Grapes of Wrath

I had purchased the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 1996. That is what my scribbling on the book's title page says. It was a paperback edition. That is the year Monisha and I got married. I cannot remember exactly from where I bought it or why. But I bought it. I guess I read about it somewhere. Possibly in some must read before you die kind of list. Google was yet to be invented and the idea of an internet was known but was possibly not experienced. So I must have read it in some magazine or newspaper. It is entirely possible that I bought it from the book seller who used to come to the ET office with a suitcase full of books on the recommendation of one of the more erudite colleagues.

Anyway, without getting further into what made me buy the book or from where, let me confess that I did not know much about this book before I bought it. It is seen as an American classic is all that I knew. Prior to this, my knowledge about American writers was limited to Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway only. 

But as things turned out the newly married young man in Calcutta didn't find the time or could never get into the frame of mind to read the book in twenty four years. From time to time I made unsuccessful attempts but never went beyond the first few pages. I cannot analyse why it was so. Possibly I had grown bored with fiction. 

These attempts continued and the book somehow remained visible in my book shelf despite two relocation of residence during this period. Finally as a the Covid19 lockdown rolled into its third version I picked it up. By this time I had grown confident that I could easily scale those 500-pagers.  Just before picking it up I had finished To Kill A Mockingbird. The book, I found, had gone yellow. Cheaper editions use a kind of paper that leaks acid and the pages turn yellow after a few years by which time you are expected to finish reading it. Regardless of how late I was in picking it up, I picked it up.

I could never have chosen a better time to pick this book up. A time when millions of unfed, jobless, migrant labourers in India are going through extreme hardship. They are walking with their family and belongings for hundreds of kilometers to their homes in the villages of India. They are leaving the big cities where they had gone to work and are now going back or are trying to go back to their villages where they think they belong. 

Their hardship and misfortune is indescribable. From the comfort of our homes we are reading about them in the newspapers or watching the images on television and facebook. Some are carrying their old mothers on their backs. Some carrying their children on their shoulders. Some are even giving birth on the road side and then walking again. I saw the photograph of a man holding a table fan in his hand as he walks down the highway with his family. It seemed that was a very dear possession for him. This image somehow haunts me. I do not know why. The newspapers are full of incredibly sad stories of human tragedies. I will not get into those details here. I am tired of them. I feel sick. I feel guilty. Terribly guilty that while I read books from the comfort of my house these people are facing such insurmountable challenges. You could just google them up. 

While the Indians are trying to walk back to their illusive homes from their places of work, the Americans in this book are leaving their homes in the dust bowl in search of work in California - the promised land. Both are illusive - the work and better life in California for the Americans and the security and comfort of village homes for the Indians. Both are in an existential crisis. The Indians are not aware that they are not welcome back in their own villages. The resident villagers see them as a threat, being carriers of the disease and are scared of them. Trouble is breaking out in various villages over their unwelcome entry into their own homes. May be not headline news but they are happening. 

The Americans in this story are also not aware that they are not welcome in California. 

Here a family of extremely poor farmers from Oklahoma in the 30s' America, the Joads, dispossessed of their ancestral land and livelihood, are travelling to the promised land of California in search of steady work and a better life. Most incongruously for an Indian like me to conceive, the poor Americans are driving a car or truck, as they call it. No matter how "beat up" the car is it is impossible for me to imagine this in an Indian context. The poor, dispossessed, landless farmers in India cannot afford even a bicycle.  Here the Indian family in a similar situation would have travelled by train, perhaps without ticket. 

But the description of the American poverty is so realistic and palpable that one can soon recognise them as being indeed poor and the beat up car becomes more symbolic of their poverty than their relative affluence. Poor, rustic people think and behave in a similar way all over the world. If you have intimately mixed with a poor Indian family in any village, you will be able to identify with the Joads and see them as really poor farmers, despite their car. I have just accepted that to an American family a car is as common as an image of Kali or Laxmi in an Indian household. Everyone has it. In fact the Joads never had a car. They bought it for this journey and got cheated by the sucker of a used car salesman. Used car sellers are also similar across the world and adopt similar techniques to dupe their buyers or sellers :-) 

I am right now at around page 350. The entire book is 535. I will possibly need 3 more days. The Joads have reached California and the welcome has not been good. They have realised that their dream is already shattered. It is slowly breaking apart. They have learnt a new word Okies. They realise that they are Okies.

Page 385 - "The stars came down wonderfully close and the sky was soft. Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother. I read these lines today (11th May, 2020) two days after that tragic accident in which a running goods train took away the lives of a family of 15 tired migrant labourers who had fallen asleep in the night on the railway lines near Aurangabad. They were walking towards their home some hundreds of miles away. I did not read the news for details. There are other similar deaths happening on the highways but this got bigger prominence due to the number of victims.

I finished reading the book last night. In the wee hours of this morning actually, Wednesday 13th May, 2020. I will write down my feelings a little later. I am off with the Dubliners now.