On reaching the end of Sheba Jose’s novel Chamor, if one feels more than a twinge of disappointment, one could, perhaps, blame the subtitle. After all, if the promise on the cover — “A deadly mistake and its aftermath” — seems out of reach when one has gone through two-thirds of the book, then even when it is fulfilled in the final third, albeit in a hurried, let’s-get-this-over-with kind of way, the reader is bound to feel let down.
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This is not to say that Chamor — the story of a terrible tragedy that marks the end of childish innocence — doesn’t have something going for it. It does, as becomes evident early on in the book. Told from the perspective of a young girl, the novel centres around recollections of a childhood spent in two places in south India, a town named Majuri in Tamil Nadu and a village named Vranni in Kerala. Young Simi, whose mother and father keep very busy, even if they are fond and loving guardians, is brought up mostly by the teenaged help Jency in Majuri.
The accounts of the various high jinks that Jency and her small, enthusiastic accomplice get up to — delivering cake during the deserted night of a strike to a secret boyfriend, chasing after carollers who have gone down the wrong path, trying to get hold of forbidden sweets — which form the first half of the book are also its most diverting, enjoyable portions. The various recollections, which seem to organically grow out of each other (as is the nature of memories), include fond portraits of the many characters who populate the small world of the five-year-old Simi, who is already, at that young age, in love with stories. She also seems to have a sharp ear for dialogue, as seen in her account of the exchanges between her parents, which offer a revealing look at the expectations of gender roles in marriage and the frustrations and subtle manipulations they can lead to.
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PremiumAn episode of ill health takes Simi to the purer environs of Vranni, where she is entrusted to the care of her grandparents. They live on a vast estate, filled with animals, plants and numerous secondary characters, where the young narrator finds enough distractions to take her mind off the devoted Jency, who has been left behind in Majuri. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite so easy for the reader to forget Jency, who was outlined and coloured in with such loving attention in the first half of the book, only to be abandoned as soon as the action shifts to Vranni. This is a shame especially because no character in the second part of the book can quite match up to the idiosyncratic particularity of Jency, not even the titular Chamor whose backstory seems hastily shoehorned in right at the end. The tragedy hinted at earlier in the book is particularly maltreated, being dispensed with in a couple of chapters.
Kerala is magical (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Read as a series of vignettes, Chamor is an engaging, even charming experience. While not every one of the many characters filling its pages is fully fleshed out, there are more than a few who are memorable enough that their absence from the pages, when they exit the narrative, is felt. Particularly delightful are the descriptions of various natural sights — the serene pool that Chamor creates on the Shalomi House estate, the lantana shrub which blooms in a pit near the house in Majuri, captivating Simi and her mother with its unassuming beauty — which come alive under the author’s affectionate eye.
It’s when it labours under the burden of an actual plot, with larger implications about justice and systemic cruelties, that the book falters and collapses. This is unfortunate, as the loosely-stitched memories of childhood, featuring all the passionate attachments and fleeting obsessions that one experiences in that early stage of life, are engaging enough to hold the reader’s attention. The Chamor plot, coming in at the end as it does, seems little more than a box that needed to be checked off.
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