by Dana De Zoysa
 

(This title is the first in a series  by little-known or unpublished women writers in Asia. Because of political constraints or the economics of book publishing in the region, these women would never otherwise reach a global readership. In all cases their writing will be available via direct download from themselves in PDF format. In some cases their books may be made available on CD, but that is up to the author.)

A novel about Asia  by a long-time resident courses a different stream from the flood of self-focused personas that dominate Western fiction. Character development takes a back seat to the consequences of character interaction. The hero does not bring glory upon him(yes, him)self; he is just another time-tossed class-apparatchik determined by his birth. Redemption more often is prophetic, affecting the world around the man but not the man. 

Hence, when you read Bangladeshi author Sylvia Mortoza’s nation-coming-of-age novel The Inconsequential Politician, don’t expect The Last Hurrah with beards and saris. Her novel is about the birth of Bangladesh as seen through the life of...well, an inconsequential politician. Being a political novel, it ignores the rules of the hero narrative, for politics grinds heroes into the bone meal on which tyrants feast. In this kind of story, the stage dramatizes the story rather than the story dramatizing the stage. It is also a novel about outback realpolitik in a country few Westerners can even locate on a map, much less fathom as a political culture. We watch a nation, born under a dark moon and thunderous skies, from the perspective of a bit player shunted mercilessly from almost nothing to little more by the forces he helps support.

Ms. Mortoza’s story begins with the birth of Ummed Ali Mridha’s son in prophetic circumstances:

His one [other] surviving child out of all the babies she had delivered over the years was now ten and therefore approaching the age of marriage. ... Staring up at the stone house that had seen some better days, [Ummed Ali Mridha] was nevertheless pleased with what he saw for he had something solid to bequeath his son. He ignored the fact that none of this had been earned by the sweat of his own brow, as this house with its tall pillars and stately steps that led to a long veranda had been bequeathed him by his father. Although his sister had inherited a portion he had made certain she would not enjoy it. He felt no pang of remorse as he recalled how he had sent for her husband and persuaded him to tell her to sell it. His brother-in-law had expressed no surprise at this demand because it was according to the custom of the day, for no one wanted to share his property with a woman who ‘belonged’ to another family as it might ultimately go into the hands of these ‘outsiders’.

No melting pot, this. It more resembles a reef populated by an eye-tingling array of colors and habitats, some predatory, most defensive, colony upon colony each snapping at its share of the barely sufficient nutrients. The most powerful class, the zaminders  (local landlords), ruled with an iron plow, just as local religious potentates ruled with an iron alms bowl. Ms. Mortoza paints the effects well:

When Ahmed Ali Mridha first saw the light of day that year of 1887, the house and its surrounding village of Bahawalpur was just an insignificant dot on the map and known to few. A small village as villages go, even for rural Bengal, it was situated in that part of the country that was well known for its backwardness. Although the village could not make any claim to any glory, and although the house was admittedly starting to crumble, the reason Ummed Ali Mridha was proud of it was because it not only gave him prestige and standing in the community, it was made from stone. Few Muslims were able to live in a house such as this. In the first place they could not afford it, and in the second, the Hindu landlords would not have allowed it but as this particular house had been a gift from the Hindu king, there was nothing any Hindu could do to turn him out, no matter how powerful.

Sorry. This is Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi Ahmed Ali is as much tossed as tossing, ambivalent as indecisive, wrong as often as right, ignorant how hectored he is by being forever a day behind the times. Ms. Mortoza paints a portrait of how a man with ideals of reforming politics fails not because of the high rate of hypocrisy in the House of Autocracy—he sees that only too clearly—but because he fails to see that reform must start from within. 

A Cadmean quality to his life emerges from Ms. Mortoza’s deft pen, a victory won at as great a cost to the victor as to the vanquished. For, Ahmed Ali has the dignity of one who knows deep in his core that he is a day late and an idea short, yet refuses to be defeated. His real face is seen in Ms. Mortoza’s sketchpad renderings--a face confused by the huge panoply of tradition entangling his ability to plumb causal depths. At the age most men call their prime, one of Ahmed Ali’s colleagues tells him bluntly, “I think you have been away from mainstream politics for far too long.” 

And yet he still tries to change his times:

Ahmed Ali stopped to open his outsize umbrella. He was a short man and beneath the umbrella he looked even shorter but for all that he was still an imposing figure in his black sherwani—a long black coat that was the hallmark of the Muslim League and the cap, which had become known as a Jinnah cap. His long Father Christmas type beard had already turned white but he did not colour it with ‘mendhi’ as others did. All these thoughts were making him feel weary. He wanted to return to his village. He really must find a way to get out of this job. His thoughts flew to his people. They were really far too simple. This could be their undoing. He had tried so hard to make them politically aware, but it had all been of no use. No use at all. They were mainly of peasant stock and dedicated to their rice crop and their beloved jute. Still for all that, they were not fools. It had taken them only a short time to realise the cost they had paid, for their freedom had been high. Very high indeed! He thought it was only a matter of time before they rebelled and when they did, he wanted to be by their side so that they did not do anything foolish.

Read this book not because you want some great transport of the word, a cake of lyric under a frosting of metaphor, but because you want to know about a nation, a people, a way of life, a religion, an era...and a man. And a man he is, warts and all—“He smiled the smile he reserved especially for [his wife] when he thought she was being especially stupid.” Never once in his 218-page life does Ahmed address his wife by her name—one of the effects of an arranged  marriage, even today. Yet he and his wife grow to love each other not because of emotional bonding but because they have been through a lot and know their partner is so reliable that their weaknesses are bravery built of trust. Theirs is the Asian love that occurs not when a couple looks into each other’s eyes, but when they look into the eyes of their children.

"Like the rickety gate announcing visitors with a shrill shriek” in one of Ms. Mortoza’s memorable descriptions, a culture is a collection of winds blowing in basically the same direction and making basically the same squeak. A wind not of genes, but of memes. Ideas, behaviors, styles, usages. Spread person to person via the urge to embellish. Ms. Mortoza’s novel is  about story passed into lore, lore into tale, tale into legend, legend into myth--the pattern of human- to-deity stories all over the world, whose collective amnesia does not obliterate but prefers to blur the truth. The result is that one becomes so engulfed in one’s own civilization and history that it is not merely all one knows, but all one can know.

(Dana De Zoysa has a passion for developing-country authors. He commutes between Bombay and his writer’s paradise in Mirissa, Sri Lanka. He can be reached at [email protected].)