A N I TA D E S A I

The Zigzag Way Dense with evocative imagery. — T H E G U A R D I A N

Also by Anita Desai e Artist of Disappearance Diamond Dust and Other Stories Fasting, Feasting Scholar and Gypsy Journey to Ithaca Baumgartner’s Bombay In Custody e Village by the Sea Clear Light of Day Games at Twilight and Other Stories Fire on the Mountain Where Shall We Go is Summer? e Peacock Garden Bye-Bye, Blackbird Voices in the City Cry, the Peacock

The Zigzag Way A N I TA D E S A I

PENGUIN BOOKS USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com Published by Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd 4th Floor, Capital Tower 1, MG Road, Gurugram 122 002, Haryana, India

First published by Random House India 2008 This edition published in Penguin Books by Penguin Random House India 2021 Copyright © Anita Desai 2004 Introduction copyright © Abraham Verghese 2009 First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Chatto & Windus All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 ISBN 9788184000764 For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only Printed at Replika Press Pvt. Ltd, India

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

Paper from responsible sources

To Kiran, with thanks for her companionship

INTRODUCTION

When I first arrived in El Paso, Texas, I discovered that the hospital where I worked was right next to a cemetery, which in turn adjoined a dive called the Lucky Café. e cemetery was small, threatening to spill onto the sidewalk, only a chain link fence holding back the headstones as I walked by each day. One November morning, I was surprised to see the cemetery bustling, a fiesta of sorts; families clustered around the graves, cleaning them, decorating them with colorful marigolds. I saw toys and candy stacked on a child’s grave, and corn and a bottle of tequila on an adult’s headstone. I found out later that this was Dia de los Muertos: e Day of the Dead. I’d never seen this kind of acknowledgment of the spirit life in the parts of North America where I’d lived, though I had seen it in Africa and India. Over the years, I came to associate November with this ritual, which announced also that anksgiving was around the corner. A cold wind would be blowing in from the Chihuahua desert and across the Rio Grande, and snow would appear from over the Franklin Mountains. Perched there on the border, I had a sense that this part of the country would always be more Mexico than it would be America, disinclined to change. vii

ere was nothing about this world that I could see intersecting with the territory of Anita Desai; after all, she lived and taught at M.I.T. in Boston, and at Cambridge in England. I had come to Desai’s novels out of order, first with Baumgartner’s Bombay, still my favorite. I’d been mesmerized by the tight, precise prose, so quietly confident in itself, the details precisely observed, evoking houses and crepuscular (a Desai adjective that I have borrowed) spaces that enclosed a solitude only she could describe. I was hooked. I read the novels that preceded and followed Baumgartner’s Bombay. But nothing prepared me for e Zigzag Way when it arrived in 2004. e novel was set in Mexico, with not an Indian character in sight. She had previously written in Bye-Bye, Blackbird about Indians facing the reality of an England that did not want them; she had looked at foreigners coming to India in search of enlightenment in Journey to Ithaca, and of course the marvelous isolation of a German Jew stuck in Bombay in Baumgartner’s Bombay. But with e Zigzag Way, she had set her story in my backyard! I read eagerly, but with apprehension, hoping that she had not over reached. I confess I was ready to be critical, because I felt possessive about a culture that I had adopted, married into, and thought I grasped. What I found out was how little I really knew; in reading Desai, I saw and understood Mexico anew. It was a wonderful and humbling lesson to see a master create a sense of place, a sense of destiny wrapped around geography, a sense of a nation still defining its nationhood. e notion of Dia de los Muertos, the dead incarnate at least for that day, is central to e Zigzag Way, critical to its denouement. e story of a young American, viii

Eric, seeking to learn more about his grandfather, who he knows made an improbable journey from Cornwall, England to the silver mines of Mexico, is the means by which Desai approaches Mexico, not to understand it (because Mexico is beyond understanding, most of all to its own citizens), but to lay out its conflicting parts: the politics of identity, the irony of its warring selves, its stark physical beauty, its mingling of the secular and spiritual into quotidian rituals, the bastardizing and deboning of indigenous culture to leave a hollow shell, and the parallel parody of a class posturing as European, claiming a Europe that disowned it long ago e word ‘zigzag’ appears exactly twice in the book, in reference to the path the miners with their heavy loads had to take, to descend and ascend from the bowels of the earth from which the ore must be extracted: ‘ey walk in a zigzag direction because they have found from long experience that their respiration is less impeded when they traverse obliquely the current of air which enters the pits from without.’ Eric’s zigzag journey forms the skeleton of the narrative, and on those bones are draped other stories, like that of Dona Vera. She is an unforgettable character, a woman who finds the meaning that has eluded her in her life, and also seals her escape from her husband by becoming the unlikely champion of the Huichol Indians. Academics and visitors throng to her hacienda where she presides at the dinner table; seated at the far end of the table are three Huichol Indians, tricked up in elaborate native costume, ignored by the other diners, on display to lend ‘authenticity’ to her soirees. e omniscient narrator’s point of view is Eric’s, then Dona Vera’s (in flashing back to the gold-digging skills ix

