Tending The Seasons

THE Everest Hotel is I. Allan Sealy's third novel, and easily his most impressive work of fiction yet. It is also an unexpected work, for there is little in the sprawling and energetic The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle or in the social satire of the less ambitious Hero: A Fable that will prepare his readers for the close observation of nature and of character that informs every page, or the chiselled, lapidary prose of this novel. Sealy's earlier novels were evidence that he was of the first rank of subcontinental novelists writing in English; from now on, The Everest Hotel will be counted among the half-dozen works that best exemplify the disparate achievements of these writers.

The sub-title of this novel is "A Calendar," which Sealy tells us is patterned upon Kalidasa's Ritusamhara (The Garden of Seasons) but also on "the old baramasih (twelve-month)". The temporal cycle is important here—a year passes during the telling of the novel, summer returns to Drummondganj, this little town that lies between the terai hills and the higher mountains beyond, but the annual rotation of the seasons suggests a much longer scale, a hill-and-mountain time that dwarfs human lifespans. A primeval aura hovers about the time and spaces of the novel: Ramapithecus—the prehistoric hominid—is the spirit of the place and watches over the forests of Drummondganj. Much happens in this year in Drummondganj and its environs, but even extraordinary events seem to be absorbed into the unhurried rhythms and pace of the novel.

Life in Drummondganj is far from static though. Characters are caught up in various kinds of social and political turbulence. The novel begins and ends on June 14—on each of those days, bandhs called in support of the demand for the hill state of Varunachal turn violent. A colony of lepers outside Drummondganj learns to protect trees in the forest against loggers using the simple tree-hugging methods first developed by the Chipko movement. A central character attempts to blow up a large dam built above Drummondganj, since his village, and others like it, are being submerged by the lake that results. The local people will benefit neither from the water in the lake nor from the electricity generated by the dam—both will be directed to the plains. But even as public ferment and action criss-cross this novel, its heart and soul lie in quieter spaces, in the enclosed spaces of gardens or rooms, or in the solitude of rooftops.

Most of which are contained in the grounds of the Everest Hotel, a rooming house that now houses a largely decrepit and deeply eccentric set of pensioners, looked after by an order of Christian nuns. Chief among them is Mr Jed, the owner of the building, prisoner to a decaying body and to dementia. Once he walked tall in these mountains, climbed Everest, and collected botanical and other specimens from faraway places. Now, his brain rotting, he lives in a fog of memory and child-like desires, petulant and badly-behaved with the nuns who look after him. Years ago, married to and in love with the beautiful Fay Popescu, his philandering ways brought them to a loveless end, and this is the rage within that consumes him, and which he must expiate.

His nurse, for the most part, is Sister Ritu, recruited fresh to the nuns at the Everest Hotel as she is good with old people. An educated young woman, she is also a more than an amateur botanist, a skill which is put to good use in the hills, teeming as they are with flowers and plants. We see much of this world through her eyes, and discover with her the flora and fauna, and the people who live in and around the hotel. There are the nuns, and the residents of the hotel, and then there is Brij, a local young man favoured by Mr Jed (who sees him as a Nachiketa to his demented Yama Raj). Mr Jed is Yama Raj because he is the keeper of the keys to the local cemetery, which shares a broken-down wall with the Everest Hotel, and because he imagines that he is writing a cabalistic Drummondganj Book of the Dead. Brij is his amanuensis, and he comes to the hotel often, and increasingly so after he meets Ritu.

Theirs is a delicate love story, made up of shared silences, occasional conversation, an episode in which they share in the wonderment of a kite that flies higher and higher, and a single, bumbling kiss. Post-kiss, Ritu retreats into her habit, Brij into the confusion and blunted desire of one who falls in love with a nun. But not for long, for into this melange of characters comes Inge Vogel, a neo-Nazi Berliner in search of her uncle Otto Planke's grave. Planke, a war-time internee and fascist poet, lies buried in the Drummondganj cemetery. Inge spends time in Drummondganj sculpting a headstone for his grave (much to the annoyance of Dixit, the Brahmin stonecutter who expects the commission), and she and Brij take up with each other. Autumn turns to winter, and with winter comes tragedy (a plot event which it would do no good to reveal here).

Spring brings with it the desperate act of sabotage against the dam, but also a qualified renewal. Into the lives of those who live in the Everest Hotel comes a three-and-a-half year-old girl, orphaned and left at their doorstep, her only introduction a note that says, "Look after her. No child should see what she has seen." She becomes Ritu's special charge, and as their attachment grows, her future. Ritu decides to leave Drummondganj, and the order, so that she can be a mother to Shama/Masha, this bright little girl with no name and no history. It is summer before she leaves for Delhi, to attempt the adoption and to begin a life together.

Most of Sealy's characters—and there are others, including a wonderfully realised police inspector named Bisht (who intuits and dreams solutions to murder mysteries) and an ex-army chowkidar inevitably named Thapa—live at odds with, or at a remove from, the exertions of mainstream public life. That time has passed them by, and so they live in memory: Rose Sampson is full of stories of a charming and flirtatious Nehru, who asked to call her Rose but desisted when she suggested she would call him "Jowar", while Mr Jed wanders in the forgotten by-ways of his dissociative mind.

Their lives are a testimonial to a time when British India was home to a variety of Europeans and their biological and cultural descendants. In this novel, as in The Trotter-Nama, Sealy suggests the strange cosmopolitanism, and the provinciality, of these communities, now as depleted as the cool hills to which they retired.

I had earlier described Sealy's style in this novel as lapidary. But that is perhaps not correct, for his prose glows not with the icy intensity of a polished gem but with the far warmer and more vital colours of the wild flowers that Ritu draws or the domesticated varieties that she cultivates. Sealy, like his almost-cloistered nun, turns out to be a secret voluptuary, in love with the lines and textures and tones of nature, attuned to bird-calls as to the songs of wind and thunder. In this novel, the hills are under siege, but the spirit of nature breathes a silent benediction, offering beauty, peace, and the possibility of human renewal.