Telling the story of a nine-year-old boy in India of 1940, The Skinning Tree is a striking debut novel by Srikumar Sen that packs a punch and yet doesn?t quite live up to its promise
The Skinning Tree
Srikumar Sen
Picador
Rs.499
Pg 217
After spending three decades as a boxing correspondent and on the sports desk of The Times, London, retirement from writing was not an option for 81-year-old Srikumar Sen, even when he retired from the paper. The result, his debut novel, The Skinning Tree, which took him three years of his post-retirement life to write and was the joint winner of the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize, 2012, for unpublished works, packs quite a punch. The book tells the story of Calcutta boy Sabby, who is sent to a boarding school when the Japanese advance on India during World War II.
?Murder was the plaything of us kids,? Surojit ?Sabby? Sarkar tells us as he tries to adjust to life in an Anglo-Indian boarding school in the hills of the north in pre-independence India. As a child in Calcutta (now Kolkata), he lived in a world of his own, ?of my imagination, to escape from the sense of menace that the city stirred in my mind?. But in the wilderness of Gaddipahar in the faraway hills, as the children talked about killing, he was unable to fall back on his imagination and seek shelter in it. The school?s strict rules didn?t make things any easier??we became rough and coarsened by the treatment we received?.
For nine-year-old Sabby, living in the Calcutta of the 1940s, ?India was in England, and India and England were in Cal….? The little boy was drawn into the comic-book world of Tarzan and Captain Marvel even as his mother kept herself busy playing bridge thrice a week and planning dinner parties. Even when the war was at their doorstep, the talk at their dinner table was about the independence movement and not the war??It was not their war.? When he was uprooted from the familiar into the unknown, Sabby was inextricably drawn into a brutal and terrifying, tragic world that scarred him for life.
Only in its retelling is there some relief, and Sabby leads the rest of his life trying to exorcise ghosts from the past. The best parts of the book are the accounts of Calcutta in the 1940s, heady for some, desperate for others, and the boarding school life. Sabby and his friends, like the bunch in William Golding?s Lord of the Flies, found a ?niche? in the new surroundings and made their world around it. Far away from the comfort of home, Sabby ?learnt to kill, play the mouth organ, play tops, spit and wipe his bottom with exercise book paper?. In a chilling ritual, the kill?bloodsuckers, snakes, squirrels, monitors?was thrown over a wall on to a cactus, the ?repository became known as the skinning tree?.
As Sabby and his friends learnt about ?the strap? and were subjected to regular beatings and punishments, the tormented thought of abuse as a natural way out and talk of killing and revenge became commonplace, till they were embroiled in a tragedy they could perhaps avert but didn?t. This momentary lapse of reason would haunt Sabby his whole life.
Sen?s portrayal of a nine-year-old under duress is keenly etched but the book doesn?t quite explain what happens to all the characters involved in the tragedy. The end doesn?t quite live up to its promise. Hopefully, Sabby part two and, maybe even part three are on their way.
The writer is a freelancer