I found this book fascinating and a very captivating read. In large part that’s because it examines a time and place (India in the 1970’s) with which I’m not very familiar, and I enjoyed seeing a glimpse of that life. Really, just listening to the characters speak is a lot of fun.

The characters and their back-stories are complex and fascinating, with pinches of irony nicely distributed. There are a few just-plain-evil characters here and there, but if this book were made into a movie (and let’s bookmark that idea, since it’s not half-bad), they wouldn’t make the top half of the credit roll. If there is a villain, it’s probably Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, or more specifically her national emergency program, a rather dark spot in the country’s democratic history. The main characters and their assorted friends and family are by and large quite complex and sympathetic, and the story is so broadly diffused among them that it’d be difficult to pinpoint any one character as the main one. If I had to guess I’d say Dina, a fiercely independent woman whose life is shaped by the childhood death of her father and her subsequent struggles against her brother’s authority. She is wonderful, if sometimes difficult, to read; despite my own feminist sympathies I must admit that I found myself wondering about some of her choices and her rather stingy inclinations. Ultimately she is big-hearted, though, and someone who is struggling to make the best she can of an environment not suited to her - much like so many other characters. Among the minor characters I think my favorite was the rent collector, who with fez and officious plastic binder was the very picture of a faithful employee trying to do the best he could to make a living (and in the process wreaking havoc on the lives of others.)

As it happens, his character is not the only one whose story is so closely enmeshed with some sort of object or talisman: Dina with her quilt, Om and Ishvar with their trunk, and Maneck with his chess set. These objects are well-chosen, a neat reflection of their characters story-lines, and the focus of a good deal of rumination. Dina is someone who patches her life together out of an assortment of raw and mis-matching materials, and so the quilt is a perfect symbol of her life. (And while I normally hate it when authors really hit you over the head with the actual meaning of a symbol - I prefer to work for it - the scene, towards the end of the book, when the import and actual physical composition of the quilt is made plain is actually quite lovely and enjoyable.) For Om and Ishvar, the trunk is a perfect illustration of their transience, an albatross around their necks which dramatizes the difficulty of the basics of life for them: for they are merely trying to stitch together (as it were) a living and trying to live by their values as best they can, but that is increasingly difficult for them as time goes on. Maneck is someone whose desire for a world with plain rules, straightforward interactions, and basic justice is nearly painful; for him the chess site is a kind of tragic mockery.

The ideas of balance is implicit more than explicit, which I appreciate. In actual, macrocosmic fact the world of the book is not very well balanced: there is no justice, the poor and marginalized are constantly harassed and troubled and set against one another, villains emerge triumphant and our heroes are trapped in a sort of dark comedy from which they cannot escape. The country’s politics are darkly conservative and anti-democratic, a creeping authoritarianism which make the post-9/11 Bush administration seem like some sort of liberal utopia. But on the other hand there are the moments of individual saving grace which give us hope and humanity: the dinners at Dina’s house, the heroic moment in which Ishvar and Narayan save Ashraf Chacha, Aban Kohlah’s walks in the countryside, and Shankar’s funeral. These are so touching and heart-warming that they make the dark comedy that forms the major arc of the plot more than tolerable. The epilogue is a little oddly shaped (I thought a big chunk of it should have been part of the book proper), but it perfectly draws out this fine balance, with Maneck losing hope despite his bright prospects, and Dina, Ishvar and Om soldiering on despite their own dark ones.

And perhaps that is the message of the book, illustrated through the twin and contrasting metaphors of sewing and chess: for both are trying to impose some kind of order in a world full of chaos. But one of them (chess) is a stylized game formed on clear but unrealistic dichotomies that fall apart when the game is over. And the other (sewing) is a difficult and strenuous endeavor, but one which engages which the real world and all of its messiness, and makes of all of that complexity something beautiful and enduring. We are meant to think, I believe, that the macrocosmic world of politics (symbolized by chess), dark and intrusive and monstrous though it sometimes can be is counter-balanced and perhaps even over-matched by the microcosmic world of kindness and beauty in human relationships (symbolized by sewing, and specifically by Dina’s quilt). It is a fascinating message, though I don’t totally agree with it myself.

I picked up this book at my book club’s Yankee swap last year, and it was quite a worthwhile acquisition!