‘A River Runs Back’ by Amarjit Singh: An unquiet river of memories of 20th century Punjab

A journalist and a novelist, Amarjit Sidhu divides his time between Canada and India. Like him, his novels, too, move back and forth between home and beyond, often searching for roots in the cultural chaos of rootlessness. Like other writers from the diaspora, Amarjit also struggles with the questions of identity and meaning in a borderless world, where all certitudes dissolve into a blur.

In his first novel, ‘No Way Home’ (2010), he had dived into the quest of Dave, a Punjabi, who is not able to complete his PhD in the US. He returns to India without a green card, and struggles to find his bearings in the land of his birth. Caught in the maelstrom of the Delhi riots of 1984, he leaves for Canada, an overload of memories strapped to his back, a Sisyphean burden.

In his second novel, ‘A River Runs Back’, he returns to unpack some of those long-forgotten, submerged memories, and create a fascinating story of the four generations of Raigarhias — moving back and forth between an inconspicuous village, Raigarh, and the plantations of Rangoon (where one of their ancestors had worked as a medical doctor during the British Raj), the semi-royal corridors of Patiala (where one of the sisters, Hardev, was married) and the intellectual climes of Oxford (where she studied briefly).

However, the entire burden of generational memory is borne by Bibiji (nee Avtar Behanji), an 80-year-old childless widow, who, like her ancestral house, witnesses the slow destruction of her family and its heritage. The floodgates of memory are thrown open once Bibiji gets the news of her younger brother Baljit Singh’s sudden death. Baljit had not been able to make much of his life, despite possessing a degree in engineering, and had mostly lived off his wife, who taught geography in a school.

Bibiji wanted him to return to the village and take charge of his lands, but the more she insisted, the more he felt repulsed by this idea. Since he had married against the wishes of his family, he didn’t want his wife to be ‘disrespected’ by anyone, least of all Bibiji, his sister, who wouldn’t so much as register her presence on family occasions, ever. Most of his time was spent on travelling across the country, as every time he sold off a slice of ancestral land, he would go out to explore one business possibility or another. Somehow, all his ventures had ended up in smoke. Memories continue to seep through, in spurts, as Bibiji travels from her village to Ludhiana to attend Baljit Singh’s cremation. Memories that form the very tapestry of this novel are often not easy to handle, as once pricked, they have a way of spilling over, even overwhelming us. This is what offers a real challenge to a novelist, when he sits down to arrange and re-arrange them into a well-ordered fictional universe. Amarjit has met this challenge as a master craftsman, in the process unspooling a powerful novel, poetic and unputdownable.

While Amarjit dexterously uses memories for structuring the events and defining the characters, he ingenuously transforms the familial/social space of the novel into a debating arena for a wide spectrum of ideas. Going beyond, he also offers a gentle, unobtrusive critique of these ideas. We come away from the novel wondering whether the Gandhian notion of swadeshi or village-centric life was more enduring than the Nehruvian concept of progress and modernity; or how and in what different ways our political decision to import American PL 480 or ‘Soviet Land’ had impacted our lives, relationships and/or ideological bearings in the 1960s; whether democracy has only given rise to political expediency or changed people’s lives, too; or when and how our villages imperceptibly became haunted spaces, what with greed for land and mindless urbanisation becoming endemic.

All in all, ‘A River Runs Back’ is a quiet lament on the passing away of an era, a dirge on the 20th century feudal Punjabi society, going through spasms of generational shifts, a la Chekhov, who, too, had hinted at a similar shift in the 19th century Russian society in many of his plays.

Amarjit’s memory tale, though disturbing, is extremely well-told, and the way he blends gentle, lingering sadness with sudden, unexpected flashes of humour, it throws us back, once again, to dear old Chekhov.

— The writer is a former professor of English, PU

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