By Suvanshkriti Singh
Until I started reading it, I didn’t know what had drawn me to Name, Place, Animal, Thing. To me, the title’s capaciousness, its playfulness beckoned Borgesian undertones—perhaps, an emporium of defamiliarised expertise. But the pleasures of this debut outing, I was to understand, are far easier in their elegance, and rather categorically universal.
Daribha Lyndem’s book is a compendium of vignettes of girlhood, narrated by D from memory, and one is tempted to classify it as an auto-fictional bildungsroman. Lyndem, nevertheless, insists on the novel’s fictionality, even as she admits that the inspiration for the stories comes from her personal experiences. The book is all the greater for it.
Name, Place, Animal, Thing is framed nearly as an ethnographic record of the characters that shaped D—from her landlady’s enable and the Chinese restaurant her household could afford only sparingly to the eccentric Hindi teacher and the stuffed toy out of which D tends to make a totem. The novel’s kind and frame, then, enable Lyndem to touch on challenges as wide-ranging and ubiquitous as class, racism, xenophobia, sexism, bullying, loss and sexual harassment. One of the aesthetic achievements of the book is that the handling of these challenges under no circumstances feels heavy-handed. In one particularly properly-executed scene—a college senior has a propensity to pinch D’s ‘bathroom parts’ —the harassment itself, and the exploration of the victim’s psyche turn into ancillary to the establishment of Bear as D’s fortunate charm.
This lightness of touch extends to troubles that are significantly less straight away relatable. D’s early expertise of Shillong’s political insurgency, for instance, is mostly mediated by means of the bandhs that permitted her to miss college and cycle on targeted traffic-cost-free roads. The book’s final chapter is similarly touching in its unflinching however tender narration of the friendship of a lifetime.
Lyndem’s excellent achievement is the way in which she has inhabited a child’s voice – and gaze. If memory weren’t currently a deviously slippery element, its purity is rendered all the more inaccessible by the taint of an adult’s socialised viewpoint. It requires no insignificant talent to eschew the tomes of digests that teach one how to respond, to react—and crucially, to think—in favour of foregrounding the immediacy of childhood expertise. For the most component, Name, Place, Animal, Thing is all verbs, all movement, regardless of whether the action takes place to, about or inside D.
The skilful consistency of Lyndem’s narrative voice—D has an eye and a memory for the sizes of doors, and is particularly attentive to caterpillars—lends the moments that gather to kind D’s life. D’s planet could be situated in Shillong, constructed of cherry blossoms and pine cones, but geography does not mediate the passions, pastimes, and apprehensions of which it consists, regardless of whether it be the ritualistic consumption of aloo muri chaat post-tuitions, exchanging prurient literature in the name of sex-ed or agonising more than one’s possible for romance.
In her employment of language, nevertheless, Lyndem acquits herself more ambivalently. On the one hand, it is refreshing to see the Khasi words incorporated into the text not getting italicised or endlessly translated, avoiding the postcolonial insecurity of explaining the margin to the centre. On the other, there are moments rife precisely with such more than-explanations of D’s—and Lyndem’s—culture as undercut the safety of her authorial position. In terms of craft, trite formulations coexist with vibrant descriptions of homes as colourful graves and mortality as ensnared butterflies. Similarly, her therapy of life in the north-east can often really feel wilfully idyllic or romanticised, even as clear-eyed, incisive representations of poverty, all-natural disasters, and classism offset this nostalgia.
Name, Place, Animal, Thing is not an extraordinary novel—and I imply this in the most complimentary of strategies. This is an ordinary story, told with elegance, warmth, and intelligence. The game just after which the book is titled is not merely an workout in taxonomy, but one also in reminiscing.
And, I realised, that it was the title’s invocation of hours spent laughing, playing, and quarrelling more than trifles, hours in which my partnership with life and time was significantly more individual, unmediated by theory, that attracted me to the novel.
My associations with the memory of the game are significantly the same—in its preoccupation with names and naming, with capturing in 4 columns the components of a young girl’s life, what Name, Place, Animal, Thing portrays is the fleeting eternity that is childhood.
Suvanshkriti Singh is a freelancer
Name, Place, Animal, Thing
Daribha Lyndem
Zubaan Books
Pp 208, Rs 300 (e-book)