“The Elsewhereans” by Jeet Thayil - A review
Mohan Gulrajani
“The Elsewhereans” by Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil
A collage of epigraphs makes up the first few pages of The Elsewhereans. Each subsequent chapter is heralded by a series of locations, dates, photographs, and quotes—some perhaps falsified. Jeet Thayil’s newest work is exactly what its subtitle—“A Documentary Novel”—claims: a partially-fictional documentation of Thayil’s family history, recorded scrapbook-style in bits and pieces. Dedicated to his late mother, who passed away earlier this year, The Elsewhereans reads as an attempt to capture forever the spirits and lives of his family in a single fluid location, to bind them in the pages of a novel’s created home.
The Elsewhereans begins with the marriage of Thayil’s parents, George and Ammu, and follows them in the third person through their first apartment in Bombay and through Ammu’s difficult pregnancy. Their son is referred to solely as “the son”, at least until he grows up and takes over portions of the narrative with his first-person perspective. This son is Thayil himself, and he seems to have inherited his parents’ addiction to travelling—he traces his father George’s footsteps through Hong Kong and Vietnam. These semi-autobiographical chapters are woven with others in third person that follow the rest of Thayil’s family—the perspectives of his cousin Chachiamma and aunt Uma are two among many such digressions—as they move about from city to city within India, and from country to country outside of India.
Thayil describes death as returning to a river.
The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel, Jeet Thayil
There’s a death in the first chapter, and the book ends with a different death. Early in the novel, Thomas, Thayil’s grandfather, remembers a series of things on his deathbed:
… the simple wooden cross in the main room of the house, their separate beds, Chachiamma’s face waiting for him on the other side of time, and he watches the river seep into the floor of the hospital room, green water thick with weeds, mud, river detritus, his bed quickly submerged, the room filling with murky light, quickly completely submerged, and at the spot where the window was, a square of radiance glows ever brighter, glows until it fills his sight and everything is green.
And then Thomas passes away. In the last chapter, Ammu, Thayil’s mother, is on her deathbed:
… though in truth, by the time he returns she has already gone, towards the fire, the electric glow, ashen light he will carry to the house where she, and he, were born, twenty-five years apart, to immerse her in the river that begins this story, the river that becomes sea that becomes ocean, and for all the years of his life when he sees water, he will think, she’s here.
Thayil describes death as returning to a river, most likely the same river that runs by their family home, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. This river, this body of water, is now the home of Ammu and Thomas, as well as of other family members. In life, however, Thayil’s family has moved around so much that Kerala and its flowing water no longer feels like home; Thayil comments that his parents have “lived Elsewhere too long: they’ve become Elsewhereans.” Ammu and George suddenly felt as alien in Kerala as they did in Bombay, in Hong Kong, and in Bangalore. Outside Kerala, Thayil’s family calls Kerala home. Inside Kerala, their home is some other country or city. For Thayil’s family, home is a constantly shifting thing, just out of reach, always elsewhere. Metaphorically, this fluid home is a river of sorts, though less clearly defined than Thayil’s description of death. Kerala is their home, Hong Kong is their home, and Bangalore is their home—all of these things are both true and false; the truth shifts.
Reality in The Elsewhereans changes just as much as location.
Prior to the first chapter of The Elsewhereans, Thayil reminds us that this book is a novel, not an autobiography.
The real names and photographs in these pages are fictions.
The fictional names and events are documentary.
The truth, as we know, lies in between.
Reality in The Elsewhereans changes just as much as location. The cities traversed in The Elsewhereans range from Hanoi to Hong Kong and from Berlin to Bangalore, but as Thayil describes these cities in quick succession, all of them blend together—it’s hard to remember when the narrative takes place in Hong Kong and when it takes place in Bombay, for example. There are few signposts that signify a change in location, and nothing at all signifies a change in truth—nothing distinguishes a fictional moment from a real part of Thayil’s family history.
As a result, the whole novel seems to run its course in some broad, worldwide city, called “home” with all its shifting definitions, located “elsewhere”. Thayil’s narrative scrapbooking in The Elsewhereans—his insertion of photographs and documents; his quick jumps between time and place—when presented alongside his superb use of the present tense, creates a separate world, a constantly moving home within which his family will always reside. The river running through Kerala contains the spirits of Ammu and Thomas after their deaths, but the flowing narrative of Thayil’s novel contains their spirits during life.
Ria Dhull is an artist and collector based in NYC. Her writing also appears in Spectrum Culture.
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/the-elsewhereans-by-jeet-thayil/
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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