Bye-bye Blackbird (Anita Desai)

 Introduction: Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and short story writer. She is known for the portrayal of the inner life of the characters. She is deeply concerned with human problems. She uses different techniques to narrate her story. She has won ‘National Academy of Letters Award’ and ‘Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize’ for her work “Fire on the Mountain”. Her novel, “Bye-bye Blackbird”  mirrors the complexity of human relationship. There are three major characters named Dev, Adit and Sarah. The novel mainly deals with the problem in immigrants, alienation, love-hate relationship, lack of adjustment and existentialism.  Anita Desai makes use of various techniques such as contrasting characters, the use of Hindi words, rhetorical skills, slogans, psychological analysis, and poetry in this novel.

Plot of Bye-bye Blackbird: In Desai’s third novel, Bye-Bye, Blackbird, like has a tripartite structure: arrival, “Discovery and Recognition,” and “Departure.” The three main characters are Dev, who has recently arrived in London from India when the novel begins, his friend Adit, with whom he is staying, and Adit’s British wife, Sarah. All three characters are in conflict with their environment. Sarah is an unstable wife who finds herself playing two roles, that of an Indian at home and that of a Britisher outside; all the while, she questions who she really is. Dev and Adit are, in a sense, doubles like Nirode and Amla. Dev is the more cynical and aggressive of the two, while Adit, though essentially the same, is muted at the beginning. The novel follows a pattern like that of Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903): Adit, who thought he had felt at home in England, returns to India, while Dev, the militant cynic who has reviled Adit for staying, takes Adit’s place after his departure, accepting a job in Adit’s firm and moving to Adit’s apartment. Bye-Bye, Blackbird is a satisfying novel partly because Desai builds an inevitability into the narrative; characters are subordinated to pattern and rhythm. Dev’s and Adit’s decisions have not been fully explained. Their conflicts are not resolved so much and the pleasure at the end is as much formal as it is emotional.

Analysis of Bye-bye Blackbird:

Fascination for England: Dev is a Bengali student. He arrives in England to enter the famous London school of Economics. He wanted to get higher education. At the very beginning, he starts to seek the job for him. He stays with Adit and Sarah. Nevertheless, he has high prejudice against English snobbery. After arrival, he starts to seek the job for him. Initially he is frustrated but gets the job of a sales representative in a bookshop. At the beginning of the novel, we find Adit Sen and his English wife Sarah live very happily. Adit  settled down at this alien shores. He is the hero of this novel. He was born in a middle class. He comes to England to enjoy the freedom. Here he falls in love with English girl Sarah and get married. Hence London is fascinating and captivating for him. Thus, Adit  has transformed himself entirely to the English culture.  He has fully adopted the lifestyle of Britain.

Feeling of Alienation and Nostalgia: Feeling of alienation is the other side of identity crisis and uncertainty. In the novel “Bye-Bye Blackbird”, Dev’s alienation and spiritual agony are objectified in his hellish experience in London at the tube station. He is in dilemma as whether he stays on in London or return to India. It is the world which makes him nostalgic for India. India is that place for him full of familiar faces, sounds and smell. For him London is the thickly populated place. Even Adit does not escape from the feeling of alienation and nostalgia. Adit’s nostalgia is caused by his visit of in-laws. It is also intensified by the unexpected outbreak of the Indo-Pak war. Gradually his nostalgia takes a dreadful turn. It makes him ill and suffocating in English surrounding. He gets visions like one who is a psychotic. He is lost in the memory of India. He carves for the Indian twilight. Like a child, he wants to see an Indian sunset with rose, orange, pink and lemon colors in the sky. He becomes so homesick that he visualizes the Indian rivers. He also desires to see the bullock-carts, monkey-walah and marriage procession of India. He declares to his wife… “I can’t live here anymore…, our lives, here have been so unreal…..”

In the case of Sarah, she feels uprooted even from her own culture because of her marriage with Indian immigrant. Basically, she is a great lover of India. She came to know about Indian life from the glimpses of pictures on the stamps. Emma is her co-sharer. Both Sarah and Emma are fond of Tagore’s poetry, Himalayan flowers, Henna patterns on the palms of ladies, food items, music of Bismillah Khan and Ravishankar. In this way, Sarah is very close to India. Nevertheless, she puts away all her wishes. She feels her face only a mask and her body only a custom. Her own people like Mrs. Miller, insults her.  Thus, she is culturally alienated and her marriage with a ‘wog’ obliges her to keep “to the loneliest path”.

