Once upon a time, a silvery old man, on a hard wooden chair,
nursing an unlit smoky pipe introduced me to a moth eaten, hard bound Reader’s
Digest version of Steinbeck’s “East Of Eden”. He was my grandfather and I was eight,
an age when you grasp only absolutes. The “wise Chinese houseman Lee” the
dreamer inventor “Samuel Hamilton” and the “murderess Cathy” left an indelible impression
on my still untarnished soul. But my eight year old memory buried the book under
a pile of Neville Chute and James Herriot imagery. My only memory of the
narrative was the half –dreamt “Cathy”, a
character who had shocked and threatened
to end the beliefs securing my childhood .
As I grew up, every once in a while, I dived into musty
bookshops crammed to the gills , and started hunting, randomly reading paras
from old books , desperately seeking the
name, the author, the unapologetic evil Cathy who burnt her parents, slept with
her husband’s brother, delivered twins silently like a cat , abandoned them ,
killed the town’s Madam , usurped the town’s whorehouse , introduced S & M
practices to pep up the place and built a “Reputation” in the same town where her children and husband lived. Stenibeck’s Cathy could bring Emily Bronte’s
Cathy of Wuthering Heights fame to her knees. The latter may have tormented Heathcliff
, been free-spirited, beautiful, spiteful, arrogant and childish but she could
never fall to the depth’s of naked evil that Steinbeck’s Cathy could.
In the book, Sam Hamilton says, “I believe there are
monsters born in the world to human parents. To a monster, the norm must seem
monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To a man born without a conscience,
a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish”.
To mark my bad luck, before I rediscovered the book, I found Cathy, twice. There
is such a thing as pure twisted evil. Feeding
on the young, the warm, the weak and the good there are wretches in this
universe who consume their victims, unleashing torture, madness, death,
breeding hatred and in spite of it all sleeping fitfully, living , thriving,
bursting with health . You must have seen them too.
And then one day, a year back, possibly two decades after
my original encounter, in an apple orchard in Raison, Kulu, surrounded by
sheets of rain, I found it. The East Of Eden by John Steinbeck rested in an old
walnut cupboard, beside a creaky wooden stair case, in a faded jacket cover. I
couldn’t finish the book even though , I read through most nights. Though the
rain poured steadily, there was too much laughter in the storm. The days were
spent jumping mountains, cooking , singing, teasing and loving my wealth of friends’ who were on holiday with
me.
But the book possessed me. When I got back to Bangalore, I took
a sabbatical and read as much of Steinbeck as I could …. till I was forced to
work again. East Of Eden, Grapes of
Wrath, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charlie, The Cup Of Gold, Log From The Sea
Of Cortez. He gets it, the grittiness of human emotion, the way life often packs
a double punch when you are down, and yet somewhere in the lost causes , out in
the distance there lies some hope, as unreal as the “The Cup Of Gold” and as real as the truth spun from those who
claim to have seen it.
One day soon, I shall go to Salinas and like the good
Catholics do outside the Pope’s Roman verandah, I shall kneel and kiss the
grounds outside Steinbeck’s house. I will show obeisance to the man who used
the simplest of words to spin one of the greatest tales in the world. A man who
said, “When a man comes to die, no
matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved, his life
must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if
you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should
remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the
world.”
