Wind from the East

It’s as rare as a sighting of Salman Rushdie in Iran—Indian writers setting their story in foreign lands without a single Indian character. Our literary Brahmins have always hesitated to cross the seas in their narrative, perhaps because of native loyalty, or simply cultural cowardice. Kunal Basu, the Oxford don who wrote the enchanting story The Japanese Wife — about two pen friends who get married through their letters and live as man and wife without ever meeting — has sent forth into the world a masterpiece, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure. Basu has the heart of a poet, the fussiness of a librarian, and the bawdiness of Laurence Paros. Lyrical, insightful and impressionistically descriptive, this novel is the story of a Portuguese surgeon, Antonia Mario who travels to China to discover a cure for syphilis in 1898. His father is dying of the ‘pox’. Antonio believes that a cure for the ‘Canton Rash’ is available in Peking.

Unless he has strong memories of having reincarnated as a pleasure-loving aristocrat in 19th century Lisbon, or as a Chinese Mandarin during the Boxer’s Rebellion, Basu’s sheer scale of detail is impressive. The Festa das Latas that offered delights “as tempting as the festival queen blowing kisses under the lilac jacarandas of Lisbon”; the bazaars of Alfama full of thieving Arabs; the syphilitics crying inside the Monsatery of Jeronimos, are all vignettes in imagination’s time travel. Antonio’s quest for the cure for syphilis — a disease which in that century was so feared that “even lepers ran from them” and “kind priests hurled rocks to keep them away” — evolves into the inner discovery of the doctor’s pain-filled karma. It changes him, robbing him of peace, and perhaps a singular bride, the witty, chain-smoking Arees. Enigmatic China is an illustrated volume of exotica in Basu’s hands: the Dowager Empress invisible in her summer palace; the healing mysteries of Nei Ching; jade fountains, lotus pavilions and rebellious peasants thirsting for blood. The story is simple and classic: a quest, an elusive lover; loyalty, betrayal and loss. As much as it is Antonio’s story, it’s also the enchanting and tortured Fumi’s, who teaches Antonio both acupuncture and exquisite lovemaking.

Whether it be Marquez or Lampedusa, history is the canvas of the novelist who dreams big — when imagination meets history, sometimes it makes history. The Yellow Emperor’s Cure comes close. While attempting a book of this scale, it is usual for the diverse cast of characters to become pale shadows flitting about the protagonists. Not here. Padres try to neutralise the manuscript black market and get murdered, setting off a chain of suffering and vengeance; French, American, British and Spanish diplomats create an Occidental world of their own as the rebellion begins to spread like Chinese ink on water; eunuchs and soldiers, pox-cursed concubines and Chinese pornography, and the Yellow Emperor, who slept with 1,200 women and ascended to heaven as a pure soul, are part of Basu’s flamboyant pageant. His imagery is worthy of a master: “he felt empty like the temple robbed of its Buddha” or “the seven hills of the city rise like giant seahorses from the Tagus”. Only, the author seems to be unhealthily obsessed with sardines in the few early pages: women with eyes like sardines and monks like bunched sardines, but the smell quickly passes.

In book-a-minute India teeming with litfests and yada yada, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure is a great remedy for literary despair.