that allowed her to escape Europe and the impending holocaust by snaring and marrying Roderigo, the heir to a mining fortune), and then that of Eric’s grandmother, the unfortunate Cornish woman, a miner’s wife, trying to make a go of it in Mexico, only to watch helplessly as the mines and the mining company fall in the revolution that unseats President Porfirio Diaz. What comes across is Desai’s great sympathy for all the characters, especially those who at first blush seem less likable; what comes across also is gentle instruction, wisdom about the human condition, which, whether in Delhi or Bombay, or a silver mine in Mexico, is endlessly instructive. In describing Dona Vera’s first glimpse of her future husband, Roderigo, at a hotel where she had gone to see ‘if one familiar face could be found’, she instead finds Roderigo: ‘large, foolish, fumbling, but all fresh linen, gleaming leather and the smell of bay rum. An outsider, a foreigner, presenting an opening to a foreign world. Not that she had ever craved one before, or had any idea of what it might be—the places and people he named were unknown to her—but compelling for precisely that reason.’ Desai never imposes these observations upon readers. What makes e Zigzag Way so enjoyable is her faith in us, her confidence that our imagination will paint just the right images and details so that the story will unfold evoking all that is magnificent about Mexico and its people. Of Eric’s arrival in the interior of Mexico after his long journey, she writes, ‘. . . he thought of the days and nights he had spent on the train, slowly, sadly rattling over the lonely plains, struggling to achieve the horizon where hills rose to break the oppressive flatness only to find them mysteriously receding and remaining x

elusive, and then the hours on the bus through the valley with its strange twisted forms of cacti rising out of the volcanic rubble like stakes rising from secret graves.’ Having finally arrived, Eric begins to fear that the town he is seeking does not exist: ‘He thought of himself cutting the figure of a timid pilgrim who sinks down in despair again and again along the way, needing to be coaxed and assisted into rising and going on, and avoided looking at himself in the tin-framed mirror as he rubbed his hair dry.’ ese winding sentences with their small, telling details—‘volcanic rubble’, ‘the tinframed mirror’, ‘fresh linen, gleaming leather and the smell of bay rum’—contain an entire universe. Desai knows that in Eric’s story we will see ourselves, we will recognize the kinds of self-delusions that allow us to go on, the undignified rituals we need to salvage dignity. is is why e Zigzag Way is so powerful. Eric’s quest is ultimately a search for meaning, a voyage of inner exploration. By finding his place in the chain of history, by finding the narrative of his ancestors, he can pick up the thread of his own life and go on with renewed faith. It is just how I felt after putting the book down—a renewal of faith. What more can a writer give you than that? Abraham Verghese, Stanford, 2009.

xi

After half an hour’s silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed:

‘What agreeable people one runs across in queer, out-of-the-way places!’ ‘Who on earth are you thinking of now?’ I enquired. ‘Why, I was thinking of us!’ he placidly replied, and went on with his reading. Charles Macomb Flandreu, Viva Mexico!, 1908

PART I:

Eric Arrives

1

PART II:

Vera Stays

61

PART III: Betty Departs

117

PART IV: La Noche de los Muertos

161

Part I Eric Arrives e ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past.

Eric is a buttoned-down Boston boy, a misfit in his family of hearty fisher folk. Uncertain he will ever complete the book on immigration he has been funded to write, he impetuously decides to follow his bossy girlfriend to Mexico. There, he is seduced by the pageantry of this colourful new country and its old-world charm, and stumbles on an astonishing discovery — his grandfather was one of the Cornish miners who worked the local mines more than a hundred years ago, and once had another wife. Soon, Eric will find himself abandoning his own tentative future project in search of his family’s other lives. The Zigzag Way is the story of twentieth-century Mexico, through civil unrest and personal calamity; of the exploitation of the Mexican Indians, and their dubious saviours, such as the formidable Doñavera, widow of a mining baron, and Eric’s own grandmother, a young Cornish girl whose grave lies in a hillside cemetery. And in unravelling their dark, often violent, histories on the día de los Muertos, the day locals celebrate and remember their dead, Eric comes face to face with his own story, its past and present; even, the afterlife. Haunting and luminous, the zigzag way is a magical novel of strange, elegiac beauty.

Fiction

Cover design by Gaurav Gupta Cover photograph by Roberto Carlos Roman Don on Unsplash

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