Nilanjana Sengupta’s new book is a bold but uneven attempt at taking on the role of women in minority religious communities through a blend of research and mystical fictioneering.
After her last book The Votive Pen: Writings on Edwin Thumboo (Penguin Random House, 2020) was shortlisted for both the 2021 Singapore Book Award and the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize 2022, I was pleasantly surprised to be offered a chance to review her new book.
Chickpeas to Cook & Other Stories is a hybrid work that considers smaller religious communities in Singapore. The approach that Sengupta has taken is to include a brief overview of the religion being written about, then more in-depth research about the community before a creative storytelling chapter based on interviews she has done with members of the community.
Here is an example: For Christianity, she considers the Eurasian community. The brief paragraph on Christianity is framed through the mystical nature of the faith, looking at Christ as a figure of sacrifice and love. While valid, it does feel rather vague and presumes too much upon a reader already knowing the basic tenets of the faith. The ensuing chapter on the Eurasians focuses on their culture, their cuisine, their lineage and the matriarchal bent of their families. There’s nothing about the Christian faith in this segment. Eurasians generally subscribed to Catholicism, and I was expecting more directed writing regarding the aspect of faith here given the nature of the book as a whole.
If the intent is to write about these faiths from a non-academic perspective, then Richard Holloway’s dramatic description of the Parsees’ Towers of Silence in A Little History of Religion is a riveting example of an entry point into their faith.
On the top of the Malabar Hills south of the city of Mumbai on the west coast of India, tourists might catch a glimpse through their binoculars of a mysterious stone tower rising above the trees. They are forbidden to climb the hill to visit the tower themselves, but if they used a drone to photograph it they would see that it has a flat roof surrounded by a low perimeter wall. And the roof is divided into three concentric circles. The camera might catch sight of carrion-eating birds at work on the roof, devouring the dead bodies that are arranged there, men on the first circle, women on the second circle and the tiny bodies of children on the third circle.
In Chickpeas To Cook, the story in the segment on Christianity, ‘New Beginnings’, takes the form of a play script, revolving around two main characters, a mother-daughter pair, having a long conversation on the porch of their house late in the evening.
The dialogue is loaded with references to various food dishes, the infamous Eurasian love for dancing, and growing up in Katong. It is replete with everyday loan words that derive from a variety of languages and spins an extended thread on tracing one’s genetic heritage. Themes of relationships, love and a generation gap in the Eurasian community are woven throughout. Interestingly, there’s only a brief mention of religion, a passing reference to attending an Ignation spiritual retreat. This is accompanied by a voluminous footnote on Ignatian spirituality. In fact, footnotes are found on almost every page, perhaps a reflection of how Othered the language and practices of the Eurasian community have become.
And yet, I’m not convinced that a scene is the best way to portray this community. For one, I was looking for a more targeted consideration of faith in the storytelling. Instead, the impetus seemed to be to try to throw everything gathered in interviews into a scene. The result is that the lines are overwritten. It’s like eating an entire sugee cake at one sitting. Way too jelak. It contains detail upon detail mapped onto a very lean plot. One that doesn’t really move anywhere other than within a narrow well of memories and worn tropes of loss and change. And whilst the point-of-view of the two women is well explicated, as it is in all the stories, I do have to ask, where is the lived relational engagement with faith?
The structure of research + creative fiction is repeated for each of the different faiths. The net result is a kind of creative primer into various faiths. But it’s not academic research, so there’s no way to ascertain the statements that are presented as factual. And as a primer, quite a lot of the context around a community is not very religion-centric, which seems to be a lost opportunity given the way the book is scoped.
However, some of the women that Sengupta meets are deeply spiritual beings, and their depth is reflected in Sengupta’s prose, which at turns contains lyrical sweeps of grandeur while containing Rumi-esque formulations on spirituality.
This is from the last story on Zoroastrianism:
Finally, I found her after crossing the wooden Japanese bridge. She stood waiting in the radiance of the sun, slightly indistinct in all the luminosity. The golden haze has left tints on her cheekbones, entered the satiated afternoon of her eyes.
And later on, describing her interviewee, Mithra:
Mithra, born into a house of prayers, growing up in their shadows like once, long ago, an ox had shaded the infant Zarathustra when he was cast in the path of a raging horde. Before she really understood, she saw; and before she saw she heard. The deep glottal sound of the Avestan words. Her father— standing by the window, in his white vest of the faithful, with its giroban, a little pocket for keeping good deeds—would say his prayers for what seemed like interminable hours, while life parted ways and thundered around them, leaving them in a little eye of calm.
In thinking about the contemplative turn of phrase or the way in which the lived wisdom of story merges with and within the everyday world, the exquisite voice of John O’Donohue in Anam Cara comes to mind:
The idea of memory was very important in Celtic spirituality. There are lovely prayers for different occasions. There are prayers for the hearth, for kindling the fire, and for smooring the hearth. At night, the ashes were smoored over the burning coals, sealing off the air. The next morning the coals would still be alive and burning. There is also a lovely prayer for the hearth keepers that evokes St. Bridget, who was both a pagan Celtic goddess and a Christian saint. In herself, Bridget focuses the two worlds easily and naturally.
As a genre, Chickpeas To Cook is an attempt at braving the variegated country of creative non-fiction. But ultimately, the book is too diffused in its reach. Given how layered, complex and often problematic this intersection of faith and gender is, might it not have been better to focus on one faith? I would have appreciated more situated research about one particular faith followed by a series of snappier vignettes, perhaps even multiple stories that offer different entry points from age, social mobility, education level, and the like.
