Sound of Water
by Sanjay Bahadur.
Roli Books.
Pages 168. Rs 195.
Mining today finds mention only in environmental forums, with environmentalists holding forth loudly on how defacing it is and how crippling to the landscape. The human aspect, predictably, is lost in academic wrangling. A human disaster tweaks the academic posturing only to settle back into statistics in disaster management texts.
Sanjay Bahadur’s The Sound Of Water’ does not allow the reader to take refuge in such academic trivia. Bahadur with a deliberate brutality cuts through the statistics shrouding the Bagdighi colliery disaster that killed dozens of miners in 2001 and brings the reader face to face with the deadly ‘beast’ that stalks miners in the ‘tomb dark womb of the earth.’ The reader is shoved willy-nilly into the labyrinth of Mine No 3 along with the condemned and expendable five; Raimoti, Arif, Birsa, Lakhan and Sagan. Like Birsa, the reader can feel the gorge rising when faced with the ferocity of the ‘charging beast’, the black remorseless water that rushes into the mine ‘swamping life’. ‘The cold sinewy paw’ of the water alternately immobilizes and stimulates panic in both Arif and the reader. Arif and Raimoti caught in a pre-death situation struggle with the questions of ‘Who wants to die?’ and ‘Why do you want to live?’ This juxtaposition of life and death ‘I exist. I am going numb’ becomes the leit motif of the novel and claws into the consciousness of the reader. The connection between the reader and the protagonists, thus, is complete and unbroken. Against the background of this epic struggle is the tragedy of Bhibhash, the mining engineer who is lost to his family and who seeks oblivion in ‘whiskey’ and then in the dark swirling water of the inundated mine. But his sacrificial death is submerged in the political red tape that needs a ‘sacrificial lamb’ in Bhibhash. The political posturing of the Unionist Ghosh Babu and Pandeyji and the utter detachment of Karna reflect an insensitive establishment.
The narrative has a quality of wrenching sadness as it recreates the human tragedy of miners who drink themselves into oblivion to escape the encroaching soul-destroying darkness of the mines. The nightmare of death by water with its quality of utter hopelessness leaves an indelible mark. At times the overt and sometimes encroaching presence of the author does create a degree of discomfort but the consciousness of being walked along by the author on a preordained path dissipates as the narrative gathers momentum and inexorably moves towards its deadly finale. But in the final analysis, it is not Bahadur the deft craftsman, nor Bahadur the ultimate storyteller, that makes the lasting impression. It is the portrayal of the epic struggle of life and death that lifts the novel from the moorings of ordinariness. A great debut novel that transcends the limits of story telling and in doing so transforms into an archetype of life itself.
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