scenes are different. As Sudhakar is sucked into the whirl of events and loses his moorings, his perception of reality gets blurred. ‘The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated’. There is irony in the way these scenes juxtapose the comic and tragic trials of Bombay life; it’s there even in the depiction of Sudhakar’s love. He hates Hindi films but falls in love with a girl who looks like a Bollywood heroine, and is dragged by her to fifty Hindi films. His suffering at the end of the affair is real, but the pathos has, inevitably, a Bollywoodian flavour. The irony reveals that it’s not always art that imitates life; art – especially escapist art - can at times entice life into imitating it.
The perception of reality changes again in the ‘expiation’ part of the novel. On the verge of retirement Sudhakar goes to his village and has a near-fatal attack of chickenpox. During those long nights when the fever rises, and he swims and sinks in the dark waters of hallucinosis, Sudhakar has an eerie feeling that his nurse is perhaps the Yakshi of the Suragi tree. Reality merges with the phantasmagoric here. The supernatural is kept subterranean, but only just.
After the fever there is another transformation. The fever burns away Sudhakar’s sense of guilt. Coincidences turn into correspondences and the world becomes coherent and meaningful again. The Hindu review is eloquent about this change: “Though not rapturously happy he has achieved an inner poise, and has learnt at last, as all of us must learn, to move in measure like a dancer.”
About the novel’s central symbol, Suragi: Suragi flowers are fragrant even when they dry up. The tree’s flowering is unusual: clusters of tiny buds erupt, not at the ends of twigs and stems like in other trees, but all over its trunk and branches, like chickenpox. It’s a symbol rich with suggestiveness.
The Suragi Tree is a novel that is at once traditional and contemporary. It
creates a world its readers can enter and breathe in. It is written by
one who knows that the 'great tradition' is still alive in the Indian
languages, and believes that a good traditional novel is most likely to
come from India, from someone rooted in Indian literature.
Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee
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