A Matter of Cognition: The “Country” We Live In
A Matter of Geography
by Jasmine d’Costa
Mosaic Press: 2017
246 pages
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” This quotation by the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard placed at the beginning of chapter two of Jasmine d’Costa’s novel A Matter of Geography captures very well the overall nature of this fascinating work of fiction. A Matter of Geography is a novel about many things since the writer’s mind, naturally, is called up to use words in order to make sense of the world and the self and thus cannot draw a neat line to artificially restrain its subject matter. Good novels, works that make us think and rethink life, our position in this world and the greater universe, need expansion. They need a “geography” that crosses boundaries so that we can see where and how our neighbours live and how we ourselves live—or perhaps ought to live.
This book is a call for us to walk in our neighbours’ streets, sit at their table, pray their prayers, put on their clothes, see how they, like us, also love, and love deeply. It is also a call to see existence beyond the socio-political realities that we have become accustomed to—enslaved by. This unbound “geography” is presented in the novel as the necessary step, the needed empathy or openness to forge community among people who may otherwise be labeled as our enemies. And it is also the necessary step to realize our humanity and eschew oppressive boundaries that have constituted us—erecting us into “buildings” of one type or another. The novel calls us out of ourselves, inviting us to see the “other” as a part of our world even if at times that “other” seems alien and our instinctual first reaction—which is really a fear born out of non-reflection—would be to shut our door on his/her face and retreat into the self. But are we not all others? Are we not the other who is the other of an other in a sort of ad infinitum ontological conundrum? Do we not need the other to see our own selfhood and find our very own humanity? These very important existential ontological questions are all addressed by Jasmine d’Costa in her novel.
Set in India and spanning from the late 60’s to 2010, A Matter of Geography centers around the personal lives of the inhabitants of the Billimoria Building and its surrounding neighborhood in Bombay, which is mostly Catholic. Being mostly Catholic, the inhabitants of this quarter live closed off from the larger realities of India—that complex, throbbing, multi-ethnic and multi-religious India with the heavy marks of the British colonial past (or other previous colonialisms), until one day in 1992 the Muslim bakery across the street is set on fire. As Peter, our narrator tells us, that day was “the end of our lives as we knew it” (17). The novel uses the inhabitants of Billimoria to delve into questions of identity, belonging, nationalism and religious riots that came to be a common staple in India. Both the Prologue and the Epilogue function as allegories for what the novel reveals through a close look into the lives of the people of Billimoria and its neighborhood.
In the Prologue a young panther cub escapes from the Borivali National Park and roams free among the bustling streets of Bombay, amidst scared, frantic people. The animal is oblivious of his own strength and does not know why people around him are running as if they had just seen a lion. As a result of “not understanding [its own] strength, [the panther cub] knocked dead a child in its path” (7) before it is captured and put into an enclosure in the Borivali National Park. The Prologue sets the stage for what the novel is going to discuss: the various ways in which each of us constructs a world within us that is not reflective of the vast reality of our surroundings, making us live enclosed in a narrow “geography”, in house that is quite small. It is a house of our own making. Our mind, our memory, our perceptions, our experiences become the framers of our reality—the cognitions that create our views, our “country”. But as the novel also reveals, it is the responsibility of each of us to expand that “country” of ours in order to fulfill our humanity, our ontological call, which always cries out for more. It all depends on how we use our consciousness. Do we put all our cognitions to use becoming fully conscious (or as conscious as possible) or do we use selective epistemological mechanisms to arrive at a fuller truth? The consequences of a narrow personal “geography” can be devastating for the self and for the communities we live in and with—for the personal is personal but it is also political since humans do not live in an island even if they wish to.
The Epilogue reiterates the importance of our cognitive “geography”: the panther has now disappeared from its enclosure and in its place we find a mound of excrement on top of which lives a mole rat. The mole rat is a species not native to India but to parts of East Africa. How did it get there? Is it really there? Can we suggest that it was brought there through colonial encounters, encounters which are in fact responsible for the India(s) and the Africa(s) that exist today? This reading makes sense since the novels deals heavily with the socio-political reality of India—a country that was once part of the mighty British Empire. Such reading leads us into many other kinds of problematics related to the constructed reality of national boundaries and the violence that that entails as conquerors come and go and claim ownership of a place oppressing those who are already there, who themselves may not be auctothons.
