demons of class, religion, and culture by emigrat-
ing to America. Enchanted by the glamour and
rituals of the elaborate marriage ceremony, Layla
embraces her marriage, partly out of guilt for her
sexual indiscretion with an American man, partly
out of fear that she, like her mother, may be dis-
graced, but mostly because she finds love and ac-
ceptance in her new family. Nonetheless, despite
the pornographic letters Sameer has written to her
during their engagement, and in spite of all her at-
tempts to seduce him, including clandestine trips
to faith-healing alims, the marriage fails because
Sameer is gay. Sameer assumes and assures Layla
that all their problems will disappear once they are
in the United States, for Sameer views America as
a utopian world where sexual, religious, and class
differences do not exist. However, Layla, who has
lived in the United States, warns Sameer that no
such utopia exists: In the United States, differences
also cause discrimination and humiliation, except
that the differences targeted are of a kind based on
nationality and ethnicity. The rain dampens the
honeymoon, and the marriage remains uncon-
summated, forcing each partner to confront his
and her crippling secrets.
Ali writes to give voice to the Indian-Muslim
experience and hopes her readers will understand
the particular struggles of her characters as uni-
versal human struggles. Her novel gives readers
a glimpse into the lives of aristocratic Indian-
Muslim women sequestered within the walled
city of old Hyderabad: their distance from, and
camaraderie with, the servants they depend on
and their acceptance and perpetuation of patri-
archy that renders them and their needs invisible
through walls and veils. Madras on Rainy Days,
by revealing the trials and tribulations of a mi-
nority group, the Muslim community in India,
functions as a parallel to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
Road, which exposes the struggles of the minor-
ity Asian-Muslim community in England. The
two novels expose different aspects of Muslim
communities’ struggles and their attempts to rise
above the circumstances that trap them, be they
of race, class, sex, or gender.
Sukanya B. SenapatiAll about H. Hatterr G. V. Desani (1948)
G. V. DESANI’s only novel, All about H. Hatterr has
become a legendary cult book—more often known
about than read. Especially important, Desani’s
novel has influenced Indian English writers such
as Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie.
While Hatterr is Desani’s only novel, he re-
turned to it many times. In the subsequent edi-
tions, he revised the text, adding commentaries
and, in the final version of 1972, a new concluding
chapter. In January 2000, shortly before Desani’s
death, the novel was adapted for the stage in To-
ronto as “Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for
You!” by Rehan Ansari (Modest Productions, The-
atre Passe Muraille Backspace).
Hatterr is hailed as the first Indian-English
postcolonial novel. It uses the English language in
a way it had not been used, bringing alive Indian-
English accents and Desani’s own idiosyncrasies—
his personal style. For this playful relationship with
language, Desani has been likened to James Joyce.
In his introduction to the collection Mirrorwork—
where a part of the novel is included—Salman
Rushdie sees Hatterr as an Indian Tristram Shandy:
“Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the
first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness
of the English language” (xvi). For all its inventive-
ness, intertextuality, multilingual phrasing, and
experimentality, it is also at times a difficult book
to read.
Besides its linguistic extravaganza, the novel is a
complicated story of a man of indefinite European
and Oriental origin, who escapes his past and takes
on the name H. Hatterr. Hatterr, as the first-person
narrator, describes his path among seven sages—
“the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in
India), Madras, Bombay, and the right Honour-
able Sage of Delhi, the wholly Worshipful of Mo-
galsarai-Varanasi, and his naked Holiness Number
One, the Sage of All India himself!” (33)—paro-
dying the way people too easily yield to spiritual
manipulation.
The chapters are divided into three parts. There
is first an “Instruction,” relating an encounter with
one of the seven sages in which Hatterr is given
more or less indecipherable instructions about10 All about H. Hatterr