THE BLUE BEDSPREAD
By RAJ KAMAL JHA
New York: Random House, 2000. 209 pages, $21.95
Karline McLain
In The Blue Bedspread, the anonymous narrator urgently records his memoirs throughout the course of one night, while a newborn baby sleeps on a blue bedspread in the next room. The baby was born to his sister, who died during labor. The narrator hurries, striving to complete a family memoir for the baby before the scheduled arrival of its adoptive parents the next morning. In a series of brief chapters divided into five sections-Father, Mother, Sister, Visitors, and Brother-the story weaves the past and the present together, flickering between the present, punctuated by the cries of the baby, and the narrator's memories of his own childhood, spent with the baby's mother, his sister.
The baby's presence is the impetus for the narrator to pick at the scars of his own childhood, to remember and reshape the past in order to make it conform to and explain the present. The narrator is acutely aware that he is recasting history itself in the process of retelling his and his sister's stories, stating, "At a different time, maybe at a different place, I would have told you other stories." Throughout the narrative, Jha demonstrates that memory is always subjective, that one person will remember an event one way, while another remembers it differently, and that people recall things differently at different times. History is always a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, as is shown when the narrator pauses while relating the story of his sister's unfulfilled marriage, asking how he should conclude it:
How should we end this story? We could have her go down to get him the second drink, hear the crackle as it hits the ice in the steel glass, climb the stairs again and listen to him talk about the school, the child she couldn't give him. Or we could end it like this . . .
Jha uses the genre of the memoir to consciously portray the past as mediated, and to emphasize the connection between history and emotion, showing that ambivalence, desire, and resentment are feelings that can motivate action in the public realm as well as the private. The novel, set in the narrator's flat, is located almost entirely within the private realm. City life is seen from the veranda, where the narrator watches the trams and caged pigeons, and remembers his father's daily wait at the bus stop. Throughout the night, the narrator does not leave the flat; his ventures into the city occur only in the realm of memory, recounted for the baby asleep in the next room. However, the novel investigates the tension between public and private life, the way society impinges its rules upon the family, defining what is normal and what is taboo.
Jha's novel investigates the publicly sanctioned concept of "home" by opening up the door to the narrator's private flat, questioning the popular concept of home as a safe place of return. The narrator, who as a middle-aged adult still lives in his childhood home, can locate home not in his flat but only in the blue bedspread that he and his sister shared throughout their childhood, the bedspread upon which her baby now sleeps. The bedspread is the heart of the novel, a symbol of the relationship between the narrator and his sister and of their bond, which could not be publicly sanctioned.
In the final chapter of this unsettling novel, the memoir becomes a confession, in which the narrator's final words, eight simple words, once spoken, shape both the past and the future in irrevocable ways, and finally announce his true role in the story.
Karline McLain is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin who studies public culture in modern India and women's studies.