The Economy of Postcolonial Literature: Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey

In an otherwise complimentary review of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991), Glenn Carey is chagrined to note a “serious flaw,” to wit, the lack of an “appendix of Hindi expressions used in the story, with English translations” (127). David Ray’s review of the novel in the New York Times Book Review also draws attention to Mistry’s use of various languages: “The novel frequently poses a problem for all but the polyglot reader. Words from several Indian languages are dropped in liberally. Some passages are veritable pastiches of two or more languages. A glossary would have been welcome” (13). Although not traditionally part of the bailiwick of critics, book reviews and jacket notes—the extra-textual surround of literature—increasingly function as crucial accessory signs of the dynamics of the production and consumption of post-colonial products. Necessary handmaidens to the “marketplacing” of postcolonial intellectual and artistic goods, they serve to provide telling tales of the vectoring of the artist and critic in the ideological graph mapping intellectual exchanges in the global market. Quite apart from the fact that the appendix proposed by the first reviewer would not be too helpful to the general reader in understanding the many Parsi-Gujrati expressions also used by Mistry—a fact Ray at least is aware of—what is recalled by the reviewers’ observations is a much earlier debate on “intelligibility” and “universality” in “emergent” literature (Wlad Godzich’s term), and its import for a contemporary reckoning of the historical dimension of aesthetic norms.1

More than a decade ago, in his review of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, John Updike bemoaned the profusion of untranslated Swahili and Kikuyu words in the novel. As Reed Way Dasenbrock notes, Updike was hardly alone then in making an implicit appeal for universality, a tendency Chinua Achebe had earlier denounced as synonymous with “the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe” (11). Carey and Ray’s comments on the polyglossia of Mistry’s novel once again raise the issue of linguistic bondage to the colonial center; equally importantly, they unwittingly exhort an examination of the larger question of the orientation and purpose of postcolonial literature, criticism, and pedagogy, and consequently of their place within the First World academic marketplace that has proved so hospitable to all three. While the presence of the English-language postcolonial novel may be said to function as a potent sign of a lamentable de facto glottophagia that disappears vernacular scripts from the larger postcolonial text, the anglophone postcolonial novel that repeatedly challenges standard English obliges us to conceive of polyglossia not only in terms of discrete languages but within the same one. In the case of an overtly polyglot novel like Such a Long Journey, vernacular language use functions as a blatant sign of what we might also consider the larger question of literary codes. The distress caused by the elision of vernacular “postcolonial” literatures and the displacement of “real others” often illogically obscures the problems arising from a politics of reading favoring either the consumption model or a hermeneutic of suspicion of “successful” literature. If “literature itself is a social institution,” as Annette Kolodny points out in her observations on the theory, practice, and politics of feminist literary criticism in “Dancing through the Minefield,” “so, too, reading is a highly socialized—or learned—activity” (153).2 Compare, too, Derek Attridge’s observations about the expectations held of South African literature:

The demand that the production and judgment of literature be governed by its immediate effectiveness in the struggle for change (or against change) has been immensely powerful, and has given rise to a suspicion of anything appearing hermetic, self-referential, formally inventive, or otherwise distant from the canons and procedures of the realist tradition. (243)

Those sorts of readings of texts that refuse to accord literature its literariness or deny the imbrication of sociopolitics within an aesthetic scheme are no less motivated by the technologies of inclusion and exclusion than the process of canon formation that “selects certain kinds of authors, texts, styles, and criteria of classification and judgement [including language], privileging them over others which may also belong in the same period” (Ahmad, In Theory 123). Without a critical commitment to a method capable of incorporating literary and aesthetic concerns, the text’s strategies of revolt against literalism are likely to remain underappreciated.

As it stands, Such a Long Journey, yoked to its First World context, can be used (and apparently is used) to invoke a predictably smelly, chaotic mass of others who reinforce the superiority of the West, doubly so because the more resourceful among them, the author and many an expatriate postcolonial critic attempting to explicate the work, inter alia, have clearly voted on this issue with their fleet, transnational feet.3

Rohinton Mistry’s need for peace, order and (relatively) good government—Canada, Brampton version—is understandable when you read his novel, Such a Long Journey. It is a tidal wave of humanity at its smelliest and most chaotic. (Ross 2)

The easy slippage evidenced in Ross’s comments between Mistry, the smelly subalterns, and the whole civic and governmental structure available to this “tidal wave of humanity” should convey something of the challenges posed in particular by postcolonial texts that operate in the mimetic register of realist fiction. The realist mode of Mistry’s “fiction” and the ensuing propensity for it to be read as a representative and transparent text of postcolonial India further complicates the issue, for it is bootless to insist that it is, after all, a fiction and must be read with an apprehension of the ambiguities of “realistic” literary representation. The literary and disciplinary revetment behind which such a “retreat” (for this is how it will be seen) might have been possible (through what will inevitably be construed as “withdrawal” into discussions of techniques of storytelling, or of the dignity of the individual hero, or into the intransigence of the signifier, for example) has been unprofitably and prematurely eroded by the same wave of political interests that brought post-colonial cultural work into the purview of First World academe in the first place.

If attention to “the historic positional value” of the postcolonial and its commodification enjoins that we teach the conflicts (as Gerald Graff suggests), or the market (as Bishnupriya Ghosh argues), however, it also introduces us to an ideological context in which the order of aesthetics has been suppressed. Confronted with the economy of postcolonial literature in the global marketplace, criticism has attended but poorly to the development of an organon capable of dealing with the economy of the individual text—its functional arrangement of elements within a whole, its thrifty and careful management of its “resources,” and those components of value that contest its reduction to exchange value alone.

The particular challenge of Such a Long Journey is that of unlocking the complexities of mimetic representation in the tradition of realism in the precise historic moment that demands representation from the postcolonial text. If realism is all too glibly associated with naive epistemological assumptions, mimesis—its modality—occasions considerable anxiety in a great deal of contemporary discourse. If Plato’s critique identifies the danger of mimesis in its “undermining of a stable notion of truth,” contemporary suspicion of mimesis is directed toward “a false belief in the fixity of meaning” (Jay, Cultural Semantics 121, 120). In the traditional estimation, mimesis is a “conservative reproduction of existing signs,” as Barthes insists (quoted in ibid. 120). Apt to engender “confusion of linguistic with natural reality,” mimesis in the realist genre can be a risky trope for the postcolonial writer because it is associated with such terms as “copy,” “reproduction,” and “imitation,” and so in danger of contributing to rather than challenging the problems of fixed identity that postcolonial discourse has consistently struggled against. In the register of realism, the slice of life was traditionally expected to reproduce the totality of social relations through a faithful copy of the world in which it is placed. The formal order of the novel—which also alerts us to its artifactuality—sometimes reinforces rather than attenuates this expectation. Mimesis allied with the powerful literary convention of realism can lead us to mistake the representational for the representative, the artistic copy for exact replica, the particular for an undifferentiated tidal wave of smelly subalternity, the representation of a character’s discomfort with the crowd for an auctorial and textual stance of rejection of the masses. A whole set of conceptual exchanges can be precipitated not only despite our understanding of instrumental commodification but precisely because of it.

