“THIS
IS WHY YOU READ FICTION AT ALL” MINDREADING IN ANURADHA ROY’S THE EARTHSPINNER
Professor Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar,
Department of Humanities, UIT, RGPV, vinita.dhondiyal@gmail.com, 9425004577
Abstract
This
paper looks at Anuradha Roy’s The Earthspinnerthrough the prism of the
cognitive act of mind reading. The novel is presented to us through a mixture
of modes of narration, including journal entries, letters and third person
narration The author allows us the illusion of peeping into the minds of the
central characters and also captures the dynamics of their attempting to read
each other’s minds. The potential for misinterpretation and misunderstanding
make this enterprise fraught with anxiety and excitement. Through our understanding of what the author
chooses to tell and what she chooses to withhold, we also attempt to read the
mind of the writer. In the ultimate analysis this novel nudges us to try to
read into our own minds as well. This is what justifies its categorization as
literary fiction.
Keywords: Mind reading.
Cognitive rewards. Fictional Minds. Third person narrative voice.
Why do we read fiction? What pleasure
does it provide us?
“Every once in a great
while, a novel comes along to remind you why you rummage through shelves in the
first place. Why you peck like a magpie past the bright glitter of publishers’
promises. Why you read.”[i]
This stunningly effusive
review of Anuradha Roy’s first novel was published in the Washington Post. This paper contends that it
is the range, variety and reliability of the fictional minds of people who
inhabit her books that make Anuradha an extraordinary storyteller. It is
precisely the sheer scale of input required of readers in constructing the
minds of characters that make The Earthspinnersuch an engrossing read
Liza Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction.Theory of Mind and the
Novel explores the relation between mind reading and the pleasure of
reading fiction:
“Thus we engage in mind-reading when we
ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable
action (e.g., we see her reaching for a glass of water and assume that she is
thirsty); when we interpret our own feelings based on our proprioceptive
awareness (e.g., our heart skips a beat when a certain person enters the room and
we realize that we might have been attracted to him or her all along); when we
intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description (e.g., a
friend tells us that she feels sad and happy at the same time, and we believe
that we know what she means); when we compose an essay, a lecture, a movie, a
song, a novel, or an instruction for an electrical appliance and try to imagine
how this or that segment of our target audience will respond to it; when we
negotiate a multilayered social situation (e.g., a friend tells us in front of
his boss that he would love to work on the new project, but we have our own
reasons to believe that he is lying and hence try to turn the conversation so
that the boss, who, we think, may suspect that he is lying, would not make him
work on that project and yet would not think that he didn't really want to);
and so forth. Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we
construct and navigate our social environment, incorrect though our
attributions frequently are.”[ii]
In other words, the
pleasure afforded by a fictional narrative owes much to the excitement and the
exasperation of mind reading. Mind reading is the ability to discern the
thoughts of another. It is an adaptive response to
increasingly complex primate social interaction[iii]
Mind reading is an
evolved cognitive capacity which enables our interaction with each other and
our ability to make sense of fiction. The cognitive rewards of reading fiction
are aligned with the cognitive rewards of a leap in imagination which allows us
to “try on” mental states potentially available to us but differing from our own.
In Zunshine’s words: “It is possible, then, that certain cultural artifacts,
such as novels, test the functioning of our cognitive adaptations for
mind-reading while keeping us pleasantly aware that the "test" is
proceeding quite smoothly.” (pg.19). One of the pleasures of reading is being
told how a variety of fictional people are thinking. The novelist can then
experiment with our readiness to posit a mind where we observe behavior as they
balance the amount of interpretation of the character’s mental state that they
themselves provide with what they expect us to infer on our own.