Between the Prologue and the Epilogue and told in thirty seven chapters, through a style that invites us to expand our prism of vision, open the window of our mind, a window that has been narrowed by our religion or caste or gender or the neighborhood we are accustomed to, we enter the lives of the people of Billimoria Building and its neighborhood. The style alternates between deep philosophical reflections and allegories of immense beauty that tie the human with the immediate socio-political and also the larger cosmos, making us question our assumptions about all aspects of life: about the body-politic and its relative and ephemeral nature and that which lies beyond all that, a spiritual or energy realm where all divisions are suspended and “God” is found in the diffused yet all related cosmic molecules. We are those molecules: all of us. Told mainly through the voice of Peter, the novel also allows us to read the personal diaries of the young Anna Fernandes, who describes, with her innocent eyes, the adventures of the Billimoria Building before she left for Canada. D’costa uses the personal lives on the Billimoria dwellers to make political matters personal matters and show us how extremist behaviors related to religion or belief system can have the most nefarious consequences. At the same time, and through the coming together of people of different religions and ideological stands to counteract the violence that is spreading, we get to see how people find ways to forego (suspend) their differences (expand their “geography”, that is) and rescue one another when atrocities of the worst kind are about to be committed. And so we have the different families of Billimoria coming together to save the Muslim family from being killed by Hindu extremists: The Fernandes, the Souzas, the Marchons (all Catholic) arrange for a sanctuary in the house of Mrs. Ezequiel, the Jewish woman who appears to have sought refuge in India herself due to the persecution of Jews in Europe during the World War II. These neighbours of different creeds, morals and ethical inclinations also bind together to hide a crime.
Moreover, the novel tells us about the dangers of being trapped in our false memories or to believe in things that are not real. Peter, our narrator, who is love with Anna (or thinks he is), who left for Canada at the age of 16 after a horrible incident is a man also imprisoned by his memory. His mind, his cognitive geography lacks the necessary elasticity or adaptation. A teacher of mathematics, he is fond of reason and has trouble understanding emotions and love. But he too is pushed to exit his narrow cognition by Mr. Apte, the deeply reflective and philosophical Hindu and by Anna herself, when she returns from Canada many years later for a visit. Confronted with the fact that Anna has changed and cannot be the person Peter has kept in his mind during all the years of separation, he is forced to rethink his notion of love. In the end, he takes his mother’s advice by “embrac[ing] what [is] in front of [him]” (236), and seeing, for the very first time, Sheila’s eyes which “were, surprisingly, a blue shade [he] had never seen before” (245). This opening toward the living being(s) and the reality that are in front of us appears as a highly liberating act, conducive to growth, acceptance and happiness. And these three precepts are presented in this enlightening novel as fundamental human responsibilities—responsibilities toward the other and the self.
One of the most powerful aspects of A Matter of Geography is that we get to see how the “country” that we have built in our own mind is problematic because it is not the real country living all around us: it is rooted in a reality of our own making. But we are not helpless victims of this “geography” of confinement. The country we live in can either open up and expand our personhood and humanity, or it can shrink, imprisoning us in a cell of our own making. It is all up to us. It is all “a matter of geography”—the geography of our mind, our awareness, our consciousness. We can see a lion, a panther, a mole rat… We can see a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew—or we can see a person before the religious code—a person like us in his/her own difference. We can see a woman or a man—or a person before a body and a gender. Because “Amidst this loud din out there in the cosmic heaven: Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Love and Hatred, Fear, Truth and Falsehood, Reality, Right and Wrong, Living and Dying—all of it seem[s] insignificant, almost a comical exertion set in motion by a God who has ceased to watch this repetitive farce play over and over again under what [we] call History.” (241)