For Adorno, however, mimesis can function as a valuable resource in the struggle against the reigning power of instrumental rationality in the modern world. “If art were simply equivalent to rationality,” he argues, “it would disappear in it and die off” (Notes to Literature, I, 147). Adorno points out that mimetic comportment “does not imitate something but rather makes itself like itself” as a contiguity rather than an appropriation or domination (Aesthetic Theory 111).4 This interpretation of mimesis capitalizes not on the arbitrariness of the sign so much as it does on the foundational understanding that “the mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves” (104). As Adorno insists even when conceding the status of art as fait social, “Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity” (1). The danger that mimesis will produce the illusion of “knowledge” is rejected in Adorno’s scheme of artistic nonfulfillment of the concept:

The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as “rational.” For that to which the mimetic comportment responds is the telos of knowledge, which art simultaneously blocks with its own categories. Art completes knowledge with what is excluded from knowledge and thereby once again impairs its character as knowledge, its univocity. (54)

Without the awareness of this nonfulfillment in the text’s negotiation with its object, the “struggle for the sign” (Voloshinov’s phrase) ends in the establishment of rational knowledge and the surrender of the text to the rule of equivalence (earlier referred to as “identity thinking”). The mimetic comportment of art may well be a response “to the telos of knowledge,” but its success lies not in its reproduction but in its disjunctive modes of integrating into its fold that which exists in another order of reality:

In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this integration at the same time maintain what resists it and the fissures that occur in the process of integration. (7)

Form, thus broadly conceived, is the internal economy of literature. The saturation of content in form permits literary art its unique realm of experience. It is the formal comportment of art that intimates to us the proviso that if art has a cognitive content, it is not available as series of propositions. If there is a truth-content to art, it resides in its engaged alienation from a material world governed by instrumental reason and the rule of equivalence. Its immanent laws disallow the transparency we expect in identical thinking. In Notes to Literature, Adorno insists that “[art’s] idea is as different from propositional language as aesthetic resemblance is from resemblance to things” (I, 171).5 It is precisely what Adorno refers to as the principle of “nonidentity” that allots to art this peculiar privilege:

Inherently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identify. Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. (Aesthetic Theory 4)

Even experimental forms that challenge traditional genres, or traditional disciplinary boundaries—as is the case with much historiographic fiction—are recognizable owing to certain considerations of form that are closely imbricated with content. Marcuse insists that “a work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content (i.e., the ‘correct’ representation of social conditions) nor by its ‘pure’ form, but by the content having become form” (Aesthetic Dimension 8). Although it may be true that the aesthetic is inherent not only in form but in ways of reading that uncover its operations as essential to content, to seek precise correspondences between content and form is to succumb to another sort of fantasy of transparency in service of the sociopolitical. To stop at the historical-biographical significance of the novel is to cheat ourselves of the intelligence available from attention to stylistics and form; to engineer a contrived correspondence between sociohistorical significance and the text’s formal elements, however, is to miss the point of the uncontainable transformation of content becoming form, or that of the ways in which intention is extinguished in the content (Adorno, Notes to Literature, I, 161). Attention to the conjunctions between the formal and thematic choices can reveal both how figuration and narration work together as well as the gaps that emerge in the process of transformation.

To propose that the unique experience of art (in this case literature) cannot be separated from its immanent law of form is not to subscribe to formalism as we traditionally understand it. Although devotees of “close reading” and formalism come in many guises, a certain sort of formalism understood by what Murray Krieger has referred to as “a very narrow definition” that “equated formalism with aestheticisim as a doctrine which would cut the art object off from the world while treating only its craftsmanlike quality as an artifact” has been all but totally discredited (96).6 New formalisms have by now succeeded new criticism’s early expression of interest in form. Krieger himself relates formalist aestheticism to a philosophical aesthesis or “immediate sense perception” (97). Immobilization of the principle of aesthesia, in the classic sense of “the capacity for feeling and sensation,” prevents us from recognizing the artistic object as an “intentional object” (Krieger 97). Krieger’s useful discussion of the intentional object as aesthetic would seem to sound a timely tocsin as the dangers of conflating mimetic as real grow in the reading of postcolonial literature. Krieger insists that “the peculiar nature of the intentional object as aesthetic—whatever else it is—is surely duplicitous” (101). To be blind to our own collusion in the process of taking “the mimetic as real” is to deny the extent to which the intentional object, here Krieger refers explicitly to drama, “wants us to be alive to this doubleness” (101).

Herbert Marcuse has argued in The Aesthetic Dimension that “literature is not revolutionary because it is written for the working class or for ‘the revolution’”; rather it is revolutionary, as, “in a meaningful sense only with reference to itself, as content having become form” (xii; emphasis mine). Part of Mistry’s novel’s innate structure is polyglossia, linguistic and otherwise. The novel’s “serious flaw,” then, is precisely what points us in the direction of what I have earlier referred to, pace Adorno’s view of philosophy, as the Sisyphean labor of interpretation. Robert Scholes had reminded us almost a quarter of a century ago in Structuralism in Literature that “there is no single ‘right’ reading for any complex literary work” but that readings are “more or less rich” (144–45). It is not “multiple readings,” however, that are indicated by the concept in my reading of the novel, so much as polyglossia as a constitutive structural principle in the work, and of that play between sign and signification that Benjamin describes as the “foreignness of languages” (75). Moreover, if each language is an entire culture, as Upamanyu Chatterjee suggests in English, August , the métissage of language(s) in Mistry’s novel reveals a material context that has itself been creolized and rendered considerably more complex than any one model or interpretive grid alone can explain. In fact, if in the current moment Mistry’s is a diasporic tale in the West, in a precolonial context, that of the Noble family is a continuation of an older diaspora, dating back 1300 years to the expulsion of Zoroastrians from Persia at the time of the Arab invasion when a handful fled to India and were given sanctuary by Yadav Rana. As a persistently unintegrated minority with a millennial residence in the subcontinent, the Parsi fragment of the Indian nation is also a minor fragment of world history, scattered by a much older colonial order that Islamized the Zoroastrian lands of Persia in its own bid to globalize.

The slow accretion of complexities that have resulted over the course of a long and tumultuous, often contested past in the history of the cultures described in the novel should render futile any simple recovery of an underlying and suspiciously serviceable teleological structure. Although a formalistic reading of the text may reveal the technics of textual design, the novel as a social text cannot be reduced to a puzzle that must be pieced together to yield a serviceable and representative profile of the cultures that form its subject, unless we are willing to concede, with Adorno, that “this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation” (Aesthetic Theory 121). To confuse the novel’s particular rendition of human suffering with the representatively aggregate condition of the postcolony is to fall prey to the oldest of colonial fallacies, one that Memmi refers to as “the mark of the plural”: “The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity (‘They are this.’ ‘They are all the same.’)” (85).7 If “this” can only happen in India, if “this” is how “they” are, the postcolonial can never be other than an amorphous other serving dubious needs and anxieties in those with the power to name and judge, creating an aggregare object “riddled,” as Benjamin puts it, “with error with doxa [conjecture]” (Charles Baudelaire 103). Sybil Steinberg’s review of Such a Long Journey captures the spirit of this exchange in a metaphor celebrating the consumption model; the novel, she notes approvingly, “serves up an exotic feast” (66). The reception of the text constitutes something of its context, but it is scarcely the constitutive content of literature. Adorno specifically castigates that form of commodity consumption that uses art as target practice for subjective projections, whether they are sentimental identifications or disdainful ones:

Insofar as the now typical attitude makes the artwork something merely factual, even art’s mimetic element, itself incompatible with whatever is purely a thing, is bartered off as a commodity. The consumer arbitrarily projects his impulses—mimetic remnants—on whatever is presented to him. . . . As a tabula rasa of subjective projections . . . the artwork is shorn of its qualitative dimension. . . . What the reified artworks are no longer able to say is replaced by the beholder with the standardized echo of himself, to which he hearkens. (Aesthetic Theory 17; emphasis mine)

If the economy of the culture industry permits art to be treated as “merely factual,” in the alternative economy of art and literature, the distilled model of the phenomenal world carries analogies and resonances, not dutifully representative reductions or unmediated reflections of the real world. The capacity for aesthetic sublimation, moreover, is hardly confined to poetry and drama alone; “The realistic novel,” too, as Marcuse insists, “must transform the reality which is their material in order to re-present its essence as envisioned by art” (Aesthetic Dimension 44). Mimesis, within this economy, “is representation through estrangement, subversion of consciousness” (45). For Adorno, mimesis affords an alternative form of knowledge, representing an attempt to approximate nature and that which is not there—a notion intimately tied to the prospect of utopian thinking.

