Sat Ma­haraj

Ra­bindranath Ma­haraj, Tri­ni-dad-born au­thor now liv­ing in Cana­da, re­ceived his ear­ly ed­u­ca­tion in Table­land, a vil­lage on the Na­pari­ma Ma­yaro Road on the way from Princes Town to Rio Claro. Nick­named "Robin," he mi­grat­ed to Cana­da where he has writ­ten a num­ber of books. Robin us­es his knowl­edge of the vil­lages around his Table­land home as the back­drop to many of the chap­ters in his books. The fam­i­ly is well-known and I sug­gest that many of the char­ac­ters in his nov­els are re­al-life fig­ures.

In his A Per­fect Pledge his char­ac­ter Narpat is a re­al-life fig­ure known by me and the peo­ple in the sur­round­ing dis­tricts of Table­land. In fact, Narpat was a well-known na­tion­al fig­ure a few years ago when the sug­ar in­dus­try was at its height.

On the in­side flap, Robin writes: "Trinidad in 1961 is both a lush is­land par­adise and a pover­ty-strick­en slum. While the coun­try inch­es to­ward in­de­pen­dence, life in the tiny vil­lage of Lengua is very hard, and Narpat, a sug­ar­cane farmer, is sick­ened by the cor­rup­tion ram­pant on his is-land.

"A hard­work­ing man of mod­est means, Narpat scorns his neigh­bours as greedy, shift­less, and en­slaved to the rumshop. He con- trasts their seem­ing help­less­ness with his ide­alised pic­ture of the re­source­ful­ness of his an­cient an­ces­tors, and through the in­tro­duc­tion of a se­ries of strin­gent moral stric­tures sets out to cre­ate or­der with­in his tu­mul­tuous fam­i­ly and the vil­lage."

Robin Ma­haraj has been praised by many Cana­di­an lit­er­ary crit­ics in the es­tab­lished na­tion­al news­pa­pers. Some have even com­pared him to Trinidad-born Vidya Nai-paul who mi­grat­ed to Eng­land many years ago and set the lit­er­a­cy world alight. "The on­ly tru­ly se­ri­ous and suc­cess­ful Cana­di­an nov­el I have read so far this year is set en­tire­ly on the is­land of Trinidad and has not a sin­gle Cana­di­an char­ac­ter," writes Philip Marc­hand of the Toron­to Star.

"A Per­fect Pledge...will es­tab­lish [Ma­haraj] as a ma­jor Cana­di­an writer and lit­er­ary fig­ure of in­ter­na­tion­al stature...A Per­fect Pledge shares the com­i­cal­ly neu­tral tone of Naipaul's ear­li­er nov­els, ex­cept that Ma­haraj's hu­mour is broad­er, the char­ac­ters more hi­lar­i­ous in their phys­i­cal and lin­guis­tic ex­cess­es..."-Globe and Mail.

"Ma­haraj has cre­at­ed a colour­ful uni­verse of char­ac­ters, and the writ­ing is wit­ty and sharp. Much like the Is­land of Trinidad, A Per­fect Pledge is a poly­glot of dif­fer­ent styles. Part com­e­dy, part tragedy, the book is Dick­en­sian in scope, cre­ates a de­tailed world of char­ac­ters a la VS Naipaul and evokes the al­le­gor­i­cal qual­i­ties of Chin­ua Achebe or even John Stein­beck. But it is those echoes of Don Quixote that linger the most"-The Gazette (Mon­tre­al).

"This is a charm­ing sto­ry...it's un­stop­pable...[with] a heartrend­ing con­clu­sion, ten­der­ly, beau­ti­ful­ly told...I'd ad­vise keep­ing an eye out for more from Ma­haraj"-The Wash­ing­ton Post Book World. "What a de­li­cious feel­ing it is to read the first pages of a 400-page book and know you are in the hands of an ac­com­plished sto­ry­teller...It is im­pos­si­ble not to com­pare Ra­bindranath Ma­haraj with No­ble Prize-win­ning au­thor VS Naipaul...This em­i­nent­ly sat­is­fy­ing nov­el has the clar­i­ty of Naipaul and some of the bite, and a great deal that is Ma­haraj's own"-The Seat­tle Times.

A Per­fect Pledge is set in the vil­lage of Lengua which is not too far from Robin's own vil­lage of Table­land. He writes:

"On the evening the ba­by was de­liv­ered by Mul­lai, the vil­lage mid-wife, a chain-smok­ing dwarf who smelled of roast­ed al­monds, cumin, and cu­cum­ber stems, Narpat, who was 55 years old and had giv­en up the idea of fa­ther­ing a son, was sit­ting cross-legged in the kitchen me­thod­i­cal­ly com­pil­ing one of his lists: gin­ger, saf­fron, sapodil­la, pineap­ple, av­o­ca­do, co­conut jel­ly, and sikya fig, a small ba­nana found in all the bird­cages in the vil­lage.

"Narpat had pored over his list for more than an hour, adding new in­gre­di­ents and cross­ing out oth­ers. Fi­nal­ly, sat­is­fied he un­twist­ed a long piece of cop­per wire from a nail on the wall and stabbed the sheet so that it lay atop a jum­ble of yel­low di­etary clip­pings he had pinched out of news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines.

"Over the years the nail had ac­cu­mu­lat­ed scores of lists, most de­tail­ing di­etary stip­u­la­tions, but oth­ers an odd blend of in­junc­tions and af­fir­ma­tions, and in minia-ture scrib­bles, baf­fling clas­si­fi­ca­tions. "He strung the wire on the nail and re­turned to the wood­en bench, the Pavil­ion, draw­ing up both his feet and trac­ing the veins that ran along his calves to his an­kles. When he heard the mid­wife al­ter­nate­ly be­rat­ing his wife in Hin­di and en­cour­ag­ing her in Eng­lish, he got up, walked to the small wood­en porch, and leaned over the rail­ing.

"There were oth­er un­mis­tak­able traces of Narpat's hand in the de­sign. The front of the build­ing was el­e­vat­ed about three feet from the ground with thick, stub­by mo­ra logs, but the posts at the back were short­er, or had sunk, so there was a slope all the way to the kitchen...

"Lengua, a small, im­pov­er­ished cane-farm­ing vil­lage with a pop­u­la­tion of about 400, was linked to the neigh­bour­ing vil­lages of Mon­key-town, Pe­tite Caf&ea­cute;, and Bar­rack­pore through a net­work of crum­bling as­phalt roads and mud­dy agri­cul­tur­al traces in­ter­rupt­ed by bro­ken bridges, pock­ets of para­grass, and in­ter­ven­ing lath­ro, un­tamed bush­es. The roads sank and warped with each rainy sea­son."

• Sat­narayan Ma­haraj is the sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha