Sleeping on Jupiter

THE STRIKING OPENING section in Anuradha Roy's Booker-longlisted novel "Sleeping on Jupiter"is a model of economy. In brisk, almost breakneck strokes, Roy depicts the violence of a war that suddenly engulfs the citrus-scented birthplace of its central character, Nomi, brutally claiming her father, then her brother and mother, and leaving Nomi to be consigned by boat to an unknown future. The next section is even more arresting. Three older ladies strike up a conversation with a young woman on a train from Kolkata, then watch in horror as she tries to escape the lustful advances of two men on the platform outside at a stop. Their last glimpse, of one of the men closing in as the train pulls away, conjures all the ghastly headlines of violent sexual assault against women in India. The rest of this compulsively readable novel follows a series of intersecting stories set in the train's destination of Jarmuli, a fictional temple town on the Bay of Bengal. The young woman is Nomi, who after growing up as an adopted child in Norway has returned (under cover of a documentary assignment) to look for the ashram where the boat deposited her many years ago. Perhaps this will help her achieve closure with the scarring abuse she suffered at the hands of its pedophile leader, Guruji. The seniors have their own demon - age - which one of them, Latika, fights with burgundy-dyed hair and another accepts by serenely wading toward dementia. The third has a son caught up in a privileged-class existentialist funk, who, unbeknown to her, is also visiting Jarmuli at the same time. Rounding out the socioeconomic scale are Badal, the temple guide, who has developed an all-consuming crush on the tea boy Raghu, and Raghu's employer, the enigmatic tea seller, who may or may not be a figure from Nomi's past. The book deftly captures an India where women encounter harassment at every turn, and a female teacher might appear with mysterious wounds and lips "like two swollen rubber chilies" in class one day. "If you fish a woman out of the water you can lay her or sell her or set her to work," a fisherman declares, summing up a view too much of the country's population still shares. Roy's central theme is oppression, and the opportunistic violence that accompanies it, aimed not just at women, but anyone vulnerable - particularly children. Nomi and her fellow orphans are subjected to such extreme atrocities that the author spaces them out, in escalating doses. Raghu and Badal bond over the merciless thrashings each has endured; even a stray dog is beaten with a cricket bat until it is "a mess of broken bones held together by bloodied fur." But Roy's Jarmuli is also evocative of love and beauty and deep longing, of memories of emerald paddies and guava trees that float across the beach in the tea seller's song. Possibilities for intimacy are always kindling - be it the future Badal imagines with Raghu or the flirtation Latika indulges in with her driver - and though these must eventually die, they ward off the darkness of past disappointments at least temporarily. One of the pleasures of this book is Roy's prose. A saucepan is "leathery with old layers of burnt grease," underpants are "gray beyond the powers of detergent," the day's heat is described as "gathering ferocity somewhere on the horizon." A scene where Badal steals a kiss from Raghu is written with such lyrical precision that it leaves one breathless, able to discern the "salt and sea and rust" Badal tastes on the boy's lips. OUT OF A host of complex, skillfully realized characters, Badal stands out in particular. By making him an enormously sympathetic foil to Guruji, possessed of all the humanity and self-doubt the god-man isn't, Roy forces us to ponder an uncomfortable parallel. Nomi and Raghu have "two halves of the same face" - yet, Raghu would clearly be better off under Badal's loving patronage than Nomi was under Guruji, with more prospects possible than those of a frequently thrashed tea boy. Does that make his exploitation defensible? What if this is the best future a developing country like India is able - or willing - to offer him ? The book is not without flaws. Sometimes, Roy allows herself to be overwhelmed by symbolism: Nomi sees "foaming blood" in the sea, then is blinded by "sheets of falling blood" in her hotel, then claims "the juice inside poured out in red spurts" from a melon at breakfast the next morning. (Note to tourists: Beware the notorious spurting melons of Jarmuli!) More perplexing are omissions in the narrative, presumably in deference to conciseness. For instance, after raising reader anxiety and emotional engagement to a fever pitch at the end of the book's second section, there is no further mention of the thug chasing Nomi - we must make do with the bland information that she boarded the train. In Jarmuli, Nomi neither follows up on newspaper articles about a denounced Guruji, nor tries to track a beloved fellow orphan through formal means - she is content to root around for sentimental artifacts in the ruins of the ashram instead. And then there are the coincidences - perhaps forgivable, since there are so many unruly strands to tie together. But the author seems to get a bit addicted to them. These quibbles fade in the radiance of Roy's accomplishment. The world she creates is ambitiously imagined, her characters possessed of an inner verity. They remind us how strongly our identities are forged by our experiences, how difficult it is to counter the gravitational pull of our own lives and escape to new realms. MANIL SURI is the author of "The City of Devi." He is working on a book that combines fiction with mathematics.