It is a point also made by Alan
Palmer in Fictional Minds:
“My thesis is a
fundamental one: narrative fiction is, in essence, the presentation of
fictional mental functioning. I state my thesis here in this bald, stark manner
for purposes of clarity. The full implications of it will emerge later on. If I
am right, then it follows that the study of the novel is the study of fictional
mental functioning and also that the task of theorists is to make explicit the
various means by which this phenomenon is studied and analyzed. This is another
way of making the point made earlier that the study of fictional minds should
be established as a clearly defined and discrete subject area within literary
theory.”[iv]
The centrality of the
study of fictional minds also informs the work of Zunshine. She analyzes
Nabokov’s Lolita and Richardson’s Clarissa among other texts and
concludes that fiction helps us to pattern in newly nuanced ways our emotions
and perceptions; it bestows "new knowledge or increased
understanding" and gives "the chance for a sharpened ethical
sense" and it creates new forms of meaning for our everyday
existence.(pg.128)
Sara
The Earthspinnerbegins
with Sara’s journal entry for Thursday, October 11th: “It is autumn
and I am at a university in England”. Sara’s sister’s voice playing in her head
is recorded in the journal entry “You always manage to get away, you always
have it easy”. Those were the parting words that she had spoken at the airport,
“though she did not utter them out loud.” (pg.9) Right from the opening page we
are privy to Sara’s process of the cognitive act of mind reading. She is
interpreting what Tia might possibly be feeling or thinking. The accuracy of
that reading is almost immediately confirmed when Tia complains: “Now you have
gone, I can never leave. I’ll be stuck here, looking after Amma my whole bloody
life.” (pg.10) Sara can imagine her throwing punches at her reflection in the
mirror next to the phone as if she were aiming her blows at me. Of this I am
sure.” (pg.10)
This seemingly effortless
act of mind reading extends to her mother “armouring her heart against absences”
(pg.21) It reaches beyond the human realm to a possible mind reading of Chinna,
the dog, “I wonder how Dog is making sense of it-abandoned over and over again.”
(pg.21)
While Elango and Zohra
are trying to make sense of their relationship the young Sara has no problem
understanding what is happening. In an act of effortless mind reading Sara is
aware of a fizzle in the air, something invisible that exists between men and
women, when Zohra comes down to the pond. It was the same fizzle that
accompanied the prolonged goodbye at the door between the couple that had moved
into the house opposite theirs. It was the same fizzle that crackled on her
television set as a buxom actress approached her marital bed with a large glass
of milk. It had no name but Sara
recognized it when she saw it between Elango and Zohra.“I was sure that for all
the hours between the moment Zohra left the pond and the next afternoon, Elango
would think of nothing other than that she had walked the entire scrubby
distance to the pond-despite her limp-to seek him out.”(87)
Yet for all her mind
reading skills Sara is unable to read into her own actions and behavior. When
she goes down to Elango’s pond to help him make his clay horse, she notices him
in a singlet, stripped down to his shorts “the bare arm he held towards me was
long and sinewy, its muscles moved visibly with each gesture he made. I could
not understand why, when he looked this way since I was a toddler, I was
suddenly self-conscious and shy.” (pg.81) She is aware of the sensations
rushing through her in the gleaming water.
The intimacy of their
work done secretly together, the sensuousness of their preparation of raw clay
by immersing their feet in it and treading it, the conversations about pottery
and traditions are interrupted by Zohra’s arrival and sharp intake of breath.
“She
was startled to find me there, I could tell. I did not know that she too came
to the pond; I had thought it something between Elango and me.” (84) the
resentment, the jealousy is apparent to the reader though not to the character
herself.
Zohra tells Sara to wash her feet
before she goes home and Sara is tempted to tell her that for Elango and her
clay was not dirt. This is something they have in common and Zohra lacks. It is
Sara who helps Elango prepare the clay for his dream horse, not Zohra.
None of this makes any
difference to Elango. He is in love. He forgets everything that he had been
talking to Sara about and seems to be in a daze. Sara has also heard of their
rendezvous. Elango never calls Sara back to the pond after this and she is
convinced that Zohra must have asked him not to. Elango practically abandons
Sara as his love affair with Zohra flourishes. Akka is the only one who seems
to understand what she is going through:
“Even today, I thought,
she understood what suffering it was to sit alone making pots. It was clear to
me that Elango did not care at all.” (pg.102) All this time, she had been
making things with Elango’s help. Alone, she felt lost. Baffled resentment
churned up her insides. She had been told that once the clay horse was made she
would be the one to decorate it. Now Zohra’s grandfather was embellishing it
with Urdu calligraphy and both Elango and Zohra had inscribed their names on
it.
