Anita Mason

Keki N. Daruwalla, For Pepper and Christ (Penguin India, 2009), ISBN 978-0-14306-581-4, 354 pp, Rs 399 (pb)

In 1492 the Spanish monarchy conquered Granada, threw the Jews out of Spain and commissioned Christopher Columbus to find India by sailing west. With less fanfare, the Portuguese had for the previous century been exploring a route to India by sailing south and east. Nobody noticed. “While all this was happening,” observes the author of For Pepper and Christ, “not a louse wriggled across the scalps of other Europeans.” Let alone the scalps of Arabs, whose trade the Portuguese were threatening. Then in 1497 Vasco da Gama set out with four ships to circle Africa and reach the Malabar coast and – to quote the priest in this remarkable novel – all hell broke loose.

“A historical novel is neither history nor fiction,” asserts the author (a poet, former policeman and chief of Indian intelligence) on page 4. Perhaps that sentence explains why, in this novel, fact is sometimes incompletely assimilated into fiction and background information is purveyed in the tone of a historical documentary. (“In late 1490 Pedro Covilhao returned to Cairo. Waiting for him were two emissaries from John II . . .” etc.) This voice is in addition to the three voices we are promised in the prologue: that of Brother Figueiro, who accompanies Vasco da Gama; that of the Arab navigator Taufiq, who pilots the Portuguese to India; and “regrettably . . . also the voice of the obtrusive narrator” who tells of life in Cairo and Calicut. The voices weave in and out of each other, while the (presumed) authorial voice, slyly humorous, sometimes overtakes that of the narrator. The voices leave huge gaps in the story and move confusingly back and forth in time; the “obtrusive narrator” gets more rope than he merits and the voice that is italicised is not identified. It is not always easy to tell, initially, which voice is speaking, since the author’s careful signposting with chapter-headings and symbols is as apt to bewilder as to help. This is a complex and occasionally exasperating book.

It is also rich, generous and poetic. The bustling life of souk and street, of the Red Sea ports and the wharves of Sidon, is conjured so vividly one can smell the incense and taste the salt. In Cairo, where characters keep crossing each other’s paths and the spies of the Muhtasib are everywhere, the narrative feels almost claustrophobic; elsewhere it opens out, the sea swells and glitters, maps are talked of rhapsodically, and there is a tremendous sense of history blowing on its unstoppable way. Daruwalla moves surely from the grand prospect to the detail, from brutality to tenderness, and the book, as it becomes darker, is still shot through with dazzling colour. It feels patterned; and indeed I thought I understood, reading a scene in which a character inspects a carpet, Daruwalla’s intention in structuring and narrating the book in the way he has. (Nevertheless this isn’t a carpet. It’s a novel.)

In this gossipy, devout and sensuous world the weight of the book rests, and from here it takes its perspective on the Portuguese adventure. Only Brother Figueiro speaks for the Portuguese, and he is given to such reflections as, “Such men have to be questioned with blows and thus he was questioned three times.” The speed with which the Portuguese move from seeking trade to acts of savagery is astounding, but they have not started well. They bombard native rulers with cannon on mere suspicion of treachery. They extract information from Moorish pilots by pouring boiling oil on them.

One inevitably asks, as atrocity follows insult and massacre (of 700 pilgrims) follows atrocity, why the rulers of the Orient put up with this behaviour for longer than a day. The peoples of the Malabar coast lack gunpowder, that is one answer. However, another is to do with culture. When the Arabs realise that the Portuguese are aiming at India and a share – as they imagine – of the spice trade, they are not perturbed. Ibn Majid, revered navigator and astronomer of the Arabs and Tafiq’s mentor, tells his protégé, “They have been straining for years, but every time the sea defeats them . . . But if you keep knocking at a door, Allah in his mercy will open it some day. It may well be your destiny to lead them to that door.”

Since Taufiq must carry the burden of the story – the real story, that is – it seems surprising that Daruwalla does not give him more of the book. For long periods, we lose sight of him. Granted, the author’s interest is in portraying the society into which the Portuguese dropped like a bombshell; nevertheless, the tales with which we are entertained in Taufiq’s absence, involving his friend Ehtesham, who has to flee Cairo, and the sexual and political shenanigans at the court of Calicut, do not arouse the same degree of interest and, after some pages, feel like a distraction.

A further disadvantage of the eclipsing of Taufiq is that he does not develop as a character until the end. But then he speaks with passion: “The thought that I had brought these cruel barbarians to the Malabar coast started haunting me now . . . It is a heavy burden on the soul, to have spawned history, and such a terrible one at that.”

Here, when Taufiq wrestles with his responsibility, Daruwalla’s prose is at its most powerful. In the barest writing in the book, it moves towards his dreadful atonement.

The author then intervenes, in an ironic last paragraph, to remove that responsibility: “They would have come in here all the same, by sail ship or steam boat, via Madagascar and Milind or through the Suez. And the darkies would have gawked at them as they walked down the gangplanks, in doublet and hose or coat and tie . . .” It is a beautifully-judged ending which takes away the bitterness that, in the final fifty pages, has become almost too much to swallow.