The Impressionist - Couverture souple

Kunzru, Hari

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 014103498X ISBN 13 : 9780141034980

Editeur : Penguin Books Ltd, 2007

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Pran Nath

One afternoon, three years after the beginning of the new century, red dust that was once rich mountain soil quivers in the air. It falls on a rider who is making slow progress through the ravines that score the plains south of the mountains, drying his throat, filming his clothes, clogging the pores of his pink perspiring English face.

His name is Ronald Forrester, and dust is his specialty. Or rather, his specialty is fighting dust. In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke: Forrester the forester. Once or twice he tried to explain it to his Indian subordinates in the Department, but they failed to see the humor. They assumed the name came with the job. Forester Sahib. Like Engineer Sahib, or Mr. Judge.

Forrester Sahib fights the dust with trees. He has spent seven years up in the mountains, riding around eroded hillsides, planting sheltering belts of saplings, educating his peasants about soil conservation, and enforcing ordinances banning logging and unlicensed grazing. Thus he is the first to appreciate the irony of his current situation. Even now, on leave, his work is following him around.

He takes a gulp from a flask of brackish water and strains in the saddle as his horse slips and rights itself, sending stones bouncing down a steep, dry slope. It is late afternoon, so at least the heat is easing off. Above him the sky is smudged by blue-black clouds, pregnant with the monsoon that will break any day. He wills it to come soon.

Forrester came down to this country precisely because it has no trees. Back at his station, sitting on the veranda of the Government Bungalow, he had the perverse idea that treelessness mightmake for a restful tour. Now he is here he does not like it. This is desolate country. Even the shooting is desultory. Save for the villagers' sparse crops, painstakingly watered by a network of dykes and canals, the only plants are tufts of sharp yellow grass and stunted thorn bushes. Amid all this desiccation he feels uncomfortable, dislocated.

As the sun heats up his tent in the mornings, Forrester has accelerated military-march-time dreams. Dreams of trees. Regiments of deodars, striding up hill and down dale like coniferous redcoats. Neem, sal, and rosewood. Banyans that spawn roots like tentacles, black foliage blotting out the blue of the sky. Even English trees make an appearance, trees he has not seen for years. Oddly shaped oaks and drooping willows mutate in lockstep as he tosses and turns. The dreams eject him sweating and unrested, irritated that his forests have been twisted into something agitated, silly. A sideshow. A musical comedy of trees. Even before he has had time to shave, red rivulets of sweat and dust will be running off his forehead. He has, he knows, only himself to blame. Everyone said it was a stupid time of year to come south.

If asked, Forrester would find it difficult to explain what he is doing here. Perhaps he came out of perversity, because it is the season when everyone else travels north to the cool of the hills. He has spent three weeks just riding around, looking for something. He is not sure what. Something to fill a gap. Until recently his life in the hills had seemed enough. Lonely, certainly. Unlike some, Forrester talks to his staff, and is genuinely interested in the details of their lives. But differences of race are hard to overcome, and even at the university he was never the social type. There was always a distance.

More conventional men would have identified the gap as woman shaped, and spent their leave wife hunting at tea parties and polo matches in Simla. Instead Forrester, difficult, taciturn, decided to see what life was like without trees. He has found he does not care for it. This is progress, of a sort. To Forrester, the trick of living lies principally in sorting out what one likes from what one does not. His difficulty is that he has always found so little to put on the plus side of the balance sheet. And so he rides through the ravines, a khaki-clad vacancy, dreaming of trees and waiting for something, anything, to fill him up.

That something is no more than a mile off as the crow flies, though with the undulations of the dirt track, the distance is probably doubled. As the sun sinks lower, Forrester makes out a glint of light on metal and a flash of pink against the dun-colored earth. He halts and watches, feeling his jaw become inexplicably tight, stiffening in the saddle like a cavalryman on parade. He has seen no one for the last day and a half. Gradually he discerns a party of men, Rajput villagers by the looks of them, leading camels and escorting a curtained palanquin, bumpily carried at shoulder height by four of their number.

By the time the party is within hailing distance, the sun has dipped almost to the horizon. Bands of angry red show against a wall of thick gray cloud. Forrester waits, his horse stamping its hooves on one bank of a dried-up stream bed. The palanquin bearers stop a little way off and put down their load. Heads swathed in enormous pink turbans, mustaches teased out to extravagant length, they appraise the sweating Englishman like buyers eyeing up a bullock. Eight sets of black eyes, curious and impassive. Forrester's hand flutters involuntarily up to his neck.

From the rear pops up a lean middle-aged man, clad in a dhoti and a grubby white shirt, a black umbrella under his arm. He looks like a railway clerk, or a personal tutor, his appearance strange and jarring against the wasteland. He is clearly in charge, and just as clearly irked that his servants have not waited for instructions to halt. Shouldering his way forward he salaams Forrester, who touches the brim of his topi in response. Forrester is about to speak to him in Hindi, when the man salutes him in English.

