My Family and Other Saints
Kirin Narayan
Harpercollins India,Rs 295
If you want to see the West and the East meet in Bombay 30 years ago, there’s no better place than Kirin Narayan’s home at 13 Janaki Kutir, Juhu

The arcana of childhood are such that between chasing butterflies, Vladimir Nabokov would ransack his “oldest dreams for clues and keys” and retrieve the moment in which a little French girl twittered on the beach — to understand his own metamorphosis. Creating scrapbooks of childhood involves a journey backward, in search of old embarrassments and new epiphanies, and finally holding the “foolscap of life” against the light, to find a watermark.

Kirin Narayan does it, standing on the wet edge of a 1970s Juhu beach, as her past washes up at her feet, like old cans, cowries and driftwood. These are the very things with which Narayan’s precociously spiritual elder brother Rahoul crafts his “Rahoul-beings”, pasting on it, as a final flourish, the enormous eyes that he buys from the God’s Eyes Shop at the Bhuleshwar temple bazaar of central Bombay. The eyes, with all their metaphorical significance, remain throughout the book as do gods, saints and Rahoul — until he goes blind and, watched by another “Rahoul being” in New Mexico, dies of “a mysterious illness spreading among gay men”, AIDS. But we are getting ahead of the story.

Narayan’s memoir My Family and Other Saints is about a house on the crossroads of culture. (The title is a play on Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals on his Corfu days that Narayan read as a 10-year-old, following which she threatened her Maw that she would write something similar about her own bizarre home.)

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