the folded earth by Anuradha Roy ebook download

My first feeling as I started reading this book was
a rising admiration for the author’s skill as I got
drawn into the story. My second was
embarrassment, at the memory of having mistaken
it after a cursory glance at the author’s name and
the pointedly environmental feel of the cover, for
yet another tome of screechy pseudo-
development ranting by Arundhati Roy, which had
caused me to relegate it to the “no thank you”
heap for weeks.
This books is set in Ranikhet. The heroine is Maya,
a young woman from Andhra Pradesh with a
tragedy behind her. She starts a new life here and this is her story and the
story of the people she becomes involved with. There’s the Diwan Sahib, her
landlord, once Munim of the Nawab of Surajgarh until the princedom
acceded to India after Independence – but not before the Diwan himself
had been arrested by the Nawab for treason. There’s the lovely young
milkmaid Charu with a poignant story of her own. Maya’s parents and her
husband feature in the story too, though we never actually meet them. Maya
herself, as Anuradha Roy said in answer to a question I asked, is:
A rich, educated man's daughter. She has had a good education
herself; she is a highly intelligent, untraditional woman who is a reader
of all kinds of books and is in the constant company of man who is
learned and cosmopolitan and with whom one of the things she does
daily is read the international pages of the newspaper.Maya's mind has
a way of wandering and making strange connections. She gets
distracted easily, she often doesn’t focus when people are speaking.
She thinks a great deal about her past and about other people, and
this creates a prismatic sense of time so that her life with her father and
then her husband become part of the present time of the narrative.
With the Himalaya in the backdrop, one of the major background themes of
this book is trekking and mountain tourism. Hill life is well described and the
flavour of a cantonment town, its local politics and loutish politicians
enticingly caricatured. By the time I finished it, I felt a bit as if I’d lived ten
years in Ranikhet too, as Anuradha Roy told me she has.
The Folded Earth also has stories from the life of Jim Corbett, from the
turbulent times soon after India’s Independence, something about the
relationship between Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru, and a
heart-wrenching twist at the end.
This book is beautifully written and its story both gripping and plausible. I
admired the author’s choice of issues to use as background. One of the
things that upset me, though, was a cameo appearance by Ramachandra
Guha, a real person and a respected historian, without any disclaimer or
acknowledgement.
When I asked Anuradha Roy, she replied,
Ram is an old friend and he is an author we have published at
Permanent Black. In the novel, Ram Guha is another of the scholars
who arrive to meet the Diwan, in this case a scholar genuinely worried
about the safety of valuable documents. The novel throughout plays
around quite a bit at blurring the lines between fact and fiction and this
is another instance. People who know Ranikhet spot many more
instances beyond even the Corbett and Mountbatten angles. Plus for
me, it's a private joke, of which too there are plenty in the book. As a
writer yourself, you know we are entitled to have some fun while
writing!
Now the thing I like best about Ramachandra Guha, even more than the
quality of his work, is the fact that instead of using all the attention he gets
from the media to transform into a rockstar, he has applied his common
sense and clarity of thought not just in his writing but also in his personal life
and remained a relaxed, unpretentious person. So I suppose to be drawn
by a peer as a fictionalised character alongside Jawaharlal Nehru is more
than a joke, it’s a compliment.
I then asked Anuradha Roy whether she was often mistaken for Arundhati
Roy and how she dealt with it, and she replied.