The revolutionary potential of art resides in this alternative economy, itself suspended in a geopolitical economic context that both enables and restricts it. If anything, Marcuse proposes that it is the aesthetic experience that is capable of “breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation)” through “its invocation of the beautiful image (schöner Schein) of liberation” (xi, 6). “The only requirement” for a “historical reality” to challenge the world, Marcuse maintains, is that “it must be stylized, subjected to aesthetic ‘formation’” (44). If it is at all possible to talk about utopia in Such a Long Journey, it is so not because Mistry’s portrait of middle-class Parsi family life in 1960s and 1970s Bombay alludes to it in the characters’ conversations or narratorial asides, but precisely because the miniaturized world of the novel, operating within a mode we recognize as realism, has undergone a process of formation. Language is thus “tightened or loosened, forced to yield insights otherwise obscured” while “restructuring takes place through concentration, exaggeration, emphasis on the essential, reordering of facts” (Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension 45). Its order and its language operate within the work as a whole to carry the import of aesthetic transformation. If this process “turns into indictment,” it also becomes “a celebration of that which resists injustice and terror, and of that which can still be saved” (45). Art’s treatment of utopia is scarcely confined to content alone. Indeed, at the level of literary plot resolution, the triumph of liberation would seem to serve as little more than hollow promise. The fracturing of the image of liberation by reality remains one of art’s more potent means of indicting that reality. In the alembic of content having become form, the image of liberation surfaces not as a politically correct vision, but one that can only be politically correct if “it is also correct,” as Benjamin insists, “by literary standards” (quoted in Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension 53). One might argue that the vision may actually bypass the arena of praxis altogether, thereby remaining inaccessible to it, but nevertheless calling praxis up and into question. The very possibility of conjuring up this image of liberation, as transgressive of the known reality, thus lies in its inadequation to this reality.

In the reading that follows, I will pay particular attention to the novel’s use of walls and journeys, literal and metaphorical, personal and collective, cognitive and spiritual, as they function within the economy of the text. These figurative devices manage the burden of content in the book, organizing mimesis and diegesis into an interactive whole. Girded by an elaborate formal structure, the novel is organized such that its cosmos (etymologically, “adornment” in Greek, a connotation tied to aesthetics) perforce recalls the absence of order in the world without. The tight construction of the novel, tying in various motifs—of journeys begun and ended, undertaken and delayed, mourned and celebrated and of the many types of walls that protect even as they limit—overworks the principle of order, recalling in every plot resolution all that is left unreconciled in reality. The stuff of the poetic is lodged in the disadequation between this “ordered” world and that reified world which is administered but lacks the symmetries and resolutions that would reconcile it with truth and nature. The political import of the text’s allegorical construction of the problem of utopia lies precisely within the purview of its aesthetic dimension rather than in its availability as a portable program for change. In the aesthetic dimension it becomes possible to allude to the possibility of a vision neither conceivable nor understood in the language of a world dominated by the rule of equivalence.

Such a Long Journey’s traffic with the problem of utopia begins with its framing troika of epigraphs. The lament for a world gone wrong, the flickering hope of redemption, and the longing for a new language, a different set of tracks, and “a new country. . . revealed with its wonders” are signaled in three epigraphs that draw upon Firdausi’s Shah-Nama, T. S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” and Tagore’s Gitanjali. The aged priests of Firdausi’s Shah-Nama are asked, “How did they [the kings who had once possessed the world] . . . hold the world in the beginning, and why is it that it has been left to us in such a sorry state?” Sounding an age-old requiem on a familiar ubi sunt note, the question hovers over the tale of journeys to follow, issuing from an anonymous “he” who assembles the priests and invites their narrative response. The next epigraph, from “The Journey of the Magi,” seems to float into view as a solemn response: “A cold coming we had of it, / Just the worst time of the year / For a journey, and such a long journey. . .” The calculated ellipsis inserted at the end of the line bespeaks a narrative that continues, but one that must be syncopated to leave the sound and sense of journey lingering without further explanation. The final epigraph ends on a hopeful note: “And when old words die out on the tongue, new / melodies break forth from the heart; and where the / old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.” A relentless will to hope for a better prospect than one yet seen seems to prevail, one nevertheless full of cautions against an old language and a recourse to old paths that have yet to lead to the “new country.” Pregnant with nostalgia for an unknown past gone by and a future-oriented longing for what is yet to be understood in the old language or arrived at through familiar tracks, the first and last epigraphs straddle, amphimacer-like, the visually shorter middle epigraph with its promise of a narrative accounting “a journey, and such a long journey. . . .” and the difficulties indicated in “a cold coming.” The phrase “such a long journey,” plucked out to serve as the title of the novel, looms into view as one turns the page, braced by the framing text no longer in sight. Encapsulated cryptically in the very title, then, is the notion of utopia, “no-place,” the move toward which will be “such a long journey” because it is not only that the end is nowhere in sight but that the destination itself is unknown, the language of its melodies not yet understood in the old lexicon, and the old tracks have yet to be abandoned.

The novel’s formal rendition of these thematic concerns labors to resonate with the dialectic between old and new, progress and regress, journeys and ends. Selected figurative elements in Such a Long Journey expose this dialectic in a macroscopic view of the text as whole. Mistry’s use of the figures of allegory (including national allegory, one admits) in the journey motif, symbolism in the references to the black paper on the windows and in the references to insects, and the triangulated metaphor-symbol-metonymy in the recurrent references to “the black stone wall” exploit the resources of figurative language not so much to approximate significance to signification as to strain through the tension between them. The novel’s fundamental and delimiting “problem” with language thus rests at the heart of various sorts of incommensurability: between art and its object of representation; between a reconciled nature and its message of liberation; between content and the content having become form; between enunciation and understanding; between the singular and the typical.

The politics of representation makes the example exemplary, the representation representative. In this dominant scheme, postcolonial literature cannot be credited with singularity even as the area-based “knowledge” produced in postcolonial literature is forever barred from access to universality. The geopolitical division of knowledge confines the post-colonial production to parochialism while pronouncing universal appeal for writers like Joyce and Proust. One might certainly argue that Such a Long Journey is exemplary of prototypical postcolonial concerns in many ways. It is parochial in that it is interested in a small part of the world, and a part that does not feature as globally “central.” It is representative of the postcolonial condition in that it situates itself in the aftermath of a complicated colonial takeover with a conflicted legacy in which the battle between tradition and modernity constitutes a driving motif. Its choice of the novel genre, its recourse to the realist mode of telling, and even its predictable use of figuration betray this legacy as much as its content. If we pursued the narrative thread provided by Mistry’s repeated return to the wall, for instance, we would find a useful broadly aesthetic and architectonic device for the exposition of what we have come to think of as paradigmatically postcolonial thematic concerns: the nation and its fragments, postcolonial disillusionment, the transformation of a physical and mental landscape by the techonology and ideology of colonialism. We would also find, however, a symbolic internal system that exceeds these purposes, obliging us to conceive of those human concerns that are not usually allowed a spotlight on the postcolonial stage: love, loss, the individual libidinal psyche and its travails, the dailiness of postcolonial life that is at once bigger and more trivial than we usually credit, and the protest of the particular against the generic that is lodged in the inner history of the individual. At the same time, then, that the wall stands as a potent symbol of the sundering of individual experience from a total view of reality, it also points to the loss of interest in the individual in a world organized by reification and its reorganization of human relationships. Against a society that administers and manages all aspects of human life, the novel’s focus on the sensuous structure of the individual’s existence—a mode that might be considered outdated and outpaced by developments in the artistic marketplace—can constitute a subversive reminder of whom the dreamed-ofrevolution is for, who dreams of it and in what imperfect, fragmented ways. Plot elements that recall the postcolonial predicament are thus constantly sized and shaped by the privatization of the political and the social.

