Missing by Sumana Roy

Abstract

Sumana Roy Missing New Delhi. Aleph. 2018. 261 pages. Missing, Sumana Roy’s first novel after her highly acclaimed first work of nonfiction, is a modern retelling of the oldest Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Will the present-day Sita, Kobita in the novel, meet the same fate? We will never know, as she remains missing through the entire novel. What we do know from the other characters’ reminiscences about her is that she is the one who is in charge. Her husband, Nayan, who is blind, depends on her for everything in the day-today business. Kobita is a social worker, too, and her concern for a young girl molested in the heart of Guwahati makes her pack her bags and go to a strife-torn and floodravaged Assam in search of the girl. Soon, it is Kobita herself who goes missing, as her phone calls to Nayan stop coming. While the Ramayana was about bringing back Sita from the clutches of Ravana and the war that ensued, Missing portrays the internal war that goes on in Nayan, as he tries to come to terms with the feeling of missing his wife. The seven days narrated in the novel are filled with moments of despair, hope, anxiety, anger, and anticipation for Nayan. It doesn’t help that their son is far away in a foreign country and he is surrounded by people who have their own issues to deal with. The novel is peppered with clips from the daily newspaper, for which Nayan employs a young girl, and soon it becomes difficult to distinguish between news and fiction. In the age of “breaking news,” news has become stranger than fiction. Missing is not a racy mystery novel, as some may assume from its title. One needs to read it slowly. Missing’s poetic tenor grows on you. Sumana Roy’s Missing reads like the name of its protagonist, Kobita, the Bengali word for a poem. The missing is not only physical but metaphorical, too. Sumit Ray Darjeeling, India Roberto Ransom Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists Trans. Daniel Shapiro. Chicago. Swan Isle Press. 2018. 177 pages. Roberto Ransom’s openings are not just that. The first story in Missing Persons is about a pet lizard grown big enough to devour its adoptive family. Ransom’s ingenuity lies in drawing out this topic’s surprising means of presenting caregiving and loss. The first story’s unexpected developments parallel its relation to the other stories. Who could foresee a series of nuanced and unsettling tales about memory, art, betrayal, and divinity from a volume that begins with a housebound Godzilla? Perhaps someone who pays close attention to first sentences, or who reads things at least twice, because— and it took me a while to notice—Ransom employs anaphora especially well. “Lizard à la Heart” begins, “The bathroom hasn’t been open for days. Under the door, as always, it smells like a swamp.” Though syntactically nothing is missing, the words “for days” and “always” map out mysterious antecedents and seductive postcedents for the unsuspecting reader. What happened? What’s next? This is an appetizer for the initial sentences of later stories, all in David Shapiro’s superb translation from Ransom’s original Desaparecidos , animales y artistas (1999). The beautiful elaboration of the capricious time of artistic labor that characterizes “Three Figures and a Dog” begins, “He liked to be in the chapel at dawn and also in the afternoon when something similar, though not identical, occurred. For that to happen, he had to leave home when his wife got up to milk the cow.” “Something similar” and “that” are more syntactic anaphora than those that open “Lizard” because they leave their possible referents reliant upon World Literature in Review 78 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 ...