Anhe ghore da daan12/7/2022 ![]() You gather more than you pick these things as you go on reading. Equally straining is the plight of rickshaw riders who are struggling to cope with battery operated rickshaws that are now plying their trade in the nearby town. The men, mostly seniors, in the village gather and go from one spot to the other seeking solution or redemption of some sort. A villager’s house is being demolished, and though illegal in its existence, the incumbent family has no place left to go. As we move through the book the consummate dejection is conveyed through the myriad exchanges that many characters have but not to the extent that it may leap out at the reader. Singh’s approach of moving through quadrants of mini-events where characters act as coordinates for pausing in time and space is efficient for the setting the book seeks to invoke. The truth about character and of a character is more of a hegemonic approach to writing text than it is to being true to the text. For that copious abstinence Singh is perhaps the conductor than he is the unwilling quotient. At times the book can become a frustrating read for its lack of acerbic wit, or forthrightness that though present lacks the charm of quotable ideas. Though every novel, aspirational in one way or the other, seeks to develop a relationship with the reader, Singh’s genre-turning intervention is the detour from that approach. The events themselves are ruminative, rather than consequential to any degree. There is no narrative thread to follow, sans the indicator at the beginning of the book that sets the events of the day in motion. There is, however, difficulty in following the book as it meanders between characters, who in the entirety of the book, dissolve into each other to often give the impression of the same person speaking every other time. Even more so if one has, even for a fleeting moment, witnessed a cold morning in rural Punjab, where the novel is set. Singh’s prose and his technique in which he completely forgoes the labour of description is extremely effective. The focus shifts from family to family, and character to character as the inner billings of a village on the verge of being gulped by industrialists has begun to take its toll within, and despite the inhabitants. Alms in the Name of a Blind Horse is not so much a narrative as it a quadrant approach to telling the story of a village the finality of which is squeezed into a single day. Singh’s strengths are found in what he refuses to describe for us. Gurdial Singh's Alms In The Name of A Blind Horse ![]()
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