Free The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley Page B

was thinking behind those lenses.
    As I was greeting everyone, an inmate with a Marine-style “high and tight” 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. “Hi,” he said with a broad smile, shaking our hands in a manner that suggested he was hungry for contact with the outside world. “I’m Gaston.” 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 Canada’s Governor General’s 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 father’s 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 Gandhi’s 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.
    â€œGustad’s a complicated character,” said Carol. “Maybe you liked him, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought a lot of things about him were kind of heroic.” I confessed that I didn’t like Gustad much at the beginning because of the way he stifled his son’s artistic ambitions. We opened it up to the men.
    â€œAt first I didn’t like him,” said Ben. “But 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.”
    Rick admired the protagonist for not running off with the money. So did Frank: “I felt he was an honourable guy. If you’re doing a deal with him, you know he’ll hold up his end.”
    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. “You know sometimes, thinking a little bit criminally, thinking what I would do, I would have taken some of it,” he said. And Gustad would have been justified in skimming some, in Gaston’s view—he argued that better the money go to a guy making an honest buck and caring for a sick daughter than to thieves. “He’s gonna give his money to the money launderers and obviously they’re going to steal it, when he could take it and he’s a guy who obviously works for a living.”
    As a man who had stolen his share of fresh banknotes when he was “thinking criminally,” Gaston must have paused at the passage about the smell of rupees—in which Gustad says that five-rupee banknotes smell different from ten-rupee notes, and the smell of hundred-rupee paper is the best.
    â€œHe should have kept the money, then?” Carol asked Gaston.
    â€œYeah and paid the painter and got his wall built,” said Gaston.
    I had doubts about the morality of Gustad keeping the money, but Gaston’s 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 Mistry’s symbol of the impermanence of life in India. At Gustad’s request he paints a riotously colourful mural of prophets and deities from many religions on the community’s boundary wall to discourage