Essay Draft Three

Wang Teng
Date: June 20, 2007
Draft 3

Why a Tears-in-Laughter Tone?

Poor people lead miserable lives. Different people may look at it from different angles. Most would feel sad and frustrated; some, however, may feel quite different, as Ajit Babu, the narrator did in the story “The Grass-Eaters” by Krishnan Varma. In the story, Babu, an average poor Indian tramping with his wife Swapna, did not have a stable place to live, and got nothing to eat but piles of grass. However, he did not seem to be sad but just the other way about, quite optimistic. Krishnan used a very humorous tone to tell the story, which is quite meaningful and needs to be explored more deeply.

Reading this story can make one feel sad and amused at the same time:  sad about the poor life Babu led and meanwhile amused by the way the story is told. Overall, my first impression of the story was “Why Babu would be so optimistic when he confronted some many tragedies?” Actually, the tone used in the story should be considered as Krishnan’s aim to express the bittersweet feeling of both the average poor Indians and Krishnan himself.

Humor can be sensed almost everywhere in the story. When Babu lived in the footpath, he woke up one morning and found the woman beside him was not his wife, but an extremely slim stranger woman whose age could hardly be examined. (56) This humorously shows that the Babu’s were just among the numerous refugees who had no places to live but in the overcrowded footpaths. Then we would be most amused at the scene when his wife and the woman’s husband were so furious that one of them acted like a furious reptile and the other a muscular King Kong. (56)

When they found a wagon to live, they “cheerfully [opened] and shut the doors for a full hour.” (57) It is quite fun to imagine this humorous scene, though it may be a little bit exaggerated. It also directly reveals the happiness of the couple when they found a new place to live. And one would surely laugh at the phrase “no fear of waking up with a complete stranger in your arms” (57) because it just makes us reflect back the previous scene in the overcrowded footpath.

Another kind of humor can be sensed when Swapna said “she (short pause) did (long pause) not want (very long pause) her (at jet speed) baby-to-be-bone-in-a-running-train” (57). Here with the speed and rhythm of the speaker included, Krishnan creates a scene as if we were really listening to Swapna.

Apparently, Babu did not seem to be a bit frustrated when something terrible happened to him. He even gained some sort of happiness from those sufferings that would have driven most of us cry. He seemed to be optimistic most of the time because he regarded his tramping life as “an intensely thrilling experience” (57). But wait, is that what Babu really felt? Were all the average poor Indians so content with their lives?

Maybe it would be better to reflect and explore the subtext of the sentences above again. Describing the stranger as “a bag of bones” (56), Krishnan actually describes clearly the appearance of a woman lived in a footpath—an average poor Indian at that time. Although we may laugh at the couple considering the doors of the wagon as “all the privacy a man and wife could want” (57), a feeling of sympathy will arouse because we all know that the doors are just basic needs for normal people and there is nothing to be that satisfied when we just possess our own doors. And besides the theatrical effect of “at jet speed” (57), it can be noticed that Swapna was rather reluctant and grievous when she claimed she had a new baby and did not like the running train—the terrible tramping life. All of the above directed to the feeling of sadness—just the opposite of what Babu seemed to be.

If we go on to the latter part of the story, a slight change of the tone could be found—the story is still told in a humorous way, but humor is outweighed by a considerable force called sadness. We would see what we want to get out of the title--“Grass is our staple food now” (58). “The Grass-Eaters”—the name that is more like an animal rather than human beings—indicates the lowest living standard of the Babu’s, an archetypical example of the poorest Indians. Other facts about their living standard include: Babu and his wife tried as far as they could to save their no-decent clothes and footwear. (58-59). But what is all this for? Babu and his poor neighbor give the answer: it is just finding a way to “reduce [their] consumption” (58). This confirms that Babu was taking great pains to survive. No one would laugh at this. Instead, most of the readers would cry at his poor life.

That was exactly what was happening to every poor Indians. At the end of the story, a vivid snapshot of what was happening in Indian cities is presented: people “loot nearby shops, break street lamps, take out a procession, hold a protest meeting … and set off crackers.” (58-59)— Overall, it is a social catastrophe. Poor people would definitely do something extreme like this when their basic needs of life are not met. Thus, it can be inferred that Krishnan has the similar feeling as the average poor Indians do. He feels miserable about them and he tells the story to share his observation of the life of the poorest people in his country as well as the terrible social condition at that time.

But at the bottom of Babu’s heart, or to say, of Krishnan’s heart, he did want a change of his life, since he mentioned his son, “is in the Naxalite underground” (58). The Naxalite movement is aimed to liquidate estates and distribute land among the rural poor, but notice the word “underground” in the quotes, it means that the movement was still not in a state that would quickly achieve considerable improvements. Besides this, Babu’s desire to change was not very strong. He was not even prepared to these changes both physically—he was a bare-boned, night-blind man who got only one ear and one leg; and mentally—he just talked his son as someone “to do our funeral rites” (59)

Therefore, it can be concluded that Krishnan uses the humorous tone to describe the excitement when Babu sense some sort of happiness, which actually indicates the opposite of the surface—that Babu was tasting the bitter of his poor life and that he was unable to make changes, for he admitted at last, in a quite sad and serious way:

Our life together has been very eventful. The events, of course, were not always pleasant. But, does it matter? We have survived them. … We live very quietly, content to look at the passing scene: a tram burning, a man stabbing another man, a woman dropping her baby in a garbage bin. (59)

This statement confirms that Babu’s power was too weak to make some changes to. Therefore, all he could do was to lower his living standard to survive, trying to take every spark of excitement of his miserable life as happiness. That is the tragedy of his life—the tragedy of all poor Indians at that time. And that is what Krishnan really feels and wants to express.

Throughout the story, we could understand why Krishnan uses a humorous, or better to say, tears-in-laughter tone to tell such a sad story. Although the tone may seemed humorous, still it cannot be considered only as a way to show the optimistic attitude of Babu while he led a dead-end life, but as a way to reflect the bittersweet feeling of the average poor Indians--they had no alternatives for their lives, so they were just content with the fact that they have survived the difficult times.

Work Cited
Varma, Krishnan. “The Grass-Eaters.” 1985. Rpt. in The international story: An Anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction. Ruth Spack. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 56-59.

26.5.07 15:03