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In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day.
During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He doesn't know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the baby someday might.
Raj Kamal Jha's ethereal, poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Sam Schwabe
reviewed The blue bedspread on August 18, 2009
The blue bedspread
There is the story line, and then there is the prose style. Both might, at first reading, bring to mind Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Here, though, point of view and tone is subdued. Evasion and narrative elision is maintained throughout The Blue Bedspread, which might leave some readers asking for more (clarification).
Unlike The God of Small Things, where the loose ends come together in the end, The Blue Bedspread does not propose a unified tale. In this sense, it is realistic and honest. The "stories" narrated here cannot evoke a coherent whole, a complete fictive universe - for memory, especially that of the narrator, is fleeting.
The painful past is best kept forgotten, and yet, the Brother feels a duty to recall as much as he can for the Sister's baby he is addressing. The past, the truth, comes back to him slowly, and is revealed to us gradually, triggered by images, words, sensations, all of which come throughout the duration of a single night, as he remains awake recalling, repeating, evaluating, transcribing.
Like the symbol of the blue bedspread, memory has become eroded by time, use, and washing. Yet there exists a persistent nostalgia for the love, hope and comfort enmeshed in the tattered and discolored fabric of the bedspread.
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