was thinking behind those lenses.
As I was greeting everyone, an inmate with a Marine-style âhigh and tightâ haircut and military posture walked in. I had seen him at The Book of Negroes book club meeting and had overheard Lawrence Hill urging him to read John Steinbeck. âHi,â he said with a broad smile, shaking our hands in a manner that suggested he was hungry for contact with the outside world. âIâm Gaston.â He chose a chair between two other burly white inmates: Graham and Stan.
When Such a Long Journey was first published in 1991, it made the Booker Prize short list. It also won Canadaâs Governor Generalâs Award for fiction that year, beating out a book by veteran novelist Margaret Atwood. Quite a warm reception for a first-time novelist. However, the jury of prison public opinion was still deliberating.
The session started off well with an animated discussion about Gustad, whose sedate life goes off the rails in other ways. His high-achieving son, Sohrab, rejects his fatherâs plan for him to attend the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, his daughter falls ill and his wife yields to superstition. Then Gustad finds himself agreeing to store a package for an old friend who now works for Indira Gandhiâs spy agency. His strong moral principles, derived in part from his sense of loyalty and his Zoroastrian faith, fail to give him insight into his actions. Meanwhile, chaos mounts around him in his interactions with the quirky characters in the novel.
âGustadâs a complicated character,â said Carol. âMaybe you liked him, maybe you didnât. Maybe you thought a lot of things about him were kind of heroic.â I confessed that I didnât like Gustad much at the beginning because of the way he stifled his sonâs artistic ambitions. We opened it up to the men.
âAt first I didnât like him,â said Ben. âBut when I thought back, he was a religious guy and so I understand why he was such an honest person, patient, obedient and ambitious for his kids too.â
Rick admired the protagonist for not running off with the money. So did Frank: âI felt he was an honourable guy. If youâre doing a deal with him, you know heâll hold up his end.â
Gaston, who I later learned had robbed a string of banks, was amazed that Gustad was never tempted to steal the piles of money accumulating in his house. âYou know sometimes, thinking a little bit criminally, thinking what I would do, I would have taken some of it,â he said. And Gustad would have been justified in skimming some, in Gastonâs viewâhe argued that better the money go to a guy making an honest buck and caring for a sick daughter than to thieves. âHeâs gonna give his money to the money launderers and obviously theyâre going to steal it, when he could take it and heâs a guy who obviously works for a living.â
As a man who had stolen his share of fresh banknotes when he was âthinking criminally,â Gaston must have paused at the passage about the smell of rupeesâin which Gustad says that five-rupee banknotes smell different from ten-rupee notes, and the smell of hundred-rupee paper is the best.
âHe should have kept the money, then?â Carol asked Gaston.
âYeah and paid the painter and got his wall built,â said Gaston.
I had doubts about the morality of Gustad keeping the money, but Gastonâs mention of the painter demonstrated the kind of attentive reading that Lawrence Hill had talked about earlier in the month. Gaston had clearly got to the end of the book, and recognized that the pavement artist had a certain significance. To me, the painter seemed to be Mistryâs symbol of the impermanence of life in India. At Gustadâs request he paints a riotously colourful mural of prophets and deities from many religions on the communityâs boundary wall to discourage