There are very few books that can turn you into a zealous bookseller. Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches will compel you to scroll down your phone list to urge everyone―book-lovers, garden growers and plant enthusiasts―to get a copy of the book.
Lush and lyrical, it will keep you up at night. It is thrilling, deep, wise and dazzling―an epic novel that spans centuries and continents. Pariat tells the story through four characters―Shai, who comes home to Shillong from Delhi, lost and without direction. She travels to Mawalang to meet her old nanny. Evelyn, a science student from Cambridge who travels to India with a fishing fleet in early 20th century, hoping to find “the tree that held all the trees”. Johann Wolfgang van Goethe is on a trip to Italy in the 1780s. And Carl Linnaeus―the father of taxonomy who is responsible for classifying organisms―is travelling to Lapland. Pariat explores his journey through poetry.
A good storyteller, as a character says in the book, is like someone leading a person through a forest. “It is richer the more time you spend in there, the more you walk around and stop and look at trees and the flowers and the leaves,” Evelyn is told in the forest. Pariat does just that. It is a journey that is long-winded and life-changing.
At the centre of the narrative―binding Goethe and Linnaeus―are journeys into the unknown surrounded by nature. This green is the thread that binds the book together. Its central idea is the relationship with the land. “All is leaf,” as Goethe writes in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It comes at a time when climate change and survival are critical, yet still dense and distant topics.
Pariat brings alive what lies at the heart of debates in botany―how nature is viewed either to be tamed or to be gazed at with wonder. It is this battle that has defined the world. As Shai’s friend Dajied tells her, “Most people in this country, coming from feudal landlessness and exploitation, have no idea how to deal with others who think of land not merely as a factor of production, but as imagination, an Eden to live in.... It is a conflict between those who think a bigha of land makes you finally free and those who think that many hills don’t make you rich.”
Like the forest, the book is dense. Pariat is not the first writer to detail the lonely battle that women in botany in the 19th century had to fight, with their experiments being dismissed by the world of science ruled by men. There is The Signature of All Things (2013) by Elizabeth Gilbert that deals with these big ideas through Alma Whittaker, who loved mosses. Gilbert, too, tackles the idea of looking to plants and the interconnectivity of the universe in the expansive novel.
Pariat crams a universe in her book. She touches on the politics of the north-east, of tribals, of ‘civilisation’, of the philosophy that when you take, you must give back, and of old fashioned gratitude―a practice that has been forgotten. Shai is told when the land belongs to everyone in the village. If you tended it, it was yours, but if you left it fallow, it reverted to the commons. This kind of “fluid ownership” did not sit well with the British. But at the heart of the novel are the different ideas of freedom.
Everything the Light Touches is a special book, one that lodges deep in your heart, changing you. Buy it. You will want to grab strangers at the bookshop and tell them to buy it, too.
Everything the Light Touches
By Janice Pariat
Published by HarperCollins India
pages 512; Price Rs799