Book review

(The Times of India Crest Edition, May 14, 2011)

The Cloud Messenger
By Aamer Hussein

Indian literature is replete with the most evocative images of amazingly interesting ways and means of communication. There are parrots that can carry love from lover to beloved; pipal leaves are an oft-used and bio-recyclable form of letter-paper; flowers tell stories that sound like poems whispered into shell-like ears; and the wind sings songs that convey messages between people separated by wars and distance. Kalidasa in his Meghadoota (or ‘cloud messenger’) devised a more ethereal form of ‘mail’ in his 111-stanza lyric poem. It tells the story of a homesick yaksha who is in exile for not doing his job for King Kubera diligently enough. The yaksha misses his wife and tells her via a cloud, a messenger who is coaxed into doing the job through a seductive travelogue describing the delights of the journey from the plains to the city of Alaka, in the Himalayas, where the yaksha’s wife is waiting for her husband. The cloud links the separated lovers, and gives its title to the eponymous new novel from Aamer Hussein.

The Cloud Messenger is about Mehran, the narrator, who moves from a luxe life in Karachi as the youngest son and heir of a khandaan to adulthood as a student of Urdu and Persian in London. There is an almost autobiographical flavour to the character, and the “novel is the story of some of the paths I might have taken”, the author writes, describing his career development from working in a bank to studying languages, psychoanalysis and philosophy to finally becoming a much-lauded writer of culturally Asian-British fiction. The words are simple, neatly strung together, drawing pictures that alternately provoke and depress, speaking of love won, lost and languishing, a world where relationships change as quickly as the cloud formations above London.

When Mehran was a child, he and his sister Sara would listen to stories of a time that seemed to them to be strangely exotic, where they could only imagine the tastes of strawberries and crumpets, the cold of ice and snow and the sight of a lady wearing a yellow-petalled hat and called the ‘Queen of England’. England, the children knew, was “much further than India, very far away”. Mehran learned more from the Enid Blyton books that he read as he grew up and then about other lands from Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, the Old Testament, the Qur’an, the Iliad, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and so much else that he devoured so eagerly. By 1978, when the narrative swerves into the first person, he has not only read his way around the world, but done a fair bit of travelling as well, seeing and wondering through an existence that in any sense of the word would be extremely interesting, satisfying and educative.

And then he meets people who make more of a difference to his world than his reading or travel ever did. There is Marco Feliciani, “a bit of a lad”, Lady L, aka the Professor, “reputed to be a martinet”, Riccarda, an older married woman who becomes Mehran’s lover and causes Marco some jealousy, and the tragically destructive Marvi, who manages to enchant the young man into an affair that lasts into the painful and prolonged end of her life. In each relationship there is a story, and as these tales weave into each other, Mehran finds, like the ephemeral beauty of the clouds, change is about the only permanence he has. And in that, he finds himself.