Akka asks Sara about his project,
asks her who else comes down to the pond.
“I thought of Zohra reaching out for the amulet, I
thought of the look that had passed between them, of the sketch of a woman I
had seen in his book, the letter Z he had written and adorned over and over
again. I thought how Elango had given me very little time after she had entered
his life. “There was only one person, a lady…” (pg.135)
We already know that it was
Sara who had found the amulet and handed it over to Elango. We guess that Sara
is jealous. Her pottery classes have stopped. Elango no longer has time for her
ever since Zohra entered his life. Is
that why she tells Akka what is going on at the pond where Elango works?
She retracts the
statement almost immediately but the damage has been done. Akka knows about the
horse, knows about Zohra and Elango. The tragedy that follows can directly be
traced back to what Sara told Akka that day. In her dreams Sara sees herself
chasing after Akka trying to stop her, sees herself falling over the body of
Elango, trying to stop his hands from being pulverized. She wakes up at night
crying in her sleep. Her subconscious knows what her conscious mind will not
accept. She was jealous and she acted on that jealous impulse and set a tragic
course of events into action.
The
Elango-Zohra love affair
The Elango-Zohra love
affair brings the reader’s mind- reading abilities further into play. “For how
long had he lived with Zohra in his head?” (pg39). It’s a question seemingly
addressed to the reader and we scramble for a reply even as we realize that it
might be a question Elango is asking himself in an act of self-communion. Zohra has lived in his neighborhood for a year
without him noticing her: “That whole year now felt like lost time: crazy not
to have stored away those glimpses for sustenance.” (pg.39).
The moment it all began
is imprinted in his mind. She stopped at his stall and their hands touched when
reaching out for the same lamp. She jokes with him, she smiles. Does she like
him? The reader wants to know as much as Elango does.
“The next week she had
come back-why? What was he to her? She had come again not to buy a pitcher but
because she had felt something stir inside her too-he wanted to believe this,
and by degrees it grew into a certainty in his mind.” (40) Is he fooling
himself? Is he projecting on to her his own desire much like Lovelace in
Clarissa and Humbert Humbert in Lolita?
Elango is engaged in the
act of attempted mind reading and we are his accomplices at this juncture. We
are also attempting to read her actions and her behavior. We are worried that
he may possibly have misread her. She is the granddaughter of a well-known
calligrapher. He is a potter. They belong to two different religions in a world
where this is an insurmountable problem. “The space between the two was a
charnel house of burnt and bloodied human flesh, a giant crack through the
earth that was like an open mouth waiting to swallow him.” (44) We are reading
in a context where misreading and misinterpretation of women’s nonverbal
language can lead to dire consequences. We cannot fully accept Elango’s reading
of her mind. How can she possibly love him? Even if she does, what future can
they have together?
Zohra has the answers.
“She never interrupted his list of worries. When he finished, she said this was
not her way of thinking, and everything would fall into place, just as his
shapeless masses of mud became beautiful pots.”[v]
It is Zohra who makes all
the initial moves in their relationship. She is the one who asks him to drop
her to the post office to collect her grandfather’s pension. She talks to him
as if they were friends. He joyously drives fast. She laughingly asks him to
slow down. “When women are in love, he told himself, they cry out to the man to
go slow, to stop. It was both a cry for rescue and a plea for captivity-in the
movies it was always so.” (76) This
makes us distinctly uncomfortable with its sexual overtones. If the language of
love is a code, then Elango is relying upon the only experience of sexual love
that he has had-the vicarious experience of watching two lovers on screen- to
decode her language. He looks at her in the rear-view window and he is positive
that the same thought has passed between them both. We are not so sure.
He volunteers to drive
her everywhere. She says she only goes to the post office and to the dispensary
at Kuttipally. They begin to go to both places together, him driving the auto,
she sitting behind. Is he seeing too much into it? Are we seeing too much into
it? Then we are told he took no money and she never offered to pay. Now the
needle of suspicion turns to her. Is she taking advantage of his infatuation?
