Indeed, one does not intend to be facetious in saying that it seems almost impossible for anyone to read another nostalgic novel about homelands—real and imaginary—without being swamped by the ‘been there, done that’ sense of disappointment.
I cannot say that Marina Budhos succeeds in chloroforming one completely against the discomfort of such unease, but this new novel (from a two-or-three-books-old writer being first heard of in this part of the world through an IndiaInk reprint) certainly elicits appreciation for the originality of its grand central metaphor, ‘the paradox of Light, both particle and wave’. Postcolonial physics? Well, at least we haven’t heard this one before...
The ‘Professor of Light’ in Budhos’s novel is Warren Singh, the quintessential migrant figure that has become such a staple of late 20th century fiction. A Caribbean of Indian origin, he teaches philosophy (through mathematics and physics) in an American university and spends the summers in England. "In half-sentences, he sketched for students the gloomy tunnels of belief and the well-lit corridors of rational thought. He showed a passion for both. His soft, rolling voice, echoing with Caribbean cadences and bits of Hindi, made a gentle, if troubled, truce between the two."
Budhos explores his world through dichotomies, almost as if she intends the book to fall into patterns that will constantly mimic the dualities, the difficulties and the paradoxes, of diasporic existence.
The paradox that Professor Singh spends his life daring to resolve—the particle-wave paradox of Light—is a gargantuan metaphor for an immigrant’s indefinitely-deferred search for who he is and who he wants to be, where he could, and does, belong, and—importantly—who can, and does, belong to him.
Singh demands, and for the most part, receives an unconditional (read unnatural) devotion from his young daughter, Megan (Meggie) Singh, as she grows from an adoring child to a questioning but still wonderstruck adolescent.
Here is yet another paradoxical relationship, creating uncomfortable ripples in an otherwise fairly-straightforward tale of a half-crazed but brilliant academic whose foraging for the ultimate truth about Light reveals the darknesses of soul, of memory battling with ambition, of nostalgia seeping bitterly through the gloss and glitter of immigrant achievement.
There is no denying that it is this central father-daughter perplex that swirls and eddies through the lilting—and sometimes haunting—cadences of the novel, though Budhos tries continually, and valiantly, to distract us by the insistent return to the question of Light and its metaphoric significance for the complexities of identity and migration, of roots and belonging, of moving on and falling apart. We are expected to share the wide-eyed wonder of a young daughter who is bright enough to recognise the potential promise of her father’s bewildering academic pursuits, and also to appreciate her delight in being allowed to participate in the project by typing up his indecipherable notes (a backbreaking task for which she receives no appreciation at all from the larger-than-life professor). But we cannot ignore the fact that his eccentricities border on the perverse. Literary deja vu intrudes and we become wary of what lies in store for her (and us) about midway through the novel. Budhos, however, trembles on the brink but refuses to topple over. We sigh with something like relief, though we are never exactly sure what the professor’s obsessive possessiveness about Meggie is really meant to signal. Varieties of postcolonial angst, is all one can think of.
Is the hint of sexual perversity a burgeoning metaphor for the postcolonial condition, then? Or is the flaccid droop of the tale, into a convenient madness for the professor and freedom for Meggie Singh, the more potent signifier? (Im)possibilities abound.