The novel begins with the protagonist, Gustad Noble, facing eastward to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The early invocation of religious filiation will continue throughout the novel to undercut affiliation with the national narrative on various levels: in the relationship of the subject to the nation-state and of religious minority to majority. As yet, however, the world invoked in the first few pages is sealed off from these realities, its dimensions reduced to a compound shared exclusively by Parsi families who coexist with varying degrees of harmony. The sounds one hears are those of pots and pans clattering in neighborhood flats, of birds chirping in the compound’s solitary tree, the noise of the world without yet to intrude. As the narrative focus shifts further into a progressively interior spatial dimension, the heterodiegetic narrator takes the reader into Gustad Noble’s psychic world where some of his disappointments and his hopes, his fears and desires briefly unfold. The narrative focus zooms in and out through these differently sheltered and confined spaces, revealing the primary denizens of Khodadad Building, a Parsi enclave shielded from the noise and dust of a busy thoroughfare and the prying eyes of “nons” by a black stone wall. Behind the stone wall surrounding Khodadad building live some of the characters who will play major and minor, noble and ignoble roles in the story. The Noble family includes Gustad’s superstitious wife Dilnavaz and their three children: the brilliant older son Sohrab, fifteen-year-old Darius, and a young daughter, Roshan. Sohrab is clearly the repository of Gustad’s hopes and aspirations, his own having been destroyed when Gustad’s father was forced into bankruptcy and Gustad into early employment at a bank. Gustad’s outraged surprise when Sohrab secures and then rejects a coveted seat to study at the Indian Institute of Technology—“the promised land”—creates a devastating rift between father and son, providing one of the plot’s dramatic tensions in the novel (67). With the onset of his daughter’s lingering illness, Sohrab’s unexpected change of plans, and his friend Major Jimmy Bilimoria’s audacious request for help with transferring government funds, Gustad’s relatively safe world behind the wall is about to be rocked by fear and uncertainty.

Sharing the compound with the Noble family, among other minor characters, is the elderly Miss Kutpitia who claims to know of the medicinal properties of herbs, of black and white magic, and of the import of auguries; Mr. Rabadi, engaged in an ongoing feud with the Nobles over their son Darius’s interest in his daughter; Major Jimmy Bilimoria, the retired major who has gone missing for a year only to reappear in Gustad’s life in the form of a mysterious note that draws the latter into the seamy politics of Indira Gandhi’s ambitions; and lame and dimwitted Tehmul who will die in the riots staged around the wall at the conclusion of the novel. Beyond this wall is a frightening world in which the proverbial heat and dust of India and the smelly effluences of its anonymous masses assail the senses; where the fundamentalist Shiv Sena is busy renaming city streets and staging a bid for a unitarian Marathi Bombay (known, as of even date, as Mumbai); where suspicious women eye Gustad’s shopping basket askance, lest it contain offensive nonvegetarian victuals. Beyond this wall, too, is a world of political intrigue and government corruption Gustad will learn of through bitter experience.

Functioning alternately as symbol, metonymic sign, and pregnant metaphor, the wall does not stand (or fall, as it does in the end) for any simple correlative meaning. A spatial construct, it is the site of projection, of limit, of boundaries that invite convergence with cognitive and psychological parallels while also discouraging literal parallelism. The limit space of the wall functions as a central device in the novel with multiple significations, among them are the symbolic limits of representation in the national and minority narrative, a visual symbol of the internal religious and social divisions within the nation, a metonymic pointer to the threatening excess that lies beyond, on either side, and the wall as a freighted metaphor that unfolds in various ways. Gustad’s repeated return to meditate on the wall, the role of the wall in the collective and personal drama that unfolds, and the problems and protections posed by the wall make it integral to the narrative of the novel. In a critical sense, then, although sometimes a wall is just a wall, here we are faced with a story wall, a wall in a story, an intentional wall, a wall beyond auctorial intention, and a wall with a story.

At the time of our introduction to it in the first chapter, the wall is already under attack. Gustad has just received a municipality notice suggesting that a road-widening project is likely to push it back several feet:

The compound would shrink to less than half its present width, and the black stone wall would loom like a mountain before the ground-floor tenants. More a prison camp than a building, all cooped up like sheep or chickens. With the road noise and nuisance so much closer. The flies, the mosquitoes, the horrible stink, with bloody shameless people pissing, squatting alongside the wall. Late at night it became like a wholesale public latrine. (16)

The intrusions of the world beyond have been suggested earlier in the introductory chapter through Gustad’s growing apprehension of it through smell and sound. Engrossed in his prayers despite the familiar clatter and chirping, Gustad is beginning his recital of the Sarosh Baaj silently “when the domestic sounds of the building were drowned by the roar of a diesel engine” (15). The “thundering lorry” pulls away shortly after, “leaving a cloud of diesel fumes to linger at the gate.” “By and by,” we learn, “the morning air carried in the acrid smell” (15). It is this smell that draws Gustad to the gate and to the municipal notice pasted on a pillar, proposing the road widening. The municipality’s project is inextricably associated with the disturbing sounds and smells of a threatening world, its plans for modernization including an expansion as well as closing in. We might read within these conjunctions the arraignment of a selective and disjunctive interpretation of modernization that renders the idea of “progress” necessarily conflicted. Like a sheet that will not stretch to cover all that seek its warmth and shelter, it is extended in one direction, only to rob others of its protection. The contradictory projects of modernity are partially visible through the struggles over the wall in Mistry’s narrative. Interestingly, the movement of the wall is more or less irrelevant for the majority of the people. The road widening benefits the common man but little. If the foul assaults on the wall by a citizenry bereft of public facilities is a continuing source of annoyance to Gustad, it is also a dismal reminder of those who are kept out of the city’s protected enclaves, obliged to perform even their private ablutions in public. Statistics suggest that nationwide about 70 percent of the population has no access to sanitation (www.loksatta.org). The mass concentration of populations in the major cities renders this problem far more visible than it would be in the rural areas. The bodily deposits of this hapless population at the wall bespeak this abjection, defiantly so.

The city, one recalls, is the locus classicus of modernity. Its spaces under contest, its time is regulated by the workday—Gustad associates the air raid siren with the thought that it was “Ten o’clock already . . . Should have been at my desk by now” and its spaces are regulated by division of labor (143). Its size capable of “[absorbing] a highly diverse variety of services,” the city also encourages specialization and adaptability to consumer needs (Simmel 420). Gustad’s description of the neighborhood in which his physician’s, Dr. Paymaster, dispensary is located, suggests the sprouting of these goods and services as the area is transformed to offer “transistors, toasters, tyres, auto parts, plastic crockery—everything essential for the magic which swallows up a hundred years of history and propels a country stuck in the nineteenth century directly into the glories of the twentieth” (154). Gustad’s negotiations with the metropolis introduce us to its teeming variety, its diversity regulated and unified by nothing more than the money economy that has created the city, its assault on the senses relentless.

Denial and the blocking out of sensory stimuli, we might recall, was offered as a classic psychological response to the sensory overload of an overpopulated, underserviced city in Georg Simmel’s comments on the problems of modern urban life in “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Challenged spatially from forming a community on this large a scale, self-preservation demands from the individual the ability to close out and seek shelter from the random and relentless profusion of stimulants of city life. Reserve stems not only from indifference but a revulsion that Simmel describes as “mutual strangeness and revulsion,” which is likely, moreover, to “break into hatred and fight at the moment of closer contact, however caused” (415–16) as they do toward the end of the novel when “spontaneous emotions, bottled up for God knows how long . . . [pop] their corks” in a spirited demonstration against the city’s municipal corporation (Mistry 329). From Gustad’s perspective, the wall offers a retreat from the maelstrom of a burgeoning and hostile metropolis seeking to reorganize the space of the city in the name of development or in the majoritarian quest for a univocal identity by replacing colonial street names with nationalist ones (74). Written over by the bodily effluences of the “bloody shameless people,” the wall is unsurprisingly illegible to Gustad as a sign of one of many problems that neither the nation-state nor the ordinary bourgeois individual has been able to confront meaningfully.

