The Darkness Beholds: (Re)Membering, (Re)Visiting and (Re)Turning to the Self and the City in Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain

The promiscuous gaze of West ever penetrates the “exotic” East, wanting to possess and dominate every part of it indiscriminately. The fascination for its dark secrets arises a momentary pleasure within the Occidental which ebbs once the need to possess the inexplicable is fed. In Sunetra Gupta’s novel, Memories of Rain, Anthony, from London, characterises as a neo-Orientalist who fetishizes Bengal and feminises the nation out of his deep desire to penetrate within its darkness. However, elusive Bengal causes him to be enthralled by Moni, a middle-class Bengali woman whose unyielding silence makes her a body metaphor of the city. When Anthony, her deceitful husband, finally possesses Moni and takes her with him to London after marriage, the gendered dichotomies of colonialist and heterosexual desire operating in the novel find new roots in Moni’s psychological disintegration and her shattered diasporic self. Having so far existed within her husband’s essentialized construction of her identity within the space of diaspora, Moni who shares an unresolved relationship, or “darkness” with Bengal, begins to harbour a nostalgia for her originary home. As her abandoned lover, Calcutta, claims her back, Moni remembers and revisits her memories of the city, and with Anthony, to reevaluate her identity inextricably attached to her homeland, and her idealised version of London. Moni’s selfhood is hence reclaimed in her final return to Calcutta, now a Third Space - because of her constant revision and selective appropriation of the city through her memories. In her reimagination, Calcutta emerges as ambivalent while her migrant identity itself emerges as amorphous (Ahmed 342). Thus, this paper discusses how this postcolonial autobiographical novel uses the narrative of double consciousness, fractured memory and chronotope to deliver its protagonist to a Third Space, a space unbounded by dichotomies and identity. Through discourse analysis, this paper also studies how Gupta’s poetic prose enables Moni’s deliberate performance of (re)imagination - essentially leaving image-clusters peculiar to the modern life and ethos of the middle-class Calcutta Bengalis from the 1960s and 1970s.