The exhaustive mind
reading ends when a riot breaks out over a cricket match between India and
Pakistan. Zohra seeks Elango out when it simmers down, slips her hand into his
and does not let go until they have reached the end of the alley. Somewhere
during that walk, she also managed to touch her lips to his. But we only learn
of this in the next paragraph. So even as Zohra walks away, dupatta secure on
her shoulders, bag strap firm in her hands, we are asking ourselves if the walk
meant something. At this point of the narrative Elango has more knowledge than
we do as readers. So, Zohra knew all along what was on her mind, Elango knows
finally when she kisses him and we learn it when we read of the kiss.
“Breathtaking how swiftly she had asserted her ownership of him, how needless his
fears or his rehearsals of the precise manner in which he would tell her of his
feelings.” (pg.94) Elango has never had anyone lay such a strong claim on him.
On certain days he was taken aback by her need of him, the way her hands and
her lips found him in the dark, the recklessness of her love for him.
It is not only Zohra
whose mind Elango reads, As Taatha
walks around Kummarapet making mental notes and stops to stare at the moringa
tree Elango comments “No hair, no teeth, no balls, but he’s got his greed” he
says to Chinna. Elango is also the most evocative character in the novel
precisely because he is most often the subject for our own exercise in mind
reading.
Elango
and Chinna
Take the instance when he
first meets Chinna and decides to drop him off outside a wealthy home. Should he drop him outside the high
walled suburban bungalows? But there was no watchman in sight. The dog might
wander off and get run over. Then there were stretches with boulders but
jackals could be lurking there. One after the other he rejects the various
options till he has taken the dog home. While Elango believes he wants to leave
the dog, we as readers are aware that he wants to keep him. We have read his
mind on that long journey home and he is able to read his own mind only later.
“Look at you now, Elango said to Chinna, we can’t explain what brought you to
me, what kept you alive in that forest all alone until I found you. But here
you are and if you leave again, I know I will be done for.” (pg 57). Elango may
know it or not but we do. Elango has fallen in love with Chinna. The language
used to describe Chinna’s effect on his life suggests as much: “His heart felt
bigger, more alive, as if a clear spring had exploded inside him and soaked a
parched wasteland crying out for water. Flowers had bloomed, new blades of
grass. The desert had blossomed into a garden.” (pg.58-59). The dog had
unlocked something in him that unnerved him with its power.
Chinna has that effect upon
people. Even Sara’s mother forgets all her high principles and decides to keep
the dog despite knowing that the owners are looking for it. She allows herself
to believe that her husband “would not be able to survive losing Chinna” (pg.72)
and at another point in the narrative she calls Chinna a heart medicine and
states that her husband would be bereft without him. But it is Devika herself
who burns his old collar and leash and his old life with it. Again, the reader
is reading the mind of the character and guessing at a truth that the character
themselves do not know.
The letters that the woman writes to the agony aunt, Mrs Reddy, reveals
her own relentless obsession for the dog. “My husband has told me we have to
accept we have lost Tashi. But I cannot.” (pg.99) She combs the city looking
for her lost dog. As readers we read her letters with a sense of uneasy
anxiety, guessing at the thoughts that must run through Devika’s mind when she
receives them. When Elango is persuaded to allow the dog to stay at Tara’s
house after her father’s heart attack, Elango feels that without Chinna the
courtyard feels empty and lifeless. Even the hens seem to be searching for
their tormentor.
Chinna inspires deep affections, but that does not stop him from being
abandoned. “He is witness to and sometimes survivor of all sorts of violence: a
random carjacking, a thoughtless kick, a deranged mob. The endless cruelties
unleashed by human hands seem all the more senseless from the point of view of
a dog, and love too brings its own cruelties.”[vi]
It’s not just human beings or animals whose minds can be read. Sara
reads into the mind of the clay. Ï thought maybe my clay did not want to be a
cup-to be put into fire and transformed. Perhaps it was turning into puddles in
my hands because it would rather go back to the earth. Maybe every substance
knew what it wanted to be, and my clay had doubts about becoming a cup even as
I was experiencing strong misgivings about being a potter.” (pg104)
Reading the mind of the author.