If the black stone wall thus “stands” for various sorts of internal boundaries within the nation, it also embodies the self-sought isolation of the Noble family and by extension that of both the Parsi community and others like them who live within their relatively safer enclosures, blind to the deprivation in the world beyond—notwithstanding Gustad’s occasional acts of compassion for the poor and otherwise deprived—and the way in which modernity shapes their space and time as well as their individual psyches. The stink of the unsavory realities of a world held temporarily at bay, however, pursues Gustad as the diesel smell persists, “following him through the compound as he returned home” (16). A powerful mnemonic, it joins his consciousness of the current dilemma with two unpleasant memories: one of the bailiff’s men driving away with the contents of his father’s bankrupted bookshop in their lorries, and the other of an accident nine years ago that has left him with a limp. As he walks back into his flat, his hip beginning to hurt, Gustad wrinkles his nose and wishes “the wind would change” (17).

The accident, we will learn, is caused when Gustad and his son are forced to leap off a city bus by a surly conductor who informs them that the bus is not headed toward their destination and that they must either get off in the middle of traffic or buy a ticket. “No free ride,” proclaims this denizen of a money economy (57). The hitherto stationary bus in the middle of sluggish traffic jerks forward just as they are alighting, and Gustad suffers the fall that will leave him limping as he kicks his son out of the way of an oncoming taxi. We are told that “the smell of diesel fumes was strong in his nostrils as he blacked out’ (58). As he comes to in the street, a water-seller is demanding money for the water used to splash on his face, incurring the ire of some who find him heartless and the support of those who understand that it is unfair that he should be “left out” of the profits that the doctor and the hospital would not relinquish in the name of humanity. “They [the residents of the city] share,” as Simmel points out, “a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things; and, in this attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness” (411). As his son Sohrab hands over a rupee to the water-seller, Gustad himself “wanted to say something to him about counting the change carefully” (Such a Long Journey 59). Spawning an ever greater “right to distrust which men have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of modern life,” the city both requires and is produced by an internalization of the money economy and a concomitant blunting of discriminative capacities of the relative value of things (Simmel 415). The only individual who does not want “to profit from . . . [Gustad’s] pain” is the taxi-driver who drives him home and then to the traditional bonesetter for free (Such a Long Journey 60). But then, again, he will turn out to be in the employ of Jimmy Bilimoria and the Indian Secret Service and capable of considerable ruthlessness when Gustad hesitates to perform Bilimoria’s requested monetary transactions. Although the “internalization of the money economy” can scarcely be confined to urban life alone—the rampant and exploitative practice of usury in Indian villages can hardly have been without consequence for the structuring of social relations, for instance— the city as the seat of the money economy may well provide the first such model of a commercial relation of the individual to the life around him by virtue of size and scale. The instinct to seek refuge from the ravages of metropolitan life and its production of one-dimensional subjectivity progressively isolates the individual. The prospect of greater proximity to the chaos without and the impending “exposure” to its ugly realities lead Gustad to hope that nothing will come of the “pernicious proposition” to reduce the buffer zone provided by the wall further (90).

In a bid to protect the wall from human soiling, Gustad hits upon the brilliant solution of getting a sidewalk artist to fill the wall with holy pictures. “Will you be able to draw enough to cover three hundred feet?” he asks the young artist. Gustad’s attempt to develop an indigenous, not to mention ingenious solution, to deal with the insalubrious assaults on the wall make it an experimental field for the kind of autoplasty needed to heal the wounds of fundamentalist politics that have appropriated nationalist discourse in India. His reply suggests the lie not only of any unitary discourse of the Indian nation, but even of a Hindu one: “There is no difficulty. I can cover three hundred miles if necessary. Using assorted religions and their gods, saints and prophets: Hindu, Sikh, Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Jainist. Actually, Hinduism alone can provide enough” (182). The proliferation not only of alternative emblems of cultural presence but of the central emblems of a Hindu one suggest the impossibility of any essentialist notion of nation, fundamentalist or otherwise. That these proliferations are themselves located on the border space of the wall should alert us to its status as the limit site of cultural representation where nation-space is in the “process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in media res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image” (Bhabha, “Introduction” 3). The evolution of religious fundamentalism in India as deeply complicit with modernity rather than as a simple foil to it is discussed at length in the following chapter. For now, suffice it to register its presence in the narrative through the ambivalent sign of the wall.

In Mistry’s tale of a Parsi family, if the wall interrupts the narrative of a continuous nation by revealing its disruptive other, it is also presented as a possibility of sorts. Over time, the wall “had verily become a shrine for all races and religions” (286). On the wall the Hindu trinity jostles with Abraham, Zarathushtra, Our Lady of Fatima, major and minor Christian saints pantheon, Yellamma, the patron deity of prostitutes, and even a few dubious holy men. The subsequent evolution of the wall from public latrine to sacred shrine for a disparate band of devotees is pronounced a miracle by those who have so long suffered a heady assault of undesirable sights and smells. There are complaints, to be sure, about the “all perjaat gods on a Parsi Zarathosti building wall,” but they are dwarfed by the miracle of “smell . . . gone, nuisance gone, mosquitoes gone” (213). The smell of incense and joss sticks mingled with the “heavenly fragrances” of roses and lilies now continuously fills the air as devotees of various faiths and religions stop to offer their orisons and their scented offerings. “What an amazing contrast,” Gustad thinks, “to the wall of old. Instead of flies and mosquitoes buzzing, a thousand colours dancing in the sunlight. Instead of the stink, this glorious fragrance of paradise. Heaven on earth” (286). It is not incidental that Gustad so often and so fondly remembers a period in his life when he was part of “a wonderful world” in his father’s furniture workshop and bookstore, “where even the air had a special quality”: “Time and the world stretched endlessly then, before the bad days came and everything shrank,” and one might add, would also begin, quite literally, to stink (141). The transformed wall literalizes the plugging of these stimuli and the pleasing separation and freedom this grants to the community within its confines. The aesthetically appealing wall then provides a dramatic symbol of hindrance to the reciprocal interaction of the various elements that only speciously comprise a “society,” because “the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible” (Simmel 418).

The reliance of this solution on the mystifying force of religion and art, moreover, betrays a habitual evasion of other fundamental divides. The powers of religious ideology and art combine to provide the Khodadad building Parsis with the buffer they have so long desired, but they do so by masking and aestheticizing the nature of the various divides. The common person’s needs are merely displaced by these diversions, for one imagines that another wall somewhere is now serving the purpose thus far performed by the black stone wall, one unadorned and naked in its grim testimonial to a failure to meet the needs of the masses. Sacralized with dizzying speed through the tireless efforts of Gustad’s hired artist, the wall, a shrine to secularism and religious pluralism and a certain sort of bourgeois utopian possibility proves, perhaps predictably, to be a fragile bulwark. As the novel ends, municipal workers are chiseling out the mortar between the stone slabs after a bloody confrontation with a spirited, multireligious group of protesters. In the violent confrontation, the disabled half-wit Tehmul, who was foolish enough to leave the protection of the compound, has been fatally wounded, an unwitting sacrifice.

In the heat of intramarginal politics and the hegemonic designs of the nation-state and the enthusiasm for development, even the sacred is no longer sacred. The sacred wall’s ultimately multiple failure to resolve the problems that beset those on both sides of the wall suggests the mortifying limits of both secularism and aesthetic representations of tolerance in the face of unaddressed social needs. Neither is adequately equipped to face the onslaught of modernization, its unequal distribution of resources, and its new challenges to old problems of social and religious divisions. Nor, indeed, is religious commitment a bulwark against the more “modern” of devotions displayed by the denizens of the city: it is scarcely a matter of random chance that Laxmi, Hindu goddess of wealth, is the first to be recognized and garners the first of the many devoted offerings that will appear at the wall. Alongside the more traditional gods on the pantheon, we are told, is Parsi holy man Dustoorji Baria who is famous for helping people not only “with health problems, pet problems,” but also “stock-market problems, business-partnership problems, job-finding problems, merchant-banker problems . . . and so on” (288). The wall then comes to function as a powerful mise-en-scène for a thoroughly commodified society that is both unified and divided by the same force.

