Elegy and Affirmation

By Pico Iyer

Amid all the brouhaha surrounding the explosion of writing in English from the Indian subcontinent--the million-dollar advances won by Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie, the 36 languages into which Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things has been translated--it's easy to feel that the all-purpose label of "Anglo-Indian" writing covers a multitude of sins and that too many serious craftsmen are being massed under the Orientalist tent. Abraham Verghese's vision, full of the earnest self-inquiry of a foreigner taking America to his heart, might seem as alien to Romesh Gunesekera as Gunesekera's wrenching, elegiac tales, fragrant with the sea air of his lost Sri Lanka, might be to Verghese. Yet the two of them, an Ethiopian-born Indian Christian now living in Texas and a Sinhalese exile based in London, owe something to South Asia as each produces one of the moment's strongest works of fiction and nonfiction.

Gunesekera's first novel, Reef, became a Booker Prize finalist in 1994, thanks to its meticulous evocation of the marketing of paradise (symbolized by a coral reef in Sri Lanka). His new one, The Sandglass (The New Press; 288 pages; $21.95), sweeps that theme up into an even ampler examination of how independent Sri Lanka devolved into bloody anarchy and its people got scattered around the globe. Its protagonist, essentially, is twilight, and its brief sections, following the hours of the day ("Late Morning," "Quarter to Five," "Darkness"), tell us, unequivocally, that time is running out.

Gunesekera's milieu is that of young girls reading Father Brown mysteries under the mango trees, and his language is crunchy with indigenous hybrids (a golfer's swing is "flatter than a Bambalapitiya cheesecake"). Here he simply unravels the story of two rival clans occupying a piece of land once developed by an English captain with a house called Arcadia. By the end of the book, one scion is running a Shangri-La Hotel, and a matriarch is being buried in chilly London, at a funeral without mourners.

With his exquisite, jeweled miniatures, Gunesekera bears the same relation to a Rushdie that, say, his tiny, teardrop island does to multifarious India. He favors elliptical, charged fragments that show drifters caught between the "flat, newly built motorways" of England, "empty as the moon itself," and an island they can sustain only in memory and illusion. "I know how to live with only a modem and a slip of plastic," says his wandering narrator at the end of this deeply melancholy and beautiful book, "but with each jolt I find I yearn for a story without an end."

In contrast to that sense of irremediable loss, Verghese delivers a more affirmative view of the understandings that arise from heartbreak. With his first book, My Own Country (also in 1994), he won prizes and best-seller status with his humane account of being a foreign doctor tending to AIDS patients in Bible Belt Tennessee at a time when neither homosexuality nor drug abuse was much acknowledged. Now he has turned to the fault lines in himself and in a profession that encourages its practitioners to believe that "M.D. stood for M. Deity."

As The Tennis Partner (HarperCollins; 345 pages; $25) begins, it finds Verghese moving with his wife and two sons to El Paso, Texas, a frontera culture whose dusty glamour seduces this connoisseur of border crossings. But as he separates from his wife, Verghese begins to anchor himself more and more through his regular tennis games with a charismatic Australian medical student of his called David. Only slowly does he realize that his tennis coach, student and friend is, like many doctors (he informs us), caught in a cycle of drug dependency.

The Tennis Partner thus becomes an anguished case history about a sadness too many will recognize: one person sets about destroying himself with addiction, and another gets addicted to trying to help him. The black hole is only deepened when, as Verghese writes, you subscribe to the physician's illusion that "if he attended to the pain of others, it would take care of his own."

Verghese writes with such searching lucidity and is so attentive and engaging a figure that he could hold us just by describing his drives around town. At times he does just that, interspersing accounts of Wimbledon games from 1975 with tales of his medical rounds and glimpses of his marital breakup. But at its core his is a brave and heart-baring story about how even a teacher of internal medicine could not see inside the person closest to him. The fact that it will speak to anyone who has looked with his heart instead of his eyes (just as Gunesekera's novel will appeal to anyone separated from a home he loves) reminds us that "Anglo-Indian" writing has value only if it helps us look past all such categories.