Inheritance
February 2013
Balli Kaur Jaswal / Sleepers
Inheritance mimics the form of a Babushka doll, with the Singh family’s tale sitting within the larger microcosm of Singapore’s Punjabi community and further encircled by the narrative of a newly independent state’s shifting identity. Balli Kaur Jaswal skilfully traverses individual perspectives on both the larger experiences of displacement that beset migrant cultures and the insidious motives of the state.
Throughout Inheritance a keenly felt refrain of nostalgia is woven, either the immigrant’s for their former country, those who yearn for an earlier version of Singapore, or the expatriate’s. When Narain, the second son, is sent to study engineering in America – both because education is highly prized and to elude rumours that he is gay – his younger sister Amrit packs him a suitcase. For almost a year he avoids it, not wanting to be like the other identifiable foreign students, but when told that Amrit has gone missing he opens it. Instantly the culture he is trying so hard to deny, the self he is trying to peel off, subsumes him: ‘Sandalwood and cardamom drifted into the air and tinted the skies a rich orange.’
Unfolding over two decades, from the 70s to the 90s, the Singhs each narrate their family’s tribulations. Harbeer, the father, is a proud migrant filled with nationalism for his new country. Gurdev, a father himself, desires to secure his daughters’ futures even if it means depriving others in his family of theirs. Narain’s attempts to attain independence and integrity are repeatedly circumscribed by the responsibility of caring for his sister and his country’s outlawing of homosexuality. Amrit, perceived by her family as ‘acting up’, suffers from what is obvious to modern readers as being bipolar disorder, which unchecked and unrecognised ruptures her former self. These sections are shattering for we, not her fellow family members, are the ones privy to these confidences.
The fragmentation of Amrit’s self is an echo of the country’s denied self. Fissures running through the family mirror the scars of the country’s development. Surveillance, both from community and state, is stifling. It seems that personal fulfilment and difference must be sacrificed at the altar of the greater good; modernisation and sanitisation, both physical and moral. In this society, Punjabi superstitions and community scrutiny form a second straightjacket.
For the most part Jaswal’s writing is as lush as the place she conjures. ‘The air was sticky all year round and crickets filled the dusty kampongs with mournful songs after the rain destroyed their nests.’ Occasionally, it veers into polemics, such as when it addresses brutal school competitiveness or in the letter Narain writes to the Director of the Social Development Unit criticising their attempts at social engineering. But then, this form of rhetoric is understandable for these state-driven values have destructive repercussions. The ending resonates beyond these more overtly political passages for it contains a powerful indictment of modernism at all costs, in a way that might only be rendered possible through fiction.
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