Geetanjali Shree's ‘Tomb of Sand’: Magic of prose marks India's Booker hope

Sarika Sharma

THE mother had been repeating — “No, now I won’t get up.” (Nahi, ab main nahin uthungi.)

No, no, I won’t get up. Noooooo, I won’t rise nowwww. Nooo rising nyooww. Nyooo riiise nyoooo. Now rising new. Now, I’ll rise anew. (Ab main nayi uthungi.)

The words, the no-nos, mere mewls, were becoming something else. They had become something else right in the beginning of the novel, hinting that whenever she rises, she will be a new being, in a new life. Or, perhaps, old?

This woman, the 80-year-old matriarch of a household in north India, is the protagonist of Geetanjali Shree’s novel, ‘Tomb of Sand’ (‘Ret Samadhi’ in its Hindi original), which has become the first-ever Hindi novel to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. The judges commended: “The constantly shifting perspectives and timeframes of Geetanjali Shree’s inventive, energetic ‘Tomb of Sand’ lead us into every cranny of an 80-year-old woman’s life and surprising past.” The winner will be announced on May 26.

Her husband dead, the mother has turned her back to the world. Face to the wall, she wishes she could enter a crack in the wall and that the crack becomes her tomb. But it was not to be. She was to get up, come into her own, live like a girl going on sixteen, explore her now new, young body, scale human borders and find old love.

The Booker judges called it “a loud and irresistible novel”; the story, however, moves at a leisurely pace — characters being introduced and built slowly, too, but in fine detail. The mother, the daughter, the son, the daughter-in-law, the grandsons, Rosie Bua the hijra, the chrysanthemums, the bug, the wall, the door, the cane, the tomb of sand. The short chapters, often a mere paragraph, crafted by Shree in lyrical prose and translated equally lovingly by the book’s American translator Daisy Rockwell, build the story bit by bit, tens of pages sometimes letting in just one new turn.

When the book was first released in Hindi in 2019, the critics and readers had felt buoyed by its audacity to challenge the set structures of storytelling in Hindi literature. From mundane things like a cane and chrysanthemums to life-changing events like searching for a missing object (in this case, the mother) in a quilt, Shree’s imagination and wordplay make it special.

Her critique of women in a new world and that of daughters is rousing, and so is her theorisation of the woman’s internalisation of pain and the roles she takes on. Running into several pages is her description of crows in a meeting when Bade, the woman’s elder son, unknowingly intrudes. The serious discussion on climate change veers towards the sarees that Bade is dreaming his mother in. “Ma is ma in a saree, after all.” A crowess then begins to detail on the sarees he is imagining, hangs them from the branches of the tree for the young crows to feel — and they do, with their beaks. The crowess scolds gently, so the young ones use feather instead. The length of the book, 700-plus pages, owes itself to such luxurious detail.

In Ma’s crossing the Wagah border, the novel makes another leap, an engaging protest against the destructive impact of borders, whether between religions, countries or genders (as in Rosie Bua’s case). In the 75th year of India’s freedom, is it a mere coincidence that a novel on Partition is reminding us of our follies? Of the need to heal and repair and not instigate and divide further?

Geetanjali Shree’s writing is full of verve, and ‘Tomb of Sand’ invites a whole new audience to explore it.