The wall painter’s growing pride in the power of his art is also fated to be humbled. In an ironic twist, it is Gustad’s old friend Malcolm Saldanha who turns out to be in charge of the municipal operation to destroy the wall. Himself a musician who “used to summon the notes like magic” but proved unable to make a living, Malcolm is “now supervising pickaxes and churning concrete” (331). The pavement artist observes his approach with apprehension, crumpling when Malcolm breaks the news to him:

He gathered up his paints and brushes, boxes and belongings, and dropped them in the compound. There he sat, cross-legged, unable to summon up even a trace of the resources that had fuelled his wanderings in the old days. (324)

Initially an unassuming sidewalk crayonist, the usually humble artist has not earlier been without some aspirations to social relevance. By the time the wall is slated to be destroyed, he has come to see it as “my wall” (329). A specialist in world religions and in religious art, he is quite able to generate enough representations from the Hindu pantheon to cover 300 feet of wall; “But,” he suggests, “I always like to mix them up, include a variety in my drawings. Makes me feel I am doing something to promote tolerance and understanding in the world” (182). The artist has nevertheless attempted, thus far, to cultivate a studied insouciance and humility about his work: he had learned “during his years of wandering and drawing . . . that impermanence was the one significant certainty governing his work. Whenever the vicissitudes and vagaries of street life randomly dispossessed him of his crayoned creations, forcing him to repaint or move on, he was able to do so cheerfully” (212). The success of the wall art, however, leads him to dream of greater glory for his work: “From now on, no more crayons. All pictures in oil and enamel only. Completely permanent. Nothing will spoil them” (212–13). By this point in the narrative the artist has quite forgotten a lesson he had earlier learned, “to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs.” The work on the wall was “reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own, something immutable” (184).

In the face of unexpected success, the artist’s desire to create an enduring, meaningful “miracle” through his work is rudely exposed as misplaced pretension when the beautiful, sacred wall proves no match for the municipality’s plans. The abrupt end to his brief moment of glory reminds him that “the journey—chanced, unplanned, solitary— was the thing to relish” (184). As the Khodadad building inhabitants’ worst fears are realized, the artist is packing away his crayons, all he will need, he says, for his journey. Gustad asks him where he is going. The artist shrugs and replies, “In a world where roadside latrines become temples, and temples and shrines become dust and ruin, does it matter where?” (338). It is not necessary to read into the pavement artist’s fate the prediction of the end of art so much as its precarious position in a larger world of uncertainty and change, its future unknown, and its purpose ambiguous. Without even the cryptic clue of a guiding star, it is clear that the artist’s quest for alternative futures, like the people’s, is also going to be such a long journey.

Gustad, meanwhile, has had the opportunity to come to his own bitter conclusion that “nothing is beyond the government. Ordinary people like us are helpless against them” (338). Standing against the mobility signified by the dominant motif of “journey,” the wall also operates as a counter to change, national or personal, public or private. The protagonist, thus, also erects walls against experience and change; he refuses, in other words, to make a necessary journey for much of the novel. Gustad’s embittered awakening at the conclusion of the novel has come at considerable cost, and it is one that follows upon a literal train journey to the country’s capital. Early in the novel an animated exchange between Sohrab and his father suggests the latter’s staunch unwillingness to countenance stories of governmental corruption. As Gustad is dragged into Major Bilimoria’s scheme for siphoning money into an illegal account, ostensibly to aid the revolutionary Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini army in its war for liberation from Pakistan, sinister aspects of statecraft and political ambition begin to reveal themselves. Mistry’s use of this story line is based largely on a historical event involving a Parsi agent from RAW, a branch of the Indian Secret Service. Arun Mukherjee explains that

The actual event that Mistry focused on is known in India as the Nagarwala case. In the winter of 1971, it was reported in the papers the Head Cashier of the State Bank of India in Delhi had given six million rupees to Mr. Nagarwala on the basis of a phone call from Mrs. Gandhi who, he claimed, had asked him to take this great risk in the name of Mother India. After he had delivered the case to Mr. Nagarwala in a preassigned place, the Head Clerk had doubts about his act and went to the police. Mrs. Gandhi denied that she had made any such telephone call and the Head Clerk was suspended. Nagarwala was arrested a few days later and confessed that he had mimicked Mrs. Gandhi’s voice. (145–46)

The novel recounts a similar tale, with Major Bilimoria playing the fictional role of Nagarwala. Gustad’s growing misgivings about the state’s capacity for terrorizing the private individual develop into horror in a final confession scene in a Delhi prison hospital where Bilimoria is being held. The enfeebled Bilimoria’s halting revelation of his manipulation by the prime minister and his progressive physical and mental decline after police torture leave Gustad in no doubt that the corruption they have all taken for granted as a part of Indian life exists at a level that confounds belief. Bilimoria himself knows that it is bootless to talk to lawyers or newspapers, since “everything is in their control.” His own plan is to weather his four-year prison sentence and “then forget about it” (280). By the time Gustad returns to Bombay after what will turn out to be his last meeting with his friend, India is openly at war with Pakistan over the very liberation movement in Bangladesh Gustad had mistakenly thought he was aiding when he agreed to divert government funds.

Gustad’s reconciliation with Bilimoria leaves him in good spirits, but not yet shorn of all his illusions. His nationalistic zeal, his pride in the Indian army betray an unchanged faith in the power of the nation-state to protect its citizens as he extols the might of Indian antiaircraft guns and patriotically repairs the blackout paper on his windows, first affixed nine years earlier, during a by now almost forgotten war with China in 1962. Gustad’s wife’s pleas to remove the old paper have long fallen on deaf ears. “Long after the 1971 war with Pakistan has been won,” the narrator observes, “after the euphoria of flags, banners, and victory parades had passed . . . after the billboards and hoardings were divested of wartime exhortations; after the blackout was lifted and cities returned to light . . . after all this, Gustad still did not remove the paper from his windows” (309–10). The insistent use of anaphora in a paragraph-long preamble to the final sentence with which the above quotation ends impresses upon us Gustad’s inability to make a final, necessary gesture. He seems to sense that it is time to make this move, but finds it difficult to overcome his reluctance.

Although he dismisses Dilnavaz’s renewed petition to remove the paper with a brusque, “Why the big rush?” Gustad finds that her “gibe about the blackout paper was buzzing inside his head.”“By and by, however,” the narrator notes, “the wall’s fragrances wrapped their rich veils over him and made him forget” (310). What is sweet to the senses can also numb them into complacence. Aesthesia, the capacity for feeling and sensation, may be vital to an intelligent understanding of the complexity of human and economic relations and indispensable as a tool for human liberation, but it is no guarantor of it or of personal emancipation. Gustad finds himself all too easily beguiled away from his personal journey by the lulling scents, and all too susceptible shortly after to “moving stories of how Bangladeshis had cheered the arrival of the first Indian troops in Dacca” (310). As he pores over the newspapers over the next few days, “like everyone else, Gustad had begun to feel the glow of national pride.” A smaller item in “an obscure corner” of the paper one day jolts him back to his senses: “When he read it, the glow of national pride dropped from him like a wet raincoat.” The item in question is a small paragraph “which stated that Mr. J. Bilimoria, a former officer with RAW, had died of a heart attack while serving his four-year prison sentence in New Delhi” (311). Incidentally, Nagarwala, Bilimoria’s real-life counterpart, is also said to have died under suspicious circumstances.