We witness the events through the mind of Sara. The first chapter of the
book deals with her journal entries from Thursday October 11th to
Tuesday, November 6th. Perhaps she doesn’t write every day? Or
perhaps the author has chosen only those entries which are meaningful. Right
from the start of the novel we are also trying to read the mind of the author.
Chapter 2 recounts the traumatic incident on the highway when a man is wounded
and his wife is temporarily abducted and then thrown out at a railway crossing.
It is presented as third person narrative. Yet Sara’s mind is still used to
frame the incident. “I was just a girl then. I knew very little about the
incident on the highway. I had only the bare bones from a newspaper report
which ended in tiny italics with the name Devika Nanaiya.” (pg.34). This is
Sara’s mother’s name. She was a journalist who covered the crime beat and wrote
about the incident. She laid out the statistics, quoted the commissioner’s
statement, and bemoaned the fact that a corrupt police force meant that such
crimes would become commonplace. So, while the opening passage gave us a glimpse
of the horror of the incident especially in terms of the harrowing experience
the woman had to go through, Sara’s narrative pulls away from the personal
details to more sociological facts. Her father says the village near the
railway crossing is a den of vice. Tia wants to be a kingpin in a den of vice.
Sara denies her this possibility. “I was only eleven but already a cynic about
the things people let girls do.” (pg.35) Tia could not be a king pin. At best
she could be a queen-pin pasted to a dartboard for practice. Sara is only
concerned about the missing dog in the story but we have been privy to the
woman’s ordeal. Surely, we are sympathetic to her?
Yet when she begins to write her letters to the agony aunt column, we find
ourselves distancing ourselves from her. What kind of person confides in an
absolute stranger? Especially to an agony aunt column which will be published
for all the world to see? “But tell me, Mrs Reddy, to whom can I say I am badly
hurt too? As soon as I shut my eyes to sleep, I see them. The hands all over my
body. The things they said still make my skin crawl as if a colony of worms is
oozing and seething on me.”(pg.74).
Mrs
Reddy may empathize, but we were there. As readers we accompanied the couple in
their long drive past giant boulders, bullock carts and muddy huts. We saw the
woman take the dog on a lead; we felt her heart turn “into an iron ball
slamming against her ribs” (pg.32). We heard her scream and witnessed her being
shoved into the car. Heard the obsessive question in her head as she bangs the
window, claws the face of the man next to her “How to get out, how to get out?”
(pg33). We feared the worst as the thin man who slapped her talks of the
voyeuristic pleasure of watching a gang rape scene. We were relieved when she
was thrown out of the car even though her head hit something hard. She has
stitches on her head now and a painful shoulder. Everyone says she got off
lightly, especially in comparison to her husband who may have lost his sight in
the right eye. Her wounds are not visible. But she lives with a husband who
needs sedation, lives with the trauma and the grief of that evening. “I have
nobody to talk to.” (pg.74) she says in partial explanation of why she is
writing to the agony aunt. There is a relationship between a writer and a
reader. The woman has been reading the column for years. She has begun to feel
a sense of kinship. She feels the writer is a friend who understands her. That
is why she turns to the writer of the column for advice. What should she do?
We don’t know what the reply is. We can only guess at it through the
next letter that the woman writes. She has been to the police station to
complain. Their attitude seems to be she deserved what she got. They have no
interest in the missing dog. Her husband has advised her to accept the loss.
But she cannot let go. Every day she marks a route on a city map and takes
buses to different areas, walks and searches for the dog. “It may be pointless,
but it keeps me sane.” (pg99). In the face of trauma and tragedy, the search
for Tashi gives her life purpose and meaning. We understand her predicament.
But by now we are well aware of Elango’s attachment to the dog, we are aware of
what that dog has become to Sara’s family and to the community. We don’t want
the woman to find the dog. We want her to give up the search.
What accounts for our sympathy for Elango and Sara and our lack of that
compassion for the woman? For one thing we don’t even know her name. We don’t
know where she lives or what she does.
