An outsider's search for home

Poet and translator Maithreyi Karnoor's debut novel shines a gentle light on sexuality, motherhood, mental health and marital abuse, among other things.

A giant baobab tree in a Goan village forms the backdrop for ‘Sylvia-Distant Avuncular Ends'. Cajetan Pereira comes back to Goa looking to live close to this tree, in a bid to relive his own childhood in distant Tanzania. And he becomes ‘bhaubaab’ (bhau-brother; baab-sir) to the people around him.

In the ever-looming presence of the baobab, Sylvia comes to meet ‘bhaubaab’. There is a cast of characters around the two who not only tell us more about Sylvia and bhaubaab, but also shine a light; never overtly, on the realities of our time and the social, cultural and political contexts of their immediate milieu. The novel examines complex interpersonal relationships, caste, the subaltern, sexuality, food taboos and ‘morality’ around it, motherhood, mental health and marital abuse.

‘Sylvia: Distant Avuncular Ends’ is the debut novel of poet and translator Maithreyi Karnoor. Maithreyi has won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati Prize for translation from Kannada to English. She translated Sahitya Akademi Award-winning work, Shrinivas Vaidya’s ‘Halla Bantu Halla’, into English (‘A Handful of Sesame’). She was shortlisted for the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and twice for the Montreal International Poetry Prize.

An intimate reading

Growing up in her grandparents’ home in Mudhol, North Karnataka, shaped her love for reading and literature. So, how did ‘Sylvia..’ come about, we ask her. “It’s not as if I set out to write this novel. Although it sounds like a cliche, the book did write itself. I was walking on a street in Goa and suddenly the word “baab” jumped at me. I had earlier read about the baobab tree in Savanur and suddenly the two came together — ‘bhaubaab’ — a key character of the book — and the rest, followed.” Maithreyi explains that this is a deeply personal work, and every character has something of her. “I have experienced mental health issues, difficult relationships and abuse and these are often not talked about,” Maithreyi says, adding that she channelised all these into her debut novel.

Did her work as a translator influence her writing process? Maithreyi explains that the process of translation involves an intimate reading of a text; “you are recreating the emotions of the text and not just finding equivalents,” she observes. This process has certainly helped her with her fiction writing as well.

As one reads 'Sylvia...', one can’t but help notice the overarching “outsider” theme. There is ‘bhaubaab’ who is searching for the meaning of ‘home’, there’s Lakshminarayan Shetty who goes to Bengaluru to try his hand at acting, there’s Sylvia who never feels at home with her peer group, there’s Bhagirati who grapples with the question of motherhood and choice, there’s Shaila who’s quit her cushy IT job and her husband Sujeeth Jacob, who also try to make sense of caste and power hierarchies in their own way. All the characters are in some sense, ‘outsiders’. The baobab is an outsider too, “brought as seed across the seas to a new peninsula.”

Maithreyi says that she herself has, at various points in her life, felt outside of her peer group; not belonging in college (she has an engineering degree). “I grew up feeling secure and taken care of, but have experienced the feeling of not fitting in, studying for my engineering degree, for example,” she says, laughing.

Agency and oppression

As you are drawn into the seemingly disconnected episodes in the novel, you note that Sylvia is never in the spotlight; you know her through the many people who she meets at different points in her life. “This was a conscious decision; as I started writing, Sylvia developed into a real person and I almost felt like I was a voyeur in her life and wanted to give her space,” Maithreyi explains. “We are peripheral characters in other people’s lives,” she adds, explaining why she kept Sylvia distant from the action.

Bhagirati and Reshma are two characters that Maithreyi uses to examine questions of agency and oppression. “I wanted to explore the subaltern perspective and was inspired by the episode of Shantanu and Ganga,” she notes. Shantanu, the King of Hastinapura marries Ganga and later Satyavati, the fisherwoman, in the Mahabharata. Maithreyi uses evocative verse to speak of Bhagirati — “Bathed in my waters my child will be pure/His place in the next world will be secure/Be it sedition or stealing a cow/of all of his sins, he will be cured.”

‘Sylvia..’ is also a comment on the times we live in, never overtly but as a hint here, a hint there. Take, for instance, the tale of ‘rajana kiwi katthe kiwi’ (the king who grew donkey’s ears), which someone growing up in Karnataka may identify with. Or the making of a godman, the ways of the Kannada film industry, small landholders driving around in SUVs all of a sudden, as their land is bought over for infrastructure projects.

This debut novel has no dearth of layers. “I am a poet foremost and writing poetry has helped me bring a sense of understatement,” Maithreyi explains. Like the baobab, also known as the upside-down tree, the structure of ‘Sylvia: Distant Avuncular Ends’ is branched out, open for interpretation. “That’s exactly how I intended it to be,” says Maithreyi.