An afternoon with weeds and kek: Year of the Weeds (Siddhartha Sarma)

It's a Sunday afternoon in Leiden with its typical sadness-inducing rainy weather, sporadic sounds of mopeds zooming down the cobbled street, laughterless cycling to and from the supermarket and universal grief that tomorrow is a Monday again! While all this generally would be the perfect recipe for me to wallow in self pity, this Sunday has been different and it is all because of a book about a small boy.

I know I have been creating an unnecessary amount of prologue for this and before I finally launch into what the book is, I really need to give you the backstory of how I met it in the first place, because no good story starts without making you already root for the people in it.

Honest confession: I generally avoid YA books these days (YA= Young Adults for all those who are completely clueless in these Gen Now short forms). The main reason for that is they are in general terrible. Bad plots, bad writing and worse, popular without a shred of authenticity in their thought. I know I am starting to sound like a sour puss but its true--I mean how many times can you read the same rehashed material published under very similar confusing titles like --My love story, I had a love story, Remember my love story et al. So, I was doing what most self-opinionated and bad book readers would do--I was judging YA by a few "weeds" which I had the bad luck of being acquainted with. I picked up Year of the Weeds not because I was relieved that its title didn't have 'love' in it or because I got an epiphany about it. I picked it up because I met Siddhartha Sarma at a literary festival which I helped curate. Sarma is the kind of author that most publishers and of course literary festival curators adore. He is awfully nice, soft spoken and just so beautiful to listen to that you almost wouldn't need that pain relief tablet that most literary festival organisers pop like valium to keep their sanity! Anyway, so I had heard of him earlier from a few friends as well and when I met him and of course I had no idea what he had written, I quickly bought his book to at least sound like a semi-intelligent human in front of him. The fest went on, I talked to him twice, but thankfully unlike a lot of authors he never really referred to his book and I silently congratulated myself as I still didn't find the time to read it. I was sure it must be some simplified story of life of tribals fighting the government system (what I could gather from the blurb which seriously doesn't do the book justice) and I avoided it till my long flight back to Netherlands. The flight was empty, the movies available were terrible and I wasn't in the mood to start reading Nayantara Sehgal as I was depressed enough. So out came this wonderful YA book which had somehow weeded itself into my hand luggage.

Year of the Weeds is marketed as a YA book and I for one have no frigging idea why! Yes, its protagonist is a ten year old Korok, a Gond boy who takes care of the garden at the DFO's house in a remote village in Odisha and is friends with the "epho's" daughter (the indianisation of these words is wonderfully done throughout the story), but that's all that is young adult about it! It is more like a Harry Potter story, marketed at the young but more important to be read by adults.

The story is simple. A young Korok, whose father has been wrongfully incarcerated in the Balangir jail, works as a gardener and suddenly finds himself in the midst of an intrigue when the government announces that there is bauxite under the sacred hill that houses his village and that the Gonds need to be removed in order for mines to be made. It is a classic David vs Goliath story, the Gonds fighting a system which is not only indifferent towards them but rather happily uses them as collateral for its own profit. It is a story anyone who even sniffs a newspaper has read and heard numerous times. However, what differentiates this story from the drab newspaper stories is--"kek". Kek or cake is one of the many ways that Sarma paints his characters with, simple everyday things that make you laugh out at their absurdity as well as make you aware about the deep fracture lines that lay between people who live side by side but know nothing about the other.

Sarma's Korok is a child who views the world through his own version of truth--truths which are as fundamental as weeds growing in his beloved garden. He hates "kek", watches English movies with the "epho's" daughter without understanding a word but being too polite to refuse and yet is quick to understand the hierarchies that abound in the world around him even when their proponents say that they believe in being equal. Sarma's wry humour as he probes and criticizes government schemes for tribal betterment,  the young "revolutionary" brigades who are looking for the next big cause they can appropriate or the Maoists looking for their next big opportunity, reminds one of a young Upamanyu Chatterjee, only nicer.

How does Korok save his village? Well for that you need to read the book as to say anything more will just rob you of being ushered into the amazing world of Korok and his Deogan.

"Sometimes, Korok, it is best if the sorkar forgets you", says a wise old character in the book. However, this book is to remember and be a reminder-- to remind the sorkar (which is busy selling everything to the Company (read Ambani and co.) for real) and the people around it the importance of these disparate voices, the tribal lands and their stories.

I am going to miss reading about Korok and his antics and I do wish Sarma writes a sequel to this, or at least something like Korok's adventures into the world of adults. Till then, everytime I eat kek or watch "Obotar" on the kompitar, I will remember a young gangly boy who lives with his goat and grows the most beautiful garden.
 
till the next time
keeping it bookish

the bookbug