The other notice in the paper is one that alerts Gustad to his friend’s funeral at the Tower of Silence. Grateful that some unknown person has brought Jimmy’s body from Delhi, Gustad joins him, part of the way, on his final journey up the hill to the tower, where scavenging birds can reduce the body to bones. Despite his grief and rage, Gustad is glad to “watch the fire, listen to his prayers. And to offer sandalwood, sprinkle loban in the afargan.” In the scene now focalized through Gustad’s senses, a powerful synesthesia is orchestrated: “Powder bursting intro fragrant flames. Like shining from shook foil. Frankincense and myrrh, and sandalwood glowing red. Colour of the rising sun. And Jimmy’s face through the thick white smoke” (315). The oblique reference back to one of the framing epigraphs from “The Journey of the Magi” in the evocation of the scented offerings to the funereal fire recalls Eliot’s description of a journey that retains a final, unsettled paradox:

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

It is believed that the magi were Zoroastrian priests and that the sign in the heavens had been long prophesied. This time, however, frankincense and myrrh are unambiguously offerings to death, their red glow in the fire nevertheless suggesting, even if they cannot promise, the “colour of the rising sun” and another birth so long ago and such a long journey made for the occasion. Both birth and death lie at the conclusion of the original expedition referred to by Eliot, the redemption of mankind necessitating the crucifixion, its collective rebirth requiring this death. Whether there is any prospect of redemption in the death Gustad now grieves, however, is impossible to discern through the fragrant but obscuring veil of smoke. That it is impossible to return unsullied by the terrible knowledge embodied in his friend Bilimoria’s death might be deduced from the words that follow in Eliot’s poem, suggesting that they and we can be “no longer at ease . . . in the old dispensation.”

Gustad returns home to the novel’s closing scene in which the wall will be destroyed, the artist will set off on his unending journey, and another journey will end as Tehmul loses his life to a stray brick thrown by protestors. The cement mixers, waiting lorries, the milling crowd around the wall, and Tehmul’s uncontrollable babble quickly apprise Gustad upon his arrival at the scene: “For the briefest of moments he felt the impending loss cut deeply, through memory and time; the collapse of the wall would wreck the past and the future” (329). As the raging mob vents its fury on construction workers formidably armed with pickaxes and crowbars, the frightened Parsis watch from within the compound, while Gustad attempts to keep Tehmul away from the fascinating flying objects without. Before he realizes it, however, Tehmul slips away, to be caught on the forehead by a flying brick. Gustad rushes into the melée to grab the unconscious frame and drag it into the compound. The doctor’s ministrations come too late. As the others ponder where to put the body for the hour or so it will take for the hearse to arrive, Gustad silently approaches the body, lifts it in his arms and bears it safely home, two floors up to his flat. This sacred task done, Gustad begins his prayers for the unfortunate orphan. What strange redemption there is in the crippled boy’s death, what gain in this tragic loss, it is not clear, but with the prayers tears long held within begin to flow. Gustad turns from his prayers to find that his son Sohrab, who has been visiting his mother, has joined him in Tehmul’s flat. Whether or not their differences over Sobhrab’s choices will be resolved, some reconciliation is clear in their embrace.

Returning to the compound Gustad finds the air “rank with the smell of diesel fumes” and a nauseating stench from the barrel of sewer sludge overturned by protestors. Engulfed in the putrid odors of a world that cannot be checked in its relentless process of change and progress, Gustad will finally “come to his senses.” In a finely tuned sign of dramatic irony, the author makes a double gesture through the climactic event of the destruction of the black stone wall. While the symbolic protection of the wall is destroyed along with the literal wall, Gustad seems to begin to dismantle the metaphoric wall that exists between him and self-awareness, a gesture transferred from the events transpiring outside the home to the darkness of his flat where he starts to remove from the windows—as his family has bootlessly been urging him—the black paper he had affixed several years earlier. As Gustad pulls at “the paper covering the ventilators,” it is not only the light beyond that is let in, however, but the heat of “the sun-flooded compound” (339). Gustad’s inevitable journey out of his protected retreat into the open, if threatening, spaces of shocks and experience is masterfully captured in the double signification of this culminative moment. This delayed figurative rendition dramatizes the cognitive lag between experience and its apprehension; Gustad has long before now been ejected out of his protected Parsi enclave into the full fray of national politics, but his confrontation with the import of his experiences is perforce linked thematically and figuratively in the ending.

But not so fast. For all the walls that tumble, some yet remain. Gustad may have confronted his illusions about the state’s power and corruption; he may have understood the basis of his separation from his son, but this adult bildungsroman ends with a limited epiphany after all. It is unclear how Gustad intends to reconcile his hopes for Sohrab’s future as the technologically sophisticated heir to Indian modernity with the latter’s interest in the arts. Moreover, notwithstanding the powerful symbolism of the light flooding in after the removal of the black paper, there is little evidence that Gustad has connected meaningfully with the reality of those who remain identified in his mind with a “horrible stink.” Till this noble hero learns to develop a nose for the sources of inequality and injustice that have created walls around and between people, his coming of age should be construed more as a point of departure than arrival.

The content-form vinculum in the use of the wall as a figurative device clarifies the ways in which the novel is in a fundamental sense about walls of various kinds. Given the comments from reviewers with which this chapter began, it might be instructive to now pursue this line of inquiry with specific regard to the question of language. Mistry’s use of English might be characterized by what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin refer to as “abrogation” and “appropriation,” the former constituting a strategy of “refusal of . . . the imperial culture, . . . its illusory standard of normative or ‘correct’ usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning ‘inscribed’ in the words,” while the latter “is the process by which the language is made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience. . . . Language is adopted as a tool and utilized to express widely differing cultural experiences” (38–39).8 Mistry’s use of “a glorious foreign accent,” duly noted in the jacket notes excerpting a review from the Philadelphia Inquirer, challenges standard English usage in an attempt to capture the cadence of certain types of Indian English usage while also freighting it with occasionally untranslatable cultural specifics. Significantly, however, the use of vernacular words and slang challenge not only the Western reader but the so-called insiders to this culture as well, requiring us to reimagine the operative scale of difference.

Mistry stages a scene within the novel that brings the issue squarely to the fore in the exchange between Gustad’s friend at the bank, Dinshawji, and Laurie, the new typist, whose curvaceous beauty they both admire, the latter much less respectfully than Gustad. Dinshawji’s tomfoolery and steadily worsening campaign of sexual harassment of Laurie as he gets sicker from a fatal disease reaches a new low one day:

He stopped singing, and said, panting, “Laurie, Laurie, one day I must introduce you to my little lorri.” She smiled, ignorant of the Parsi slang for the male member. “Oh yes,” he continued, “you will love to play with my sweet lorri. What fun we will have together.”

