Daribha Lyndem’s debut Name Place Animal Thing, which has been shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature, 2021, is described by its publisher Zubaan as a novella that “meanders through ages, lives and places. The interconnected stories build on each other to cover the breadth of a childhood, and move into the precarious awareness of adulthood.” Meander, it certainly does.
Using individual narratives to stitch a broader one on a city or a place is not a new literary style, but it is one that demands unequivocally good craft. Set in Shillong, it is only D, the narrator of Name Place Animal Thing, who connects the stories and the characters around her, a device that keeps the book from being slotted as a short story collection.
Through most of its length, it does not have a plot or a thematic core for its readers. Rather, much like the oft-played school game of using letters by turn to draw up the names, places, animals and things, Lyndem ends up sketching mere character briefs of the people that D deems important for her readers: a Hindi School teacher, a house staff member, a neighbour, a schoolfriend.
Did we need a narrator?
Because Shillong is the geographical location of the characters, you get what every other book set around the town talks about – the hostility against non tribals that brings in intimidation and violence, but in this book particularly, nothing much about why this has come to be. The more you dwell on the “stories”, the more it strikes you that they would have worked on their own, without D as the narrator, and in a much better way perhaps, for her presence is a distraction and brings no additional nuance.
D as a narrator reminded me in parts of the voice accompanying a wheel turning every time an episode of the BR Chopra’s TV serial Mahabharat would begin with the words “mein samay hoon” (I am time), telling you something profound and vanishing as the episode unfolded, promptly forgotten till the next time the wheel turned.
This narrator brings in bits and pieces of the lives of a few people around her and in doing so, we get a glimpse of their predicaments and conflicts, but never their relevance to the narrative – except a haze of nostalgia that recollections often are. In every chapter, D starts with one character and through him or her, one tiny aspect of Shillong is revealed but then the story gets clouded with emotions or drama, never building on what has been established earlier.
With the author taking away a coherent plot structure from the overall narrative, the reader is none the wiser of who D the person is now, after the sum of her experiences from her associations to the characters she talks about, and what drives D to tell us these stories, much less of why. And because of this D comes across as rambling, never sure of her footing.
Selective account
I have some bad news for everyone thinking that this book is about “growing up in the troubled times of insurgency in the North East”. The narratives do not move beyond some pockets of Shillong, and though there is a sprinkling of characters who are Assamese, Bengali, Nepali etc, this is purely a Khasi world that Lyndem positions her narrator in.
The chapter on a restaurant by a Chinese immigrant that goes on to talk about the insurgency movement in the state in the 1980s and 1990s makes no effort to make her narrator to wonder why or state why the insurgency movement started in the first place, though it does mention its death knell soon enough.
The socio political mood jumps then to the mid-2000s with “There were small clashes that still took place now and then. One time I saw two boys harass a Bengali man driving a Tata Nano”, with no context. Was this a one off incident? Were the said boys juveniles involved in other incidences of intimidation, or even violence towards Khasis and non tribals? Name Place Animal Thing becomes a selective author’s account of Shillong and its people, akin to the film Axone that many outside the region talked about as representing “North East” India’s realities.
It was left to people from the region to point out how the film presented a structural issue like the racist attitude faced across India as something that comes because “we don’t try being Indian enough”. Lyndem introduces a similar tone when she has D talking about the plight of a Nepali man boxed in a “Bahadur did not look like us or speak like us” sentiment, missing out the point that, to a mainlander, a snub nose and slanted eyes mean you are not an Indian.
Lyndem positions racism only within the confines of the Khasi sociocultural ecosystem when she writes about the Chinese immigrant or the Nepali neighbour on the basis of the two being non-tribal, failing to point out that in the case of the former, it was a thriving business that invites “demands” from insurgent groups, something that well-to-do natives also faced with equally violent outcomes.
In the case of the Nepali neighbour, it was the low socio economic background that isolated him from the more well-off Khasis around him, which eventually made him leave the town. When over the course of the chapters we learn that D makes it to Delhi to go to university, all she has to say to her house staff about the city when she gets home is “how alien it was to Shillong”, a conveniently vague and cagey way of avoiding the racism factor.
The ‘north east’ question
Name Place Animal Thing works in part when read as a young girl’s coming of age: the dread for mathematics, a teacher who stands out over others, the fear and thrill associated with sexual awareness and bodily changes, the fear of examinations, the dread of stories and places that have anything to do with the dead, and growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. All of this makes for an enjoyable read, but the uneven writing and skirting around thematic areas keeps it short of being a compelling book that deserves to be read.
The appeal of Name Place Animal Thing to readers across the country indicates in part a growing interest to writing from “the North East” but equally reflects how this misnomer has effectively flattened the differences within an entire region not just geographically, but also, in terms of diverse ethnicities, political aspirations, cultures and history. It is critical to realise that marketing writings from so many different states on a non-existent homogenous identity of “the North East’ will only serve to pitch exotica or play the diversity card. Good writing does not need props and definitely not the wrong one.
A work of fiction is not necessarily meant to portray every lived experience and facts about a place, but when it is pitched as representing a small town located in a region largely beset by armed and other forms of political conflict, then there needs to be an equal readiness in accepting that Name Place Animal Thing does not do justice on this count. Not at all.
Chitra Ahanthem is former editor of Imphal Free Press, a newspaper published in Manipur. She is also a Manipuri-to-English translator.
Name Place Animal Thing, Daribha Lyndem, Zubaan.