"Looks like rain, what?"

They both peer up at the sky. As if in response a fat drop of water lands on Forrester's face.

Fire and water. Earth and air. Meditate on these oppositions and reconcile them. Collapse them in on themselves, send them spiraling down a tunnel of blackness to reemerge whole, one with the all, mere aspects of the great unity of things whose name is God. Thought can travel on in this manner, from part to whole, smooth as the touch of the masseur's oiled hands in the hammam. Amrita wishes she could carry on thinking forever. That would be true sweetness! But she is only a woman, and forever will not be granted her. In the absence of infinity she will settle for spinning out what time she has, teasing it into a fine thread.

Inside the palanquin it is hot and close, the smells of food and stale sweat and rosewater mingling with another smell, sharp and bitter. Once again Amrita's hand reaches out for the little sandalwood box of pills. She watches the hand as she would a snake sliding across a flagstone floor, with detachment and an edge of revulsion. Yes, it is her hand, but only for now, only for a while. Amrita knows that she is not her body. This crablike object, fiddling with box and key and pellets of sticky black resin, belongs to her only as does a shawl, or a piece of jewelry.

A bump. They have stopped. Outside there are voices. Amrita rejoices. At nineteen years old, this is will be her last journey, and any delay is cause for celebration. She swallows another opium pellet, tasting the bitter resin on her tongue.

Just as it does every year, the wind has blown steadily out of the southwest, rolling its cargo of doughy air across the plain to slap hard against the mountains. For days, weeks, the air has funneled upward, cooling as it rises, spinning vast towers of condensation over the peaks. Now these hanging gardens of cloud have ripened to the point where they can no longer maintain themselves.

So, the rain.

It falls first over the mountains, an unimaginable shock of water. Caught in the open, herdsmen and woodcutters pull their shawls over their heads and run for shelter. Then in a chain reaction, cloud speaking to cloud, the rain rolls over the foothills, dousing fires, battering on roofs, bringing smiles to the faces of the people who run outside to greet it, the water for which they have been waiting so long.

Finally it comes to the desert. As it starts to fall, Forrester listens to the grubby Brahmin's chit-chat, and hears himself tetchily agreeing that now would be a good time and here a good place to camp. Perhaps this Moti Lal is offended by his brusqueness, but Forrester can't worry about that. His eyes are fixed on the palanquin, the grumpy maid fussing around its embroidered curtain. Its occupant has not even ventured a peek outside. He wonders if she is ill, or very old.

Soon the rain is falling steadily, swollen droplets splashing into the dust like little bombs. Camels fidget and grumble as they are hobbled. Servants run around unpacking bags. Moti Lal keeps up a steady stream of conversation as Forrester dismounts and unsaddles his horse. Moti Lal is not the master here, oh no, just a trusted family retainer. It has fallen to him, the duty of escorting the young mistress to her uncle's house in Agra. Most unusual, of course, but there are extenuating circumstances.

Extenuating circumstances? What is the bloody fool on about? Forrester asks where they have come from, and the man names a small town at least two hundred miles west of where they stand.

"And you have walked all the way?"

"Yes, sir. The young mistress says walk only."

"Why on earth didn't you go by rail? Agra is hundreds of miles from here."

"Unfortunately train is out of the question. Such are extenuating circumstances, you see."

Forrester does not see, but at the moment he is far more concerned with erecting his tent before the rain worsens. It seems to be getting stronger by the second. Moti Lal puts up his umbrella and stands over the Englishman as he bashes in pegs, just close enough to get in his way without actually offering any shelter. Forrester curses under his breath, while all the time the thought circulates in his head; so she is a young woman.

Rain drips through the ceiling and lands in her lap, darkening red silk with circles of black. Amrita turns her face upward and sticks out her tongue. The rain sounds heavy. Outside it is dark and perhaps, though she is not sure, she feels cold. To ward off the feeling she imagines heat, calling up memories of walking on the roof of her father's haveli in summertime. Vividly she senses the burning air on her arms and face. She hears the thud of carpets being beaten and the swish of brooms as the maids sweep sand from the floors. But heat leads on to thoughts of her father, of walking around the pyre as the priest throws on ghee to make it flame, and she recoils back to the dark and cold. Drops of water land on her forehead, on one cheek, on her tongue. Soon the rain is pouring through in a constant stream. The soaked curtains start to flap limply against her side. The wind is rising, and still no one has come for her. No one has even told her what is happening. With no mother or father she is mistress now. If only she could gather the energy to assert herself.

Amrita unlocks her box, shielding it from the water. She is to be delivered to her uncle, and that will be an end. He writes that he has already found her a husband. At least, said the old women, she will arrive with a good dowry. So much better off than other girls. She should thank God.