Identity Crisis: All the principal characters are not sensitive but introvert. Dev hangs with a sense of uncertainty. His problem starts from the sort of treatment, which Indian immigrants get from the English people. Dev is full of excitement and agitation. He feels divided within. Because English people treat him very badly. He becomes a victim of insult and abuse at the hands of English people. Indian immigrants are even not allowed to use a lavatory of the English. The London docks have three kinds of lavatories meant for Ladies, Gents and Asiatic. He wants to return to India because he can never bear to be unwanted. Once a peddler refuses to tell Dev the price of Russian icon because he considered Dev too poor an Indian to purchase it. That peddler thinks that India is known for its poverty. Their typical and narrow-mindedness towards Indian immigrants is very sharp. Dev hates the label ‘Indian Immigrant’. He feels like a stranger in England. Yet Dev is sceptic and realistic about everyone who believes in oriental wisdom. When therefore, he was called ‘wog’ by white boy, Dev sharply reacts and addresses him as ‘paji’. Dev feels alienated in the beginning but at the end of the novel, he is very happy. In contrast to this, Adit feels nostalgic for India. In the beginning of the novel Dev is in confusion between either to stay or to return to his homeland. He reveals his prejudices for the foreign land. Dev thinks that he is losing his real identity.

Adit understood well the line of reconciliation between these two cultures i.e. the eastern and the western. Once upon a time, he has a great fascination for England but the same feeling makes him suffocated. At Christine Longford’s wedding the symptoms of his nervous breakdown is seen. A question torments him “Who is he and where is he?” He wants  to be seen under labels ‘wog’  ‘Asiatic’, ‘Indian Immigrant’ anymore. He carves for his identity. He feels alienation. He feels that he is losing his real identity. He wants to return to the motherland. His nostalgia acquires a dreadful dimension and illness. He fed up with the life in England. Ultimately he decides to return India with his wife.

Like Dev, Sarah too is in search of identity. She is portrayed as a traditional wife. Her situation is more complex. She cannot decide her real identity. There are numerous adjustments of Sarah in the novel. She hates English People’s love of privacy and narrow-mindedness. She thinks herself as puppet in the hands of Adit, though Sarah is fully devoted to her husband. She readily makes Indian food for her husband. On her husband’s demand, though she has problem in wearing Indian attire and ornaments, she wears Sari. She prepares herself for her husband every time. Her marriage is successful but she lives a disturbed life by her contact with Adit. She is fed up with this unhappy life. She avoids answering the personal questions from her neighborhood. She lost the harmony of her life. She cannot join English group in conversation, jokes and laughter. Her rituals and beliefs are very different from those English people. As a result, she remains as an alien in her own land. She felt mismatch herself among these English people. Sometimes she feels ashamed of her husband and sometimes she feels afraid of being tortured. She is always ready to care her husband but there is still some lack of liveliness between them. She has to face many taunts from colleague because she has broken the social code by marrying a brown Asian. She felt uncertain in her own society. Adit too notices in Sarah “an anguish loneliness”. That is why she tries to keep herself away from English people. She does not know where she belongs. She feels uprooted. In fact, she is caught between two worlds and she belonged to none. She is a pathetic figure. Many critics consider that her problem is rooted in her cross culture marriage and that is why she only suffers the pathos of an alienated girl

Thus, Dev, Adit and Sarah are in search of identity. Dev and Adit are strangers in an alien land. Whereas Sarah is an exile in her own native land.  Adit feels nonbelongingness in England. The same feeling was felt by Dev in early part of the novel. Adit has much emotion for his motherland in the later part of the novel. At the end of the novel, he rejects the western culture and society. Adit wants to escape from the unreal and artificial life, which he is leading. The Indo-Pak war is the last stroke to finalize Adit’s decision to return his own clan. Therefore, Adit, with his wife Sarah leaves England and goes to India.

Conclusion:

Thus, Anita Desai in “Bye Bye Blackbird” deals with the tropical problem of adjustment. It is the story of Indians who have immigrated to England for the better prospects of life. Some critics consider the present novel as an autobiography as it describes Desai’s own experiences whatever she felt, observed, and lived in England. The novel, in fact,  is a combination of personal experiences as well as the experiences of all immigrants. In true sense, the novel reveals alienation encountered by Indian immigrants in England. In the novel, identity crisis is portrayed through three characters namely Dev, Adit and Sarah. In the novel, there are so many situations in which the characters feel alienated. The cross-cultural encounters and human relationship experienced by the characters in this novel are common to any Indian immigrant in the western lands.