THE BLUE BEDSPREAD
By Raj Kamal Jha
Random House, 209 pages, $21.95
`I could begin with my name, but forget it, why waste time, it doesn’t matter in this city of twelve million names,” says the narrator at the start of “The Blue Bedspread.”
A lonely soul living in Calcutta, he’s a man who wears glasses and carries a paunch. But he could be anyone who feels alienated in a modern metropolis, a person more able to communicate with buildings than with people.
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One night, the police call to tell him his sister has died while giving birth. He’s asked to care for the baby girl overnight — until her adoptive parents pick her up. As the girl sleeps on a blue bedspread, he writes stories of the baby’s family, unfolding terrible memories of violence, abuse and sexual taboos.
He writes on one sticky Calcutta night, but the book softly moves across time, dredging up dark secrets that blend into descriptions of the city life around him.
This is the first book by Raj Kamal Jha, 33, dubbed the Indian Raymond Carver for his spare, gritty prose that sets him apart from other Indian writers who have sprung up in recent years.
Jha studied engineering in India before getting his master’s degree in journalism at the University of Southern California. He was a reporter for a California newspaper and today is an editor for the Indian Express, India’s largest national paper.
His writing wonderfully captures the tactile details of urban decay. But Jha suffuses his realism with dreamy, poetic images that subtly evoke how the truth of life “is somewhere in between” hate and love, cruelty and kindness.
Memories bleed into one another, which can sometimes be confusing. But isn’t that how the mind works? We can’t place our past into neat categories we store and retrieve at will. It’s one jumbled mess, sometimes beautiful, sometimes nightmarish.
Still, as the surprise ending of Jha’s book reveals, there is hope if we testify.
“Read this once, twice, thrice,” the narrator says to the baby. “Come back to it when you have the time. Read this carefully, then imagine it, feel it, hear the sounds in it.”
It’s a good way to enjoy this haunting book.