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Amritvela
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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89 people want to read
About the author
Leena Dhingra
5 books1 followerWriter and actor. Born in India, grew up in Paris and was educated in France, England and Belgium.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 16, 2016
’The same flowers as for the gods?’
‘Why not?’ she returned
Is the darkness inside me that I feel it in Meera’s tale? The amritvela, the time of nectar, before the daylight, when the spirits & creatures of the land leap from dreams into involuntary worship, contemplation, calm transcendence. I could taste all the taints of my own nostalgia, though this story is not mine and I have never lived in or even visited India. Images from my own life surged up intact, in their original light, stained with the hurt that came out of them, but edged now, bounded, pieces of memory that I am starting to learn from now they are cool enough to touch, like Meera coming out of her fever.
It is something special for a text to remain at the beginning of a story and yet satisfy. ‘In Hindi the same word is used for tomorrow and yesterday!’ It moves, yet contains stillness; its mood is eternal, yet it is all about change, metamorphosis. Perhaps it is India itself that feels eternal, like the dust, changing in a gigantic cycle for which the morning, the time of renewal in sweet darkness, is a metaphor that resonates, that captures for me the hum of everything heard by Meera’s Aunt so urgently that she must write over and over Ram Ram Ram
Meera and her charismatic old aunts. They are a world I could hide inside while I wait to wake from my own fevers.
‘Why not?’ she returned
Is the darkness inside me that I feel it in Meera’s tale? The amritvela, the time of nectar, before the daylight, when the spirits & creatures of the land leap from dreams into involuntary worship, contemplation, calm transcendence. I could taste all the taints of my own nostalgia, though this story is not mine and I have never lived in or even visited India. Images from my own life surged up intact, in their original light, stained with the hurt that came out of them, but edged now, bounded, pieces of memory that I am starting to learn from now they are cool enough to touch, like Meera coming out of her fever.
It is something special for a text to remain at the beginning of a story and yet satisfy. ‘In Hindi the same word is used for tomorrow and yesterday!’ It moves, yet contains stillness; its mood is eternal, yet it is all about change, metamorphosis. Perhaps it is India itself that feels eternal, like the dust, changing in a gigantic cycle for which the morning, the time of renewal in sweet darkness, is a metaphor that resonates, that captures for me the hum of everything heard by Meera’s Aunt so urgently that she must write over and over Ram Ram Ram
Meera and her charismatic old aunts. They are a world I could hide inside while I wait to wake from my own fevers.
January 30, 2018
Vignettes, not stories; a memoir, not a novel
To be trite, the life of an expatriate has its ups and downs. I should know, I was one for many years. having emigrated to another land. The greater the cultural difference between old and new countries, the greater the sense of dislocation. Indian migrants to the UK, Canada, or the USA must often feel, as Dhingra says, `misfits, misunderstood, misinterpreted'. They receive the sharp end of the stereotypes the host culture carries. Yet, when expatriates (or `immigrants' as most people call them) return home, they are no longer the same, they have moved in one direction, the old country in another. At last, the realization seeps through---they feel ill at ease in two cultures ! Home is hard to find indeed. AMRITVELA is a subtly drawn portrait of an Indian woman, married to an Englishman, with a daughter, come back to her relatives in India, looking for something indefinite, a sense of belonging perhaps, or the "belongingness" of an Indian childhood before her parents took her to England. She vaguely dreams of returning to India to live, but cannot find any practical way to do this. She tries to sort out impressions, reach conclusions on the nature of Indian society. She obviously cannot maneuver very skillfully in Indian society, not even in the upper class Punjabi circles of New Delhi. That is the substance of this book. I admired Dhingra's portraits and her skill in describing what India and Indian relationships look like to a Western (or Westernized) eye. Some, like her chapter on a visit to a Music Institute, are masterful and recalled to mind many an experience during my own sojourns in that endlessly fascinating and always enveloping country. However, if you are looking for a novel with a plot; a story in which something actually happens, you may be barking up the wrong tree here. This is introspection writ large. These are attractive vignettes with occasional bumpy "impartings of information" through awkward dialogues. The title refers to a special time of day or sweet moments in life---when the author/protagonist dreamed of losing her ambiguous status and becoming "one with India". I suspect AMRITVELA could appeal above all to women with similar backgrounds to Dhingra's or to people searching for direction in life. I don't think they would find too many answers, but it might ease that pain which comes with every tearing up of roots.
To be trite, the life of an expatriate has its ups and downs. I should know, I was one for many years. having emigrated to another land. The greater the cultural difference between old and new countries, the greater the sense of dislocation. Indian migrants to the UK, Canada, or the USA must often feel, as Dhingra says, `misfits, misunderstood, misinterpreted'. They receive the sharp end of the stereotypes the host culture carries. Yet, when expatriates (or `immigrants' as most people call them) return home, they are no longer the same, they have moved in one direction, the old country in another. At last, the realization seeps through---they feel ill at ease in two cultures ! Home is hard to find indeed. AMRITVELA is a subtly drawn portrait of an Indian woman, married to an Englishman, with a daughter, come back to her relatives in India, looking for something indefinite, a sense of belonging perhaps, or the "belongingness" of an Indian childhood before her parents took her to England. She vaguely dreams of returning to India to live, but cannot find any practical way to do this. She tries to sort out impressions, reach conclusions on the nature of Indian society. She obviously cannot maneuver very skillfully in Indian society, not even in the upper class Punjabi circles of New Delhi. That is the substance of this book. I admired Dhingra's portraits and her skill in describing what India and Indian relationships look like to a Western (or Westernized) eye. Some, like her chapter on a visit to a Music Institute, are masterful and recalled to mind many an experience during my own sojourns in that endlessly fascinating and always enveloping country. However, if you are looking for a novel with a plot; a story in which something actually happens, you may be barking up the wrong tree here. This is introspection writ large. These are attractive vignettes with occasional bumpy "impartings of information" through awkward dialogues. The title refers to a special time of day or sweet moments in life---when the author/protagonist dreamed of losing her ambiguous status and becoming "one with India". I suspect AMRITVELA could appeal above all to women with similar backgrounds to Dhingra's or to people searching for direction in life. I don't think they would find too many answers, but it might ease that pain which comes with every tearing up of roots.
December 9, 2013
Good Novel....
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews