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Ties That Bind
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12112 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1994 |
1,740 Words |
| Author
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Edward Hower
Edward Hower's eight books include his latest novel, A Garden
of Demons, and The Pomegranate Princess, a volume of
folktales he collected while on Fulbright grants in India. He
has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Provincetown
Fine Arts Work Center. His writing has appeared in the New
York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Smithsonian, and other
publications. He teaches in the writing department at Ithaca
College. |
AN AMERICAN BRAT
Bapsi Sidhwa
The family has always been at the heart of Bapsi Sidhwa's fiction. Her first published novel, The Crow Eaters (reissued by Milkweed Editions in 1992), is a comedy of family manners whose characters are members of South Asia's tiny Parsi community, descendants of Zoroastrians who migrated from Persia centuries ago. The book's title has nothing to do with their dietary habits: it's merely a colloquial term for people who talk too much.
The head of this novel's talkative family is a lovable scoundrel named Faredoon Junglewalla, or Freddie. He seeks his fortune in the fabled city of Lahore, arriving on a bullock cart with his pregnant wife and widowed mother-in-law. Freddie pursues his business dealings with a complete lack of scruples, toadying up to the British colonial rulers and quickly prospering in his new home.
He's an affectionate husband to his wife, Putli, who fills the sumptuous house he builds with seven heirs to carry on the Junglewalla line. His contentment, however, is often disrupted by Jerbanoo, her earthy, carping mother. At one point he is so exasperated that he tries to set his house on fire with her in it, but she defeats his plot, shaming him to the neighbors by singing for the firemen from her window.
The tensions that disturb domestic tranquility come from within the family, mostly in the form of Jerbanoo's antics. When she visits London with Freddie, she undermines his pretenses of gentility by tormenting the wife of his distinguished host with her domestic criticism and even lifts up the lads dress with a fork to chastise her for wearing such scanty underwear. I called Jerbanoo a "mother-in-law from Hell" in an earlier review, but Sidhwa, in a phone interview, disagreed with this assessment. "I view her as a strong woman who finds unique ways to deal with her rather difficult son-in-law," she said. `But it's true, she is a battle-ax," Sidhwa conceded. At any rate, Jerbanoo is a remarkable and memorable comic creation.
As unscrupulous as Freddie is in his mercantile practices, Sidhwa insists that he is in many ways an ideal man. "He's very pragmatic, defending his family and community, earning well, and doing a lot more good for others than a saintly, pious person might," she observed.
Another amusing character is Freddie's son Billy. He marries a
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