The Blue Bedspread

April 3, 2000
A family legacy of incest, violence, alcoholism and isolation comes under sudden and unflinching scrutiny as an unnamed middle-aged man in present-day Calcutta documents his family history for the future reading of a newborn niece. When the police call late at night to tell him his sister has died in childbirth, the man collects the infant and springs into action, desperately writing down family memories and his own, which he must complete before foster parents come to collect the baby in the morning. As he writes, the tiny girl sleeps on the same blue bedspread that he remembers as a talisman from his own childhood. Shifting back and forth in time he crafts a series of telling vignettes focused principally on his sister, himself, the mother he hardly remembers and his abusive father. Probing universal mysteries of ontology as well as dark family secrets, he strives to reveal the forces that shape all of their identities. First novelist Jha writes a spare, meditative prose, largely bereft of dialogue and grounded in meticulous physical description. Rhythmic repetition and brief flourishes lend the narrative a flavor of traditional oral storytelling, despite contemporary themes. Glimpses of life in India over the narrator's lifetime and carefully selected details--white and gray pigeons, an albino cockroach, foreign magazines, old maps--color a tale that nonetheless has a timeless quality. This is an impressive debut in which Jha achieves an engaging balance between the modern and the classic, the universal and the deeply personal.

March 15, 2000
This finely told first novel by Jha, a U.S.-educated Calcutta journalist, concerns a middle-aged man whose sister has just died in childbirth. He makes the funeral arrangements but needs to find a home for her newborn infant. To assure that the child will have an identity when she goes to her adoptive parents, he writes a series of stories about her mother and himself when they were growing up. At the very end, he imagines himself on a stage addressing a large crowd. He decides that, old as he is, he will raise the child himself. This prose is spare and well wrought, and Jha addresses themes similar to those explored in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Highly recommended for public libraries.--Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Silver Spring, MD

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2000
Late one night in Calcutta, a man receives a phone call from the police, notifying him that his only sister has died in childbirth; the child has survived. Adoptive parents have arranged to collect the baby the following day, so the brother agrees to keep her overnight. As she sleeps on the blue bedspread, he writes stories to her so that when she has grown she will know something of her mother and her family. The stories reveal recurring images, some fleeting, some sustained, of the family's history, a brother and his sister, their troubled childhood in the very house in which the baby peacefully sleeps now, their separation as adults. As the stories of family relationships unfold, the man questions "how so much hatred and pain could have gracefully coexisted with so much love and joy." In the process of writing, he comes to his own realization of what the past and future hold for the baby and for himself. This is young Calcutta journalist Jha's first novel. ((Reviewed April 1, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)