The brief opening prologue in Sheila James’ compelling novel “Outcaste” unfolds in southern India in 1952, where a young revolutionary lies hidden in a banyan tree, ready to assassinate a new district commander as he drives by.
Ready, that is, until Malika recognizes her target, Rayappa.
Although the setting then abruptly moves to Toronto in 1997, it’s clear soon enough just what Malika decided to do a half-century earlier. But why she made that choice will not be fully apparent for another 200 pages, when James’ intricate, time-hopping story comes to a moving denouement.
There is an epic scope to “Outcaste,” which spans multiple generations of two entwined and profoundly damaged families — dysfunctional doesn’t begin to describe either — set against major events in Indian (and Canadian) history. Much of that history, including the communal massacres that accompanied India’s “police action,” when it forcibly incorporated the state of Hyderabad in 1948, is not widely known even in India due to long-standing government whitewashing. For many Canadians, though, one historical event will resonate: the 1985 Air India bombing, the worst ever terrorist attack on Canadian citizens.
But the historical details are not truly central to the story, not in the way of the personal ones.
With clear-sighted empathy, laced with irony, James depicts an indifferently cruel world. The worst of her characters survive for decades, while those who engage readers’ sympathy die almost randomly, without fanfare, forewarning or any real attention paid by those around them. In “Outcaste,” that’s all part of the enduring reality of the caste system and the damage inflicted on James’ characters. And by them.
Suffering rarely ennobles in her story, not in a world where members of oppressed groups accept their social standing if it allows them a chance to kick at those even further down the caste ladder.
Avoidance, denial and fear have meant no single person in “Outcaste” knows the true extent of the two central families’ entanglement, and the few who know — or think they know — some aspect are usually wrong. When James as narrator sums up one key moment, she adds: “That’s what happened. More or less.”
With a narrator that unsure, small wonder the novel is full of characters who correctly recognize long-lost relatives while being dead wrong about how they are related.
What breaks the logjam is what happens to Rayappa 45 years after Malika spares his life.
One of the most telling moments in “Outcaste” occurs early, seemingly unimportant then but increasingly significant and enlightening as the novel proceeds. The day after Air India Flight 182 goes down, Rayappa scours the passenger list looking for, and failing to find, his granddaughter’s name. He simply assumes she was “erased from the record.” And why shouldn’t he, after a lifetime virtually dedicated to suppressing truths personal, familial and national?
But after Rayappa emerges from his 12-year stay in Toronto’s Queen Street Mental Health Centre to see Anya alive in 1997, and almost simultaneously receives a letter from India seeking information about Malika, things change. More troubled by his lack of memories than his once frantic efforts to hide them, Rayappa takes his surviving family to the Indian village of Korampally, where the truth — more or less — finally emerges, in James’ defiant and beautiful act of memorialization.
