Musical Ties
The Silent Raga by Ameen Merchant
(HarperCollins)
One of the first things you notice after settling down with Ameen Merchant’s debut novel, The Silent Raga, is that despite its Indian classical music metaphor and ‘Ravi Shankar-at-Woodstock-pleasing’ cover, we are not in India Exotica land.

Even as we meet the protagonist Janaki Venkatakrishnan for the first time in the past, in a village – much before she has become the famous Janaki, the prodigy on the veena running away to the big city lights of Bombay – we realise that Merchant’s story is about a character who finds herself flitting through places, situations and, above all, meeting and re-meeting people, including herself.

The language that Merchant uses to narrate his tale of the return of the prodigal daughter is with lyrical restraint. A scene that has Mallika, Janaki’s sister, an employee at the United States Information Service (USIS) in Madras, awaiting her sister’s almost unbelievable return, is as poignant as it is flowing. Gopalan, the security guard at the USIS, wants to talk to Mallika even as her mind is full of nervous expectation about meeting her famous sister after years. ‘What is it, ma, this craze for America? From two in the morning peoples are queuing for visa, you know?’ he says, incredulously, and continues, ‘Is it really a fine country?’

The character of the runaway Janaki is delicately wrought, as the author investigates the idea of betrayal, the loss of innocence, the ability to tackle disappointment and radical change. These are played out through the pages of the book like a long badminton rally between the two sisters as they remember things that they shared and come to terms with everything else that they do not. It does not come as a surprise that the evocative novel has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2008.