She nodded pleasantly, and around them, the men guffawed, digging one another in the ribs. Gustad winced. Dinshawji was going too far. But Laurie smiled again, a little puzzled, and uncovered her typewriter. (146)

The intransigent walls posed by the multilingual references and puns in the novel also stand among those we would think of as belonging on the same side in one indistinguishable mass that supposedly enjoys mutual intelligibility. In his discussion of a Renaissance Society exhibition of Shahzia Sikander’s work at the University of Chicago, Homi Bhabha comments on the artist’s use of a Durga/Kali figure overlaid “with the enigmatic veiled woman” (“Miniaturizing Modernity” 151). In doing so, the artist brings together not the East and the West, Bhabha notes, but “the East and the East” (151). The net result is to highlight “the nearness of difference, the intimacy of difference that can exist in any culture” (151). Mistry’s elaborate doubling of the joke thrusts difference into the usually unexplored realm of those read as univocally different. Not everyone in that part of the world is on the inside for this inside joke either. The “lorri” joke succeeds (or fails) by capitalizing on incomprehension by one specific member of the audience and a sharing of the joke with at least one other. Typically, the slanting of the notion of postcolonial has shown selectivity with regard to both time and place, locating the postcolonial hybrid in international space as opposed to the postcolony, which, of course, is also hybrid and transcultural and has never been a “pure” space. In a different context, Ivan Karp wryly observes that “any good Bakhtinian knows that hybridity and conflicting complexity are part and parcel of the constitution of all selves and others, even in one locality and at one point of time. In any case, even the dispersed live in one place at a time” (292).9

The bases for celebrating texts for their transnational and transportable content lie in the privileging of hybridity as produced within global movements of the present, the emphasis on movements away from originary postcolonial locations rather than also inside them, and movements toward the former as well as newly emergent imperial centers. These selective emphases allow the postcolonial thus dislocated in the West to be mobilized as the desirable other in a largely dehistoricized context. The confusions of transnationalism and globalization, moreover, predispose us to attribute a diachronic flux and dynamism to cultures being produced by global movements of the present and toward the West—and to relegate the cultures of the postcolony and the “stationary” local to a state of synchronic stasis. The performance of translation across the intimacies of difference in Mistry’s use of the joke layers anew the very notion of difference as capable of multiple figurations across and within what we describe as “culture(s).”

It is, therefore, not merely the move from one language to another that exposes the borders and limits of comprehension, but the more complex operation of variant codes within it, making monolithic others other to themselves even as they are other to the dominant subject who consumes the text that speaks otherwise. Dinshawji’s many scatological jokes occasion pleasure for his male (Parsi) colleagues who obtain what Freud calls “fore-pleasure” “due to the momentary suspension of the expenditure of energy upon maintaining repression” (40). The sexual charge of Dinshawji’s linguistic and code switching, moreover, alert us to another sort of erotics of communication: the invitation and the teasing, and the abrupt denial that throws up an unforeseen wall. The grammar of the self-other relationship thus includes both the thrill and the danger of externality that are inherent to the text; it is the other with which we choose to engage in quest of pleasures that quicken desire without always slaking it with the fulfillment of communion. The full charge of this relationship can only be explored in a view that accords literature its productively alien status:

Sited somewhere on the ground of familiar language, Literature entices only to refuse, appears complicit only to cold-shoulder. Literature is always somewhere else: that which, being literate, we have not read or cannot read. Literature admits us to reading so that we can take the full measure of our exclusion: its effect is to display the secretive knowledge which is always possible but never possessed. (Eagleton, Criticism 165)

For Benjamin, the attentive critic must treat “texts as containers of untapped sacredness,” such that interpretive unveiling will not “destroy the secret” but will constitute a revelation that does justice to the truth (quoted in Lunn 180; Arendt 41). According to Benjamin, language itself must be seen as a “symbolic mystery” rather than as an “instrumentalized system of signs used for the purpose of communicating ‘something (other than itself),’” through the task of literary interpretation. To wish for a glossary that can exhaust the literary mode of signification and render the communicative act transparent constitutes a willful disacknowledgment of the mediateness of language, symptomizing a wish to possess language to erase otherness, to deny that its silences are as meaningful as its sounds. Moments of what Adorno calls “unintelligibility” in the text “render . . . the usual intelligibility suspect as being shallow, habitual— in short, preartistic” (Notes to Literature, II, 95).

The presence of inside jokes in the linguistic exchange instantiated in the novel are not merely playful insertions qua play alone. The meaning of Dinshawji’s tasteless jest escapes Laurie for the moment but when she discovers that Dinshawji’s reference is not to “his daughter or niece, or something like that,” she finds her own name “ruined” for her because it reminds her “of the dirty meaning” (176). Gustad, to whom she has been complaining, tries to assure her that “Laurie is a beautiful name. That will never change just because of some silly slang word” (176). In confiding to her that Dinshawji is “also very sick, though you wouldn’t think so from his jovial attitude,” Gustad tries to convince her that he did not mean anything by it. In the ensuing admonitions he ministers to Dinshawji, Gustad “minced no words, wanting them to be as deadly as the goaswalla’s knife that went bhup!” leaving his victim with a bloodless countenance (180). Following the exchange exhorting him to “stop your jokes and teasing with everyone,” we are told that “Dinshawji changed utterly” (180). It is only later that Gustad understands that Laurie was wounded by the residual moraine of Dinshawji’s intent by his jests, the meaning of which has also escaped Gustad, for his friend meant no less than to prolong his survival by his capacity for projecting a jovial self, suggesting anew the ways in which “all expression is the trace left by suffering” (Notes to Literature, I, 83). This meaning, local to Dinshawji’s own psychological needs and excessive to the reading of others, is no more transparent to Gustad than to anyone else, fluent in Parsi argot or otherwise, even though he is aware of the connection between his friend’s dwindling vitality and growing ribaldry:

Day by day, he worried more and more for Dinshawji, for his ailing appearance, the face like parchment, the eyes battling to hide pain. But he also despaired about his embarrassing ways and the demise of his self-respect. Dinshawji was acting with abandon, in the manner of a medieval plague victim who knew that since the last vestige of hope was lost, clinging to dignity and other precious luxuries affordable by the healthy was of little use. (146)

Some measure of its import and its irreducibility to transparency communicates itself to the dying man’s friend when he witnesses his transformation: “When Gustad came across him later in the day, he was surprised at how authentically Dinshawji projected his new image. Till he remembered that it seemed authentic because Dinshawji was no longer playing a role; reality, at last, had caught up with him; and Gustad felt awful for confiscating his mask” (181). As Gustad confesses this we begin to realize that the import of his jests has escaped even Dinshawji; his self-assumed mask has sustained him in ways even he cannot know till he no longer has it available. Issuing from unknown cognitive needs, this intelligence escapes even that character to whom it is “native.”

Ideational, cognitive, psychological, generational, and linguistic walls, the novel reminds us, exist in many forms. They separate and isolate; they create commonalities and separations; they protect and they hem us in; sometimes they are sacred and sometimes they keep us from seeing what is on the other side. Enclosure prevents disclosure even as it creates communities of meaning and protection from the shocks of experience. If we wished to read it as a metaphor, it would be in the sense in which Max Black presents it, as “a species of catachresis” that “plugs the gaps in the literal vocabulary” (33, 32). For I. A. Richards, metaphor is “a transaction between contexts” (95). Richards uses metaphor “to cover all cases where a word, in Johnson’s phrase, ‘gives us two ideas for one,’ where we compound different uses of the word into one, and speak of something as though it were another” (116). In Mistry’s usage we would find, if not “the forty-nine levels of meaning in the Torah” (94), as Benjamin writes in describing his hermeneutic practice, numerous and sometimes conflicting contexts ripe for multiple harvests (Briefe, vol. 2, 524).

In his references to the wall, Mistry ultimately gives us not only a metaphor for intransigence but also a space of irresolution, deferral, and endless regression. And yet this is the fragile medium in which the future must be drawn. The wall is the site for also projecting the capacity for envisioning the prospect of liberation from the tools of the “old language.” One recalls that the artist decides to include in the pantheon upon the wall a mise-en-abyme that presents “the wall featuring a painting of the wall featuring a painting of the wall featuring a . . .” (288). Mistry’s description of the mise-en-abyme is itself narrated in a regressive string of the same words, suggesting both the closure of an enclosed system and the unlikelihood of exposing its contradictions in the “old language.” This gestural moment in the text broaches the question of exterior referentiality frontally through a somewhat oblique type of parabasis that exposes the framework of the performance in progress. If the pavement artist is a figure for the artist, the wall, we may recall, is the very canvas upon which the artist works out the possibilities. If the writer’s canvas is the text itself, and language his uncertain medium, it is not only non-English words that function as a linguistic wall in the middle of the flow of communication, but language itself that is the bulwark, the barrier, the bastion, and the battlement. This, too, is part of the design in Such a Long Journey.