The cover of Timeri Murari’s Four Steps from Paradise is tantalizing. Like the story, it has a deceptive charm: everything looks verdant and beautiful till you notice a hand creeping into the frame. Murari’s narrative has the same tranquil, sheet-glass quality, which is beset by slowly-creeping cracks that appear as the story progresses. The narrator, little Krishna, lives with his large, affectionate family in their ancestral home. Life is idyllic in a way it can only be for a small, well-loved child. Then their father, a widower and an anglophile, grows fascinated by a white woman and employs her as a governess. Eventually he marries her, ripping the children out of the tapestry of the family, and leading them into a harsher world.
For the first half of the book, things seem restful, and even a trifle dull. But as young Krishna grows, the book becomes darker. Murari goes on to break every cliché that he has carefully built. The cruel stepmother, for instance, remains calculating to the end, but you realize that the father – honest, upstanding and perhaps naïve – is not all that he appeared to be. Four Steps… is a quietly compelling book. It takes notions and dialectics of power, caste, race, sexuality and gender, and stands them on their heads.
Murari is a painterly writer, and is at his best while describing houses, and attributing them with personality. Like the social order in Murari’s book, the old houses too have crumbled, taking with them their singular ways of living and loving. The first half of the book is its weak link. Though well written, it could have been edited some. But Murari’s prose is really riveting because of the fragile balance it strikes between ‘good’ and ‘bad’; between love and covetousness. And perhaps because human nature never changes, this balance is a beautiful thing to behold.
Penguin India
(Anita Vachharajani © Timeout)
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