In the beginning of Indian-American author Sujit Saraf’s new novel, Every Room Has a View, a San Francisco lawyer is imploring the family of his dead client to proceed with the reading of his will. Naveen Chandra Gupta had left clear instructions to his lawyer that the will should be read within “two hours of death”. As time ticks away, the lawyer and Gupta’s family and friends realise the clock is, in fact, turning backwards from them.
“I came to America thirty-two years ago, to live in a small town where no one had seen a man from India. Again and again in those first two years I was asked: what does it mean to be a Hindu?” reads Gupta’s will. It continues, “I do not know the answer but will make one last attempt. I ask my son to cremate me on a pyre on the shore and to immerse my ashes in the ocean, to send me off with the proper rites and ceremonies exactly as I cremated my father in India thirty years ago. Whatever I may have been in life, let me be a Hindu in death.”
The will sets off a frenzy of confusion in Gupta’s home overlooking the breathtaking San Francisco bay. The American lawyer is at a loss how to secure permits for a cremation in California. The family and friends wonder what Gupta had meant by his will after all. What begins as a set of strange legally-binding instructions soon lapses into a litany of doubt and disbelief. Those who gather around the grieving family, which includes his wife Usha, their teenage son and Gupta’s widowed mother, find his instructions too troubling to comprehend as well as carry out on a land foreign to the rituals.
Published seven years after his previous novel, Harilal & Sons, which was nominated for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Every Room Has a View negotiates the treacherous terrain of roots and identity that make immigrant life vulnerable. From the early 20th century setting of Harilal & Sons, about a businessman in Eastern India under the British Raj who sustains a large enterprise and a larger family, Saraf turns farther to the familiar backdrop of California, where he lives, for his new novel. Gupta, his middle-aged protagonist, wanted a view of the stunning San Francisco bay from each room of his home, but at death looked eastward to his homeland and traditions.
Satirizing the ‘x+1 Syndrome’
The novel begins in San Francisco in 2011 with the sudden death of Gupta, who was born in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, but came to study in the United States and became part of the tech boom in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s. After their marriage was arranged by their families back in India, Gupta and Usha start their own family in San Francisco. Like his compatriots in California, Gupta, too, is stricken by the “x+1 syndrome”, a joke among Indian engineers who swear they will return to India while applying for the American visa, but changes the return date to a perpetual “next year” once they land in America.
The novel reflects the “x+1 syndrome” among Indian-Americans in the satire that it weaves around a tragedy. At the reading of Gupta’s will that gives instructions for a cremation, Usha is as confused by her husband’s wish as their friends, Mahesh, a widower, and Shanti and Shukla, who have come to support her. Gupta’s mother, who lives with the couple and their son, refuses to believe her son is dead. The four families scramble to find a pandit in the city to perform the last rites. Kris (short for Krishna), the jeans-clad pandit chosen for the ceremony, has the unenviable task of combining the rituals lasting for thirteen days into one day.
Saraf’s satire sums up the increasing uncertainty and wariness of being an immigrant in contemporary America in one man’s desire to embrace his roots in death. The novel arrives at a time when immigrants from around the world, who dream for a better life in a faraway land, are hounded by the authorities. Every Room Has a View takes the reader on a weary journey of self-discovery with an abundance of self-deprecation and humour.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
Every Room Has a View
Sujit Saraf
Speaking Tiger Books
Pp 256, Rs 499