Within half an hour the dust has turned to mud. Despite his tent Forrester is drenched. He clambers to the top of a hill and looks out over the desert, scored by a fingerprint whorl of valleys and ridges. There is no shelter. As the wind tugs at his topi and forked lightning divides the sky into fleeting segments, he is struck by the thought that perhaps he has been a fool. His red-brown world has turned gray, solid curtains of water obscuring the horizon. Here he is, out in the middle of it, not a tree in sight. He is the tallest thing in this barren landscape, and he feels exposed. Looking back down at his tent, set at the bottom of a deep gully, he wonders how long the storm will last. The Indians are still struggling to put up their own shelters, fumbling with rope and pegs. Amazingly, the palanquin is still where they discarded it. If he had not been told otherwise, he would have sworn the thing must be empty.

Before long, a trickle of muddy water is flowing through the gully, separating Forrester's army tent from the Indians' contraptions of tarpaulin and bamboo. A fire is out of the question and so the bearers are huddled together forlornly, squatting on their haunches like a gaggle of bidi-smoking birds. Moti Lal climbs the ridge to engage Forrester in another pointless conversation, then follows him back down the hill and crouches at the door of the tent. Finally Forrester is forced to give in and talk.

"So who exactly is your mistress?"

Moti Lal's face darkens.

She was always ungovernable, even before her mother died. Her father took no notice of her, whether she was good or bad, too busy weighing out coin to bother about the world outside his cloth-bound ledgers. The servants would come and report to him in the countinghouse, saying that the girl had thrown a cup at the porter, that she refused food, that she had been seen speaking to Bikaneri tribeswomen by the Cremation Gate. In the mornings her maid would find sand when she was combing her hair, as if she had spent the night out in the desert.

She was bringing shame on the family, and if the master chose to ignore it, the job of curbing her fell to his head clerk. At first Moti Lal used words. Then, when he found a cake of sticky black resin in her jewelry box, he dragged her into the courtyard and beat her with a carved stick kept for scaring away monkeys. She was locked in her room for three days. Distracted as he was finalizing a land deal, the master asked who was weeping in his house. Told it was Amrita, he seemed surprised. Does she want for something? he asked.

As soon as the bolt was drawn, she disappeared, returning with a wild look in her eye and garbled talk of trees and rushing water. Moti Lal could never find who brought the drug to her, and gradually she lost interest in everything else. She took to her bed, and stopped speaking. It was as if she had withdrawn to another world. He had to shake her and slap her face before she understood the news about her father.

His killer had left a length of wire wrapped tightly around his neck. The body had been found lying on a rubbish heap outside the town walls, the soles of its feet turned up at the sky like two pale fish. No one seemed surprised. Moneylenders are not popular people. Do you understand, Moti Lal shouted at her. Now you are completely alone.

Now the flood is coming. The earth will be drowned but like Manu the first man, Amrita will float on the ocean and be saved. She cups her hands and sees a little fish flip and curl in the rainwater. She will show it compassion because it is the Lord come to her as a sign, and though she is cold to the bone, the little horned fish means that she will survive.

They do not come to get her. The water saturates the palanquin, soaking the curtains and the cushions, running over the wooden frame in a constant stream. Am...

Revue de presse :

"Delectable, sweeping, empire-savaging, audaciously playful ... Kunzru writes with wry certitude and cinematic precision"  —New York Times

"A sprawling, ambitious, shape-shifting novel...Kunzru proves himself a clever, sharply observant writer." —The Washington Post

 "Nothing is as it seems in this serpentine Dickensian epic...Kunzru nicely limns the fickle roles race and class play in civilized societies." —People magazine

"A witty, well-crafted comic saga of the dark side of the British Empire" —Financial Times"Glorious, hilarious. Kunzru has created a book in which we can feel at home in the strangeness of his gorgeous imagination" —Boston Sunday Herald

"Riveting stuff, beautifully written ... Superb" —The Times (London)

"The Impressionist is both a great adventure yarn and an exploration of identity, both personal and national...One might be occasionally reminded of Salman Rushdie or Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)." —Detroit Free Press

"Superb. Smart, entertaining and engaging on many levels" —Dallas Morning News

"Grand, sprawling, extravagant, lyrical. A work so vibrant and richly imagined that you can smell the incense" —Esquire

"Epic in scale and rich in historical detail, the narrative is deft and swift ... carrying the reader along effortlessly. This first novel has startling depth, ambition and craftsmanship" —Time Out London

"A narrative with just the right blend of misadventure, humor, and humiliation...Call Kunzru amodern-day Kipling." —GQ

"Maniacally inventive—a fantastic funhouse of a novel." —Vogue

"The next literary lion." —Independent on Sunday (UK)

 

 

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 014103498X
• ISBN 13: 9780141034980
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 496