In Times of Siege - Hardcover

Hariharan, Githa

 
9780375422393: In Times of Siege
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375422390 ISBN 13: 9780375422393
Verlag: Pantheon Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Caring for his twenty-four-year-old ward, who has broken her leg, middle-aged history professor Shiv Murthy struggles with the feelings that the young woman stirs in him, a situation that is complicated when one of his medieval Indian lessons is challenged by a group of religious extremists. 17,500 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Githa Hariharan was educated in Bombay, Manila, and the United States. She has worked in public television in the United States and as an editor in India. Her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Since then, she has published a collection of short stories, The Art of Dying, and two novels, The Ghosts of Vasu Master and When Dreams Travel. She lives in New Delhi.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

Shiv Murthy is a meek, middle-aged professor of history at a college in New Delhi. When Meena, his twenty-four-year-old ward, breaks her leg, she calls on him for help, even though they barely know each other and even though Murthy's wife is visiting their daughter in another city. Coping with Meena's care, struggling with the feeling this intellectual, self-possessed, politically minded, and sexually aware young woman stirs in him, Murthy's life is thrown into even further turmoil when one of his medieval Indian history lessons is challenged by a group of religious extremists. The university responds by giving Murthy the opportunity to apologize publicly. But increasingly in thrall to Meena and influenced by her political convictions, Murthy takes an entirely unexpected plunge into the political world: he defies the university and the fundamentalists, and defies as well his most basic sense of who and what he is.

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ONE

New Delhi

AUGUST 23, 2000

South Gate. Shiv's car slows down, goes past the security booth, then over a series of unmarked humps. A ramshackle old Fiat passes by.

Ahead a wheezing bus snorts its way toward him. A cycle follows.

Otherwise the road, as far as he can see, is setting for more human traffic. Boys and girls--or, he corrects himself, young men and women. Dozens of them, some sitting on the pavement, staring frankly at the world going by, some daydreaming at the bus stop. A few clustered round the dhaba by the road, drinking tea and smoking. Though he is the visitor, it is they who look at him like well-briefed sightseers viewing a tourist staple. A teacher, a faculty type, a familiar monument in a city of ruins.

The university. A gate, a winding road, young faces, straight limbs. The city yields its claims. Delhi, an insatiable amoeba that grows in all directions, recedes.

Here too the trees and bushes that border the road on either side look vulnerable to the spite of the late summer sun. But the university's green--prolific, variegated--has penetrated the landscape into the heart of its texture. Here green fingers colonize the buildings. Brick is generously streaked with ivy and creepers, or curtained by clumps of untrimmed bushes. Though Shiv can't tell from the road, the buildings look as if they might be hospitable to birds' nests, cobwebs, beehives.

He feels a twinge of wonder and excitement, like a boy hungry for adventure, a castaway in an island where all the natives are young. An island in landlocked Delhi, no mean marvel. You could arrive here from the railway station, a pliant piece of clay to be molded, live the last and best years of childhood. Then take a direct bus, the 615, to deliver you back at the station. Delhi need be seen only from a bus window, its imperial avenues, its filth-ridden hovels and concrete monstrosities reduced to the powerless, fleeting images of a dream.

He sees two girls--no, a woman and a girl--wave at him to stop.

Though the hostel he is going to cannot be far away, he slows down and comes to a halt. The younger one runs up to his window, her long hair and her diaphanous blue dupatta flying behind her.

"Are you going up-campus?" she asks. Her voice is shrill and breathless.

He is tempted to find out how far he will have to go, which hill he will have to climb to reach this up-campus. But he shakes his head, apologizes.

She turns to pull a face at the other woman who is already peering into the distance, on the lookout for another car.

"I am looking for a hostel," he tells the girl and she turns back to him impatiently. "Jamuna Ladies' Hostel--I mean women's hostel. Would you tell me where that is?"

She points to a building behind the trees, then runs back to her companion.

