Rahul Vishnoi reviews Provincials by Sumana Roy (published by Aleph Book Company, 2024).
In the creative industry, print or electronic, there is no dearth of metaphorical love letters to the charm that small towns exude. It is, however, utmost curious that most of the strongest purveyors of such provincial towns come back to bathe in this lukewarm spring of nostalgia only after they have bid goodbye to their hometowns and provinces. For who will care about your small-town love if you never skipped and hopped out of the boundaries and ties that bound you?
The Elusiveness of Everyday Joy
It is only in retrospection that we find happiness. More than being fickle, it is an ordinary being, happiness. Mundane and misleading. And humble, too. Happiness never makes you realise its presence. You may be happy but you will confuse it with the mundanity, with routine. It is only when you lose this mundane existence, through misfortune or mistakes, that you look back at the past with wistfulness and miss the days you considered routine. You may never realise that you are missing the past because you were, in fact, happy in that routine. It is this cosy routine of a small town, a province, that Roy writes about.
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Sumana Roy wishes to capture a fistful of happiness that is now readily supplied by consumerism for an engineered experience. But can anything really touch the memories of one’s childhood? The excitement of many firsts of your teenage? It is this grain of happiness that Roy is searching for by diving deep into the small-town sea of nostalgia. She wants to feel it again, roll it between her fingers and feel its warmth on her palms.
Tales of Firsts and Lasting Memories
Provincials is not really about the nostalgia of her small town as much as it is about the memories of the writer’s earlier years. Aren’t we all chained to our firsts? Chained to the first house we lived in? Chained to the first school we went to? Chained to the first intimate touch of skin? Chained to the first laughter we shared with a friend on our first outing? This book is a list of many such firsts.
Split into 6 ‘P’: Postcards, Place, Pedigree, Poetic and Pran, Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy, acclaimed author of How I Became a Tree, is a love letter to all the frogs who jumped out of their proverbial wells in search of a current of a stream that would take them so far away that all they could do was miss their province, their well.
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From Siliguri to Moradabad: A Universal Journey
Although Sumana Roy writes about her town, Siliguri, 75 km from Darjeeling of Bengal in the east, it made me think about my town: dusty Moradabad of UP, a one-time forgotten constituency of legendary (and notorious?) cricketer Azharuddin, famous for its brass artefacts globally, a trade which is now a trickle of the roar it once had been. There is something about the prose of Roy. Reading it feels like the touch of a silk dupatta, your mother caressing your hair. Oh, what a joy it is to read something written by a master on top of her game!
Roy, studying in Kolkata for a better education, mentions the mushrooming of Archies gift shops that dotted the urban landscape in the early 2000s. The text that the greeting cards of Archies gallery contained flummoxed her teenage self, particularly the declaration of love with a ubiquitous phrase- ‘you are my everything.’
When my friends and I discussed it, we understood it as a more sophisticated version of “I love you.” But we didn’t use either of these sentences. Like our virginity-about which we had no idea, except that it was precious, as precious as the money our parents saved in the bank, and that it was located somewhere inside our bodies-we kept these words for the future.
– Sumana Roy, Provincials
The Language of Love and Memory
In a hilarious passage, Roy mentions receiving a love letter written in English. Her friend recounts an experience of receiving one, too, but in Bangla. “It sounded so silly,” she said. Roy writes that in the Indian provinces, the language of love had to be English. She also mentions the advice of Vatsyayana in Kamasutra, where he urged women not to speak in Sanskrit during lovemaking, probably to not scare away the suitors of inferior oratory skills.
In a passage about letters, Sumana Roy mentions how she started writing love letters for her friends and would fabricate the weather to suit the mood of the letter. Later when she read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, she learnt one talked about weather only after every other topic had been exhausted. This, she discovered, stood in contrast to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, who, having extensively read Kalidasa, effusively wrote about the rains.
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She also remembers how drab her father’s letters used to be, urging her to be a good girl. They were so generic that if they didn’t have a returning address, they could be meant for anyone. She hilariously suspected her father wanted to impress the warden, Miss Grey, with his letters that read like moral lessons to a dumb kid.
Sumana Roy equates her writing about provinces to Rabindranath Tagore’s writing, who also spent the majority of his earlier life in a small town.
Favourite Quote from Provincials by Sumana Roy
Language was everything—it was the only way to experience intimacy.
Conclusion
Sumana Roy’s Provincials bats for everything local. So, maybe the next long weekend, go visit your nani ka ghar, especially if it’s in a village.
Reflecting on your own small-town memories? Share your stories of nostalgia and the simple joys of your past in the comments below.
