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The Everest hotel: A calendar

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"Everest Hotel" records the events that take place from one summer to the next in the life of a young woman. During this year she renounces one world for another, makes an honest attempt to live a life devoted to the care of the sick and the destitute, but ultimately goes back to the world left behind, this time with an adopted child. The pull of affectional human ties seems much too strong. And yet this one year of her life is not simply wasted: it stands out as a landmark she was destined to reach in order to make further choices, a cross-road of sorts, a chronotopic point which has to be traversed no matter what the direction.

Set in a place called Drummondganj, the novel begins with a young nun, Sister Ritu, taking on a new assignment in Everest Hotel, a dilapidated building which has seen better days, now a home for destitutes by nuns. The owner, Mr Jed, lives on the top floor, alone and quite unhinged. He lolls about in one of the great bath-tubs lined up on the terrace of the Hotel, sad relics of a former glory. Is it senility or dementia that makes him shout and scream, tear off all his clothes, soil his bed repeatedly? In his quieter moments he busies himself writing the "Drummondganj Book of the Dead," an ambitious but uncanny chronicle that seeks to compile a list of all those who have lived and died in Drummondganj.

Sister Ritu is assigned the task of attending on Jed. She stoically takes the experience as a "humbling lesson," bathing him, rinsing his sheets, putting up with his tantrums. The only visitor that Jed welcomes is Brij, a political activist involved in a separatist movement. Brij, using Jed's terrace as an unwinding ground, meets the beautiful twenty-five-year-old nun and is irresistibly drawn to her. And yet circumstances must intervene and place in his path a red-headed German woman who spends her days chiselling a tombstone for a dead but not forgotten relative, her nights learning yoga and tantric rites from the young rebel. This is a woman with whom he grows intimate, a woman who is one day discovered dead in mysterious circumstances.

There is something eerie about the whole scenario: the decaying human wreck on the terrace, the ongoing chronicle of the dead, the crumbling building, the adjacent graveyard, the tantric rituals, the furtive separatist activities. All this and much more enveloped in a brooding cloud of silence. Silence unruffled by Jed's periodic shrieks. Silence like the calm before a storm, hanging oppressively in the still, humid air, or momentarily confused by the renewed whirring of fans after an extended power-cut. In short, a silence that is ominous.

Ritu's story takes place in a world that seems suspended in time. "Everest Hotel" creates a sleepy hill-town with its peculiar sights and smells, a inhabited by ordinary human beings who are a prey to ordinary human emotions like love, hate and jealousy. It is a world torn by political and environmental issues, the likes of which we hear everyday. And yet this recognizable world is defamiliarized by the many strange events that take place in it. At its simplest it is a terrain peopled by hapless creatures in need of love and care. Simultaneously it is one that extends beyond clear-cut boundaries, into the grey areas of the unfamiliar and the unknown, hanging somewhere in between sanity and insanity. A limbo best represented by the raving Jed who belongs neither to the living nor to the dead. Or by the long power-cuts symbolizing the ebb and flow of life.

In keeping with this in-between theme, "Everest Hotel" is written entirely in the present tense. The narrative is thus suspended in time, precipitously hanging in a here-and-now, with neither before nor after. At times the chronology seems to get confused: with the story flowing in an interminable present, with no shifts back and forth. This is part of the narratorial strategy, part of the design, of the cyclical motion controlling the entire narration.

Ritu, the name given to the main protagonist, is deliberately chosen. Ritu, or season, is what keeps the story hanging together, whether it is Jeth or Asadh, Push or Phalgun. Everest Hotel is a finely crafted book that tries to link the world of nature with that of human aspirations. The rhythmic cycle of seasons keeps moving, and with the fluctuating seasons, the fortunes of individuals change for better or worse. Emphasizing the inevitability of change, the narrator underscores the need for acceptance, no matter what the given circumstances. As it weaves in and out through summer, winter, autumn and spring, it draws our attention to little noticed, minute events of the natural world. It makes us pause for a while to look at life again, at the many landmarks and cross-roads that come our way. At choices we are required to make. And at the need to simply move on.

Like the seasons.

MANJU JAIDKA