The hostel building is at the end of a lane to the left. Its face is lined with balconies full of clothes hung out to dry. He parks under a tree, fitting the car neatly into a small patch of shade, and walks slowly to the open gate. He waits till he sees a girl going in. Her back is a jar-shape stuffed into faded blue jeans.

"Please," he says to the jar, and it turns around, revealing a moonface that belongs in an old Hindi film. "Please," he says to this siren in the wrong costume, "could you tell Meena, R. Meena, that her guardian is waiting for her at the gate?"

Moonface looks him up and down with undisguised curiosity. "She's broken her knee," she volunteers.

"I know, that's why I am here. I've come to take her home."

The girl nods at him. From her face it is clear that her curiosity has been instantly appeased. She disappears into the building.

Shiv stands there, looking around him.

Though he too lives in a university, it is a world apart from this living, breathing mass of students. Where he teaches, only the teachers are visible. The students are names, addresses, postmarks. Part of what is called, oddly, an Open University, as if the gates are perpetually open and the students have wandered away. Though there are no resident students, his campus is even larger than this one. He lives at the south end of his campus, a rocky, partially cleared stretch of jungle that the professors share with noisy peacocks, and the occasional snake, jackal and monkey. He drives to the "academic complex" in the north part of the campus, to sit every day in an office with an intimidating bilingual nameplate on the door: Professor Shivamurthy in English, Shiv Murthy in Hindi. He is, at fifty-two, finally a professor of history, though not quite the sort his father imagined in daydreams on his behalf. He no longer teaches students; as his Department Head likes to put it, he coordinates resources for his educational clients.

Shiv shifts from leg to leg restlessly. He can sense someone watching him.

He turns around and notices a tiny makeshift shop across the road, nestled under a tree. It sells newspapers, beedi and cigarettes, and the garishly colored packets of junk food that have been hung out on display.

The shopkeeper, a young man in need of excitement, stands outside his shop staring at Shiv. His gaze is hopeful, as if he expects Shiv to do something in the next few minutes that will make today less boring than yesterday. Then, as the young man watches Shiv do nothing, he moves his hand casually toward his crotch and scratches himself. The expectant look on his face turns thoughtful.

Shiv concedes defeat in their staring competition and turns back to the hostel gate. There is no guard at the gate, though he is sure there is usually one, the sort with a lathi, protecting that holy of holies, a girls' hostel. Perhaps he should waylay someone else going into the hostel and ask her why the girl is taking so long.

The girl. When she first came to Kamala Nehru University in Delhi two, three years back, her mother wrote to Shiv asking if he would be her daughter's "local guardian." He didn't know what this would involve, and quickly passed the letter to Rekha. His wife, Rekha, with the efficiency that makes her an administrative asset in her office, took over. Not that she had much to do. She picked up the girl from her hostel on a Sunday and took her to Sarojini Nagar to buy bargain woolens for her first Delhi winter. Then brought her home for lunch.

The girl did not have much to say for herself--Shiv can't remember having a conversation with her. She seemed watchful though, as if assessing their faces, their words, the spare but impeccable living room, their hospitality. About the only thing Shiv recalls is her silent but enthusiastic feeding at lunch. Rekha called her a few times after that, and perhaps the girl did come home again, though he is not sure of that. He does remember that the girl seemed self-sufficient. She was always too busy to visit them on Sundays--the only day Rekha could have guests for lunch--and Shiv had all but forgotten he was her guardian till the telephone call yesterday.

"You don't know me," said a girl's voice on the phone. "I am a friend of Meena's."

It took Shiv a moment to remember who Meena was. Then foolishly he said the first thing that came to his mind. "I am sorry," he said. "My wife is not in town."

There was a nonplussed silence from the girl, and he recovered himself to ask, "Is something wrong? Is Meena all right?"

The girl replied in a burst of relief, "No, she's not. She fell off a bus and she's broken her knee. She wants you to come and get her from the hostel. Jamuna Girls' Hostel. Room 15. It's very difficult for her here, she has a huge cast and she can't manage. When can you come?"

"Tomorrow....

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Verlag
Pantheon Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375422390
ISBN 13 
9780375422393
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
206
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
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