Essay Draft Two

Title

During the 1980s, the relationship between Hindus and Muslims experienced great tension, accompanied by occasional wars and conflicts, which resulted in the tremendous hardship for both sides. Many writers have tried to represent the original scene of the Indians, with Krishnan Varma being one of them. Being an Indian, Varma often shares his observations of the life of the poorest people in his country(56). In 1985 Varma wrote The Grass-Eaters, a story about an Indian refugee Ajit Babu and his wife Swapna who tried to find different dwelling places. During this process, they met various difficulties, suffered from the hard environment, but finally settled down on the roof of a building.

Despite the painful content, the readers would mostly find the story laughable, since Varma puts the story in a most humorous fashion. Readers may wonder why Varma uses a humorous tone to tell a depressing or even desperate story. The answer is that by this means, Varma actually tells the story in a stronger way.

In order to create a funny atmosphere, Varma makes a contrast between the readers’ predicted situation and the actual one of Babu and his wife, which makes the story largely amusing.

The living condition of Babu and his wife remained poor after their arrival in Calcutta. They used to inhabit the railway station platform, a little-used overbridge and a water tank, and have moved to places like a wagon, a cement concrete pipe and finally the roof of a building. Any of these places would be inadequate for people nowadays to live in. Hence, readers may imagine Babu as a man constantly frowning, complaining about the “houses”, and swearing “the damn unfair life”.

However, the case turns out to be the opposite. When Babu and his wife discovered the wagon, they found great satisfaction opening and shutting its two doors for an entire hour. For the readers, a room with four walls and a door keeping others outside are simply not worth mentioning, hence, this scene looks like an extreme joke.

At this point, readers might start to wonder why they would feel so satisfied with such a terrible place? It is because that their situation in the wagon was already a great improvement compared to their previous living conditions. When Babu and his wife first arrived in Calcutta from East Bengal, they lived in a footpath filled by refugees. It was so crowded that if Babu leaved to rest himself, he would never find his place again when he was back. Besides, as all the people slept on the same ground, it would be easy for people to sleep in the wrong arms. Actually, Babu himself woke up one day finding “a bag of bones” (56) sleeping beside him instead of his own wife. Compared to the footpath, the wagon is too good for Babu and Swapna to live in! The wagon has four walls and a door to shut outside all the strangers like those on the footpath, keeping Babu and his wife private and free inside. What’s more, the wagon is totally free of charge. The declaration of “It was heaven. I felt I was God”(57) is never an exaggeration but Babu’s most sincere thought.

Later on, when Babu and his wife moved to the roof of the building belonging to Babu’s employer, they kept finding its advantages. This time they compared the roof with the ordinary apartment below them. The roof was flat, better than the gabled cement concrete (their former residence) and it could provide more light and ventilation yet required less rent, which makes it idea.

The writer features Babu as an optimistic character whose encouraging spirit originated from the deepest suffering of his life. How can an open-air roof win over an apartment? It is because Babu had suffered from the most terrible things in life that nothing could make him sad. On the other hand, even the smallest improvement could add color to his miserable life and please him.

When life turned out to be nothing but desperation, when there is nothing worse to happen or to lose, everything will seem laughable for both the character  himself and the bystanders. Varma uses a humorous tone to represent this kind of laughable life to show the hardship of Babu and his wife’s life in a stronger way.

Work Cited

Krishnan Varma. The Grass-Eaters. 1985. Rpt in The International Story: An anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction. Ruth Spack. New York. St. Martin’s, 1994.6-8

18.5.07 05:52