`I could begin with my name but forget it, why waste time, it doesn't matter in this city of twelve million names."
So begins Raj Kamal Jha's debut novel, The Blue Bedspread, and the reader is introduced to the narrator, who sits in a room in modern Calcutta, settling down at his desk to write for the night. In the room next door lies a baby. Neither the identity of the narrator nor of the baby is clear. What follows is the rekindling of myriad shards of memory from a past family life littered with sexual abuse, incest and violence. The narrator tells the reader he wants to establish the truth of the baby's identity, but it soon becomes clear that this man is using the act of writing to relate his own confession.
As the story unravels, the narrator sketches out the lives of the principal characters in his life - his father, mother and sister. Family life is described. Childhood, young adulthood and sexual awakening is realistically and acutely evoked, and the narrative builds powerful portraits of the many characters' lives and experiences.
Minor characters flit in and out of the story, and the consequences of their actions and existence are shown to deeply affect the emotions of the narrator's family. An old man commits suicide after one of his beloved pigeons is killed by a tram. The pigeon's death is witnessed by the narrator's sister and deeply upsets her. The narrator is raped by his father and discovers his own sexuality by exploring his sister's body under the blue bedspread of the title. This same bedspread is the only link between the many characters of the novel and the two that we meet first, and comes to symbolise an area of both refuge and uneasy association.
All of these details about the family are mixed with multiple stories, inventions and conjectures about the narrator's life and the city where the novel is set. These details are also shadowed by the constant presence of the mysterious baby. The information builds up until the final, dramatic unveiling of the truth.
What is clear from the start is that the narrator has to unburden his confession on to the reader, and thus there is a very effectively-drawn air of desperation throughout the novel. But, like someone seeking to end a habit of subconsciously forgetting a harrowing experience, the narrator has to explore the processes (and recesses) of his own memory to make sense of it and tell his tale. And this is what makes The Blue Bedspread so special: it attempts to establish the truth through the telling of stories.
As the narrator says to his day-old charge at the end of the first section: "In short, I will tell you happy stories and I will tell you sad stories. And remember, my child, your truth lies somewhere in between."
This confessional device is very effective, and it is to the author's great credit that this constantly self-referring story does not become distracted from its focus. The reader is always sure about one thing: the narrator has a dark secret which will eventually be revealed.
Unusually, this is not a novel with a non-western setting that can be read like an ethnographical introduction to a foreign culture; The Blue Bedspread is obsessed with telling a story and nothing else. But it is also a powerful, haunting and sometimes shocking novel that deserves to be read at one sitting and then reread.
Cormac Kinsella is a critic and the editor of the Waterstone's Guide to Irish Books