What has happened to her has happened to others before her., the third
person narrative voice informs us. “Things of this kind happen all over the
world, every hour, perhaps every minute, more in some places than in others.
The variations are infinite, and the particulars matters only to the people
whose lives they touch.” (pg.14)
We
take this as carte blanche to justify our indifference to her quest.
The letters keep
streaming in documenting the woman’s search for her dog. Now we are getting
anxious. She has laid out a scale model city in her guest room, with all the
geographical details of the landscape. She has walked all the way to Penda
hill. She has gone down every lane on the right side of Bharati Road and the
next day she will explore the left side. She has counted the stray dogs. She is
coming closer and closer.
What is the effect of
these letters on Sara’s mother? We do not know. We have only seen her through
Sara’s eyes as “chocolate truffle in human form” (pg.64), her crust has a soft,
melting centre, we have been told. This allows us to adopt her perspective, to
wish the woman would try to focus on other things and not fixate on finding the
dog. Shouldn’t she be taking care of her wounded husband? Forget the fact that
he has rejoined work but she has been so fatally wounded, “as if a bullet went
through my brain and shot away my logic and focus on the evening I was
attacked.” (pg 115)
While Sara’s journal
entries give us some semblance of intimacy with her, the suppressed anger and
grief of the woman’s letters push us away. “ No time does not heal. Let me tell
you some wounds never heal. Have you ever had such a wound? It gnaws you from
inside like termites deep in the leg of a chair which collapses when you sit on
it though it looked whole and new. The termites are at my skull, Mrs Reddy,
some nights I wake up and my pillow is gritty with powdered bone.” (pg.138).
Again, we can only guess
at what Mrs. Reddy might have suggested as consolation but can we really ignore
the fact that she knows where the dog is and could help this woman out of her
agony but does not? Why are we dismayed rather than impressed with the woman’s determination
to find the dog?
We do not receive another
letter and as an epilogue to this story, are relieved to find that when Chinna
does meet the woman, he does not like her. She smells of something that came
from a bottle. He likes humans who smell of sweat, warmth and food. This woman
makes very little sense to him. Yet in a flash of insight, we become privy to
the feelings and sensations hidden in the dark depths of his mind. “That voice.
Those sounds. It was confusing and alluring, a call to a place within him that
had been locked away.” (pg.219)
He walks away from her.
We walk away with him. We do not want to know what this distraught woman is
thinking as she loses even that one purpose that gave some measure of solace
and strength to her life. We want him to stay with Sara’s mother whose
daughters are far away, whose beloved husband is dead. We do not want her to be
left alone. We do not care what happens to the woman whose name we do not know.
The author knows how our
minds will work. She has deliberately brought us to this point by what she
chose to tell us and what she chose to withhold. As readers we are quick to
judge Taatha and Akka and the village that attacks Elango and Zohra. It is only
through a more reflective reading that we also apply the same standards of
compassion and understanding to ourselves.
This is why we read
fiction. It helps us look into the minds of characters, and through their
behavior, beliefs and actions, catch a glimpse of the hidden recesses of our
own mind.
References
·
Marie Arana. “Book review: An Atlas of
Impossible Longing.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-an-atlas-of-impossible-longing/2011/04/11/AFE4tbkE
·
Lisa Zunshine. Why We Read Fiction. Theory
of mind and the novel. Columbus: the Ohio state university press. 2012. pg.13
·
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mind-reading
·
Palmer. Fictional Minds. Introduction pg.
6
·
Pg.97 https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the-earthspinner-by-anuradha-roy/
Bibliography
·
Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
2004.
·
Roy, Anuradha. The Earthspinner Gurugram: Havhette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd,
2021.
·
Zunshine,Lisa. Why We Read Fiction. Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus: The
Ohio state university Press. 2012
·
Arana, Marie. “Book review: An Atlas of
Impossible Longing.” Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-an-atlas-of
impossible-longing/2011/04/11/AFE4tbkE
·
Lawrence,
Elizabeth. (2022). “The Earthspinner” by Anuradha Roy. Retrieved from https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the-earthspinner-by-anuradha-roy/
·
Dynamic
self-processes Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mind-reading