As a child, I stored precious possessions in an empty Parle Toffees tin box with a picture of a girl with swishing skirts holding a tambourine above her head. Most stuff that went in was deemed unique, primarily because it had lost its set or pair. One star-shaped earring, a pink feather, a yellow scented eraser, an unusual stamp shabbily scissored from a mail envelope, a shiny pebble, a blue satin bow with bits of tape and gift-wrapping paper sticking to it, a gold-flecked marble, a hair clip. A harvest of lost things. Then, with due deliberation, I would incant, “Khul ja, Simsim” (Open Sesame), famously known from the tale of Alibaba and Forty Thieves in One Thousand and One Nights, to unlock my box of hidden treasures. Due to a property dispute, when our family of three moved from my father’s house, it was left behind, and when I look back in time, I know that the memory of that box is the real treasure, and the subsequent loss of it is still a pang.

To open the cover of Geet Chaturvedi’s Simsim, translated from the Hindi by Anita Gopalan, is to unlock many such memories, emotions, and histories stored within its characters and their stories. Chaturvedi skillfully weaves narrative time through three voices in Simsim—the mournful voice of Basar Mal Jethamal Purswani, looking back at the ruins of his life caused by the loss of his love, land, and cultural identity during the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947; the struggling, contemporary voice of  “I,” a young unnamed graduate who is facing an intergenerational conflict with his father; and the surreal voice of a book cover torn away from its pages that laments the plight of women and books during the world’s worst insurgencies. Altogether, these create a novel of deep abiding love, loss, displacement, and architectural complexity. 

At the story’s beginning, Basar Mal, an exiled old man, spends his days running the dilapidated Sindhu library in Bombay. His days open with a thermos full of milk for his coffee but also with bubbling laughter of Jaam, his lost love, and their clandestine meetings in a madrasa located in Larkana, a town in Sind, Pakistan. His wife, Jalo, another victim of partition, cannot have children and spends her days loving an adopted plastic doll. Memories of partition riots, Basar Mal’s days in refugee camps choked with people and sickness, clerks asking for documents for disbursing jobs to migrants, and images of land mafia gradually show up in the story to symbolize power and politics of land and man’s insatiable greed for it. By the end of the story, it is this historical impact of battles fought over land that Chaturvedi portrays through Basar Mal’s victimization, the young graduate’s present joblessness and the torn book cover’s lamentations about preserving cultural heritage, which allows the readers to see beyond its three narrators and situate this debut novel as a seminal work of Hindi Literature. 

Chaturvedi also illustrates this larger theme for the reader in Basar Mal’s tirade to his wife, Jalo, as he imagines what happened to his homeland, Sindh, is now happening to his Sindhu library.

“Most people in this world want to snatch other people’s land. It’s not as if they don’t have enough, no, it’s simply because they have unbridled lust to possess, to conquer. It’s not hunger but lust, Jalo! Hunger is sated for a while, but lust isn’t, even for a moment. It increases with every fulfillment.”

He goes on to say, “Every king invading other kingdoms was actually the land mafia. From Napoleon to Hitler to Stalin to Franco. So is every country that encroaches along their shared border, wanting to steal the territory of the neighbouring country. Jinnah wanted our land for his people, for himself. He occupied our land. And so, I had to abandon my own soil and sit here. We’ve historically been victims of different types of land mafia! Today, the mafia is again after me. Can anyone save me from being victimized? Maybe this is my historical fate. Maybe.”

Chaturvedi's verses in Devanagari, although not patterned in a strict haiku structure and form, capture similar minimalism and perceptiveness. As a native Hindi speaker, what charms me about each couplet is its rich, compact expression, which naturally expands when unfolded into English. So, in translating Hindi to English, especially those places that blend poetry and prose, Gopalan would have needed to ensure a consistent narrative voice and seamless integration of both sections within the novel to provide a holistic coherence to the overall cadence of the work—not to forget that structural differences like line breaks and stanza forms that move into straightforward prose paragraphs would have offered yet another layer of syntactical complexity. To Anita Gopalan's credit, this weaving results in an astonishing, textured blend of language and meaning that defies both forms. 

However, Gopalan's skill as a translator truly shines through when dealing with the intertextuality in Geet Chaturvedi's work. Chaturvedi’s work draws upon various literary and cultural references, which positions his writing within a global literary tradition and provides a profound animus to his prose. In Simsim, too, Gopalan incorporates Chaturvedi's references at the beginning of every chapter to other literary works and authors, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and several others, the effect of which feels like Simsim is conversing with them. The first chapter begins with Ben Okri's famous quote from The Famished Road: 

“In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.” 

To which Geet Chaturvedi in Simsim answers, “When a river becomes a road, it first loses its current. Then its waters. Then it loses itself. To become a road is the biggest cruelty that can befall a river.” 

Clearly, this passage sets the tone for personal loss manifesting into devastation on a larger scale, having a historical impact reverberate across time.