I have a natural affinity towards novels centred around older women. So it was wonderful immersing myself in Geetanjali Shree's International Booker Prize winning 730-page tale “Tomb of Sand” which revolves around an 80 year old woman who is determined to follow her desires and show that her life isn't over yet. It's remarked that “At eighty, Ma had turned selfish.” She's variously referred to as Ma, Amma, Mata-ji and Baji as this is a story which flits between many different perspectives. Even though she's the central protagonist, Ma has physically turned away from both the reader and everyone in her family for the first 175 pages of the novel. She's grieving for her lost husband and chooses not to converse with others anymore but people flock to her when they come to believe that her cane decorated with butterflies has magical properties. Much to her family's consternation, she launches out on her own before settling in at her daughter's home and embarking on a quest to visit her homeland that is now known as Pakistan. In the process, she revisits her painful childhood which was disrupted by Partition.
This is a book packed with a lot of detail which fully evokes the lives of this family as well as the sensory experience of Indian life. There are beautifully evocative and highly-descriptive passages about food and Ma's various saris. Some sections come close to poetry in capturing the feel of a moment such as making tea in the morning when Ma is immersed in “the sound of peace.” Not only is it a long novel but it requires a lot of concentration and patience to follow the shifting perspectives and details of the plot. Though sometimes I felt it got bogged down in excessive detail (such as whether trees should be pruned and Ma's constipation), it's consistently pleasurable and rewarding to take the time with this story as there is a lot of joy, humour and deep meaning to be found in these pages. The narrative flits to the perspective of a group of crows at one point to playfully comment upon the characters. In another section a group of the most renowned writers about Partition gather together to argue and disrupt a ceremony. The way in which the point of view shifts not only gives a rounded point of view on the story, but tests the meaning of boundaries. Are there really borders between family members, nations, genders, classes and religions? The novel inventively shows how these are social constructs which might physically constrict us and inhibit our empathy. We've been conditioned into believing they actually exist and here we witness Ma's one-woman rebellion against these imaginary dividing lines.
Both the subject and style of narrative reminded me a lot of Ali Smith's fiction as Shree's novel also contains a lot of wordplay and etymological examination. Sections of the story might stop to query the real meaning of a word as opposed to its common usage. For instance, “Understanding has become a much eroded, much abused word, to the point that its sense has come to mean to establish meaning, when its real sense is to displace meaning. To give you such a shock you see lightening.” These passages challenge us to consider how the language and terms we use often contain a deeper meaning than what's used in common parlance. Similarly, the style of narrative blithely challenges our common conception of a meticulously-ordered official history: “On that day, the exact date of which is of no matter, because this is not a history, just a herstory...” Its female-focused story hasn't often been recorded in the same way as other narratives about the past and it joyously breaks free to fashion its own idiosyncratic style of telling.
One of the most endearing and pivotal characters in this story is that of Rosie, Ma's longtime hijra friend whose presence often discomforts her family. They find it difficult to understand the pair's attachment to each other and the meaning of their deep connection only becomes clear later in the novel. But the way in which Rosie moves between presenting as female and male challenges some of the characters' ideological beliefs versus the reality of encountering someone who doesn't neatly fit into certain categories. However, this isn't an issue for Ma who accepts and values Rosie as an individual though Rosie is often scorned and discarded by the larger society. For a story that takes a leisurely pace at evoking the world of its characters, it certainly becomes thrillingly plot-driven towards the finale of the book. For this reason and more, despite its intimidating length and complexity this is a novel that I definitely recommend sticking with to the end.
