Description
When Raj, a reluctant schoolteacher with a weakness for schoolgirls, Hindu activist and would-be published novelist, protests against a breach of tradition at his temple, he is confronted by a trail of corrupted power which leads to the heart of the post-colonial Guyanese state. By turns acutely perceptive and self-deceiving, a quirky individualist and a stickler for convention, self-aggrandising and self-mocking, Raj is a dangling man, desperate to create something of value in a shabby and corrupt despotism. Forced to look inwards, he discovers that the truth-telling must begin with himself.
Persaud portrays the Indo-Guyanese community in the early 1980s as a community under intense stress. When sections of the leadership of Hindu organisations have come to an uneasy accommodation with the authoritarian corruption of Fox Burton's African-dominated ruling party, the breach of convention of taking chairs into their temple takes on a huge symbolic significance for the temple's young activists. For them, promoting Hinduism amongst an increasingly secularised Indo-Guyanese community has become an act of ethnic survival.
"Poetic in tone, surrealistic in thrust... a good addition to Caribbean literature."
The Caribbean Writer
Sasenarine Persaud was born in Guyana. He has published two novels, a collection of stories and four collections of poetry. He currently lives and works in the USA.
