ALL SAINTS’ DAYS

Kirin Narayan does it, standing on the wet edge of a 1970s Juhu beach, as her past washes up at her feet, like old cans, cowries and driftwood. These are the very things with which Narayan’s precociously spiritual elder brother Rahoul crafts his “Rahoul-beings”, pasting on it, as a final flourish, the enormous eyes that he buys from the God’s Eyes Shop at the Bhuleshwar temple bazaar of central Bombay. The eyes, with all their metaphorical significance, remain throughout the book as do gods, saints and Rahoul — until he goes blind and, watched by another “Rahoul being” in New Mexico, dies of “a mysterious illness spreading among gay men”, AIDS. But we are getting ahead of the story.

Narayan’s memoir My Family and Other Saints is about a house on the crossroads of culture. (The title is a play on Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals on his Corfu days that Narayan read as a 10-year-old, following which she threatened her Maw that she would write something similar about her own bizarre home.)

Maw is a sari-wearing, bindi-sporting, guru-loving American artist from New Mexico who even arranges a few sets for Merchant-Ivory’s The Guru; Paw is a bottle-loving, studied-in-US, landed Gujarati who mocks at the soul-searching, tie-dye-wearing, sick and homesick hippies camping at his home. As everyone from American draft dodgers to German stained-glass makers pitch their tents in the garden, Maw boasts her address is passed all along the hash trail. And then there is Rahoul who drops out of school and joins an ashram, triggering a trail of mystic associations for Narayan — from Swami Muktananda with his sunglasses and trademark orange knit cap; to the Sixteenth Karmapa who gives Maw self-multiplying pills; to the bhajan-singing ancestors, sadhus and goddesses conjured up by her grandmother’s tales. There are also cameos by Rajneesh, “the suave, English-speaking professor guru”, and Jiddu Krishnamurthy and even a half-line presence of Satya Sai Baba “who pulled Rolex watches from his Afro” along with “the ancient French mother with her scarf-wrapped forehead”.

The book reveals more than the curiosity, incomprehension and embarrassment of a young girl, who doesn’t want her hula-dancing classmates to think “we’re strange”, but who nevertheless notes it all down on stapled papers that she titles The Family. Or even the pain of a teenager watching her parents drift apart — Paw lost to his bottle, Maw to her beliefs — and her storylines foundering. Instead, from within the narrow confines of her low-roofed, whitewashed home, Narayan, now an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, carves out a scythe of Bombay. She roots her story not only in ochre-tinted memory but also in a young nation’s impatience with holy ash and holinesses, in a generation of Indians caught between a god-loving previous generation and guru-loving foreigners crowding its beaches.

For all her insistence as a child, Narayan does not try to imitate Durrell’s comic exaggeration of his family — although they both star as 10-year-olds in their respective menagerie of memories. Hers is a subdued, watchful tone, which borders on derision only when it comes to some of the antics of the “urug”, the mirror word of guru, Paw’s mocking term for western guru-seekers. And the Bombaywallahs — including Prithviraj Kapoor; Mummy-la, Kabir Bedi’s mother who becomes a Tibetan nun; and Mulk Raj Anand — pass by with as little importance as a child would give them. However, Narayan’s reconstruction of her reminiscences sometimes lags; her insistence on keeping Rahoul as the thread of the tale does not succeed and often Rahoul’s presence towards the end of chapters looks laboured. And Narayan is better reporting than introspecting in long stretches. Yet if you want to see the West and the East meet in Bombay 30 years ago, there’s no better place than Narayan’s home at 13 Janaki Kutir, Juhu.