The Road From County Sligo

Kalyan Ray speaks in many tongues. The book begins like a film, with a crime scene, viewed narrow-eyed by the investigating officer. With readers conditioned by American crime series, it makes the opening a sure way to grab attention. Then, without warning, the reader is dropped into Mullaghmore, County Sligo, Ireland. In the book-loving, quiet Brenden and his hot-headed friend Padraig, we meet the two boys whose lives will continue through the lives of others, over the next 500 pages. We also encounter what will be a constant—the beauty of Ray’s descriptive prose.

Vivid descriptions of places, scenes, people force us to read at a leisurely pace and take in the ever-changing landscape as the story shuttles between continents and generations, mapping their internal and external geography. It is writing of a style that beguiles and teases with its imagery. Ray starts the Brenden story in language that is coloured with Irish phr­ases. It is strangely appealing once the unease with the usage wears off. When Brenden says, “My eyes averted in finicky disgust as I saw her phelgm descending from one nostril...” the image shared is as real as the disgust it evokes. Slowly, the reader is being unfailingly drawn.

By chapter three, the reader has witnessed a murder, a rape, a birth and two deaths. More follow, as Padraig emb­arks on a trip that will never bring him back home. Tumultuous events keep the pace almost breathless, as the two boys narrate their tales in alternate chapters. Ray lays down the boy’s trajectories that will take them fur­ther apart, never to meet again. Journeys mark the book’s progress. If the early cha­pters are like riding a whirlwind, what follows in the middle chapters is like being bec­almed mid sea.

By the end of the book, Barisal in East Bengal, Calcutta with its lanes and trams, the rough police service, the Anglo-Ind­ian and his sense of displacement, even Jallianwalla Bagh, have been introduced. Finally, in the farm in Vermont where Brenden finds himself with Padraig’s dau­ghter, and New York, where Padraig’s granddaughter goes seeking her lost love, Ray is creating a richly peopled canvas cra­mmed with incidents, and with the stealth of an ice floe, guiding them tow­ards their destinies. Each of Ray’s characters are individuals, and the women are drawn with infinite, tender care.

If there is a flaw, it is that in knitting together the stories of people, and in spanning three generations, Ray takes wild jumps that seem more convenient than real. It’s as if once he has completed telling one protagonist’s story, he needs to move on to anot­her, linked only by the slender threads of what-might-have-been. Also disappointing is the fact that the authenticity of voice is progressively diluted. Unlike Bre­ndan’s speech tinged with an Irish dia­lect, the succeeding generations speak with a fair sameness that sounds more like Ray than themselves. Fault can also be found with the coincidences that move events forward.

By the time the story ends, the canvas is complete, and the picture is bewitching and disturbingly complex. Perhaps the fact that I felt a lingering sadness at the point to which the last set of protagonists are brought by their destinies is proof of the power of the narrative to involve the reader. That then is a fair measure of the writer’s command over his craft!