A young girl, all of seven, living in a small village close to a thick forest in eastern India with her parents and brother, hens, a cow, goats and pigs is yanked out of her idyllic life during a civil strife.
Nomita witnesses her father being killed by men, who came for him armed with axes. Her brother is lost and her mother abandons her a few days later. She is taken care of by a group of women, one of whom even gives her daughter’s gold earrings to Nomita. However, they too are attacked by the armed men and finally the child along with several other girls are taken in by an ashram, headed by an internationally renowned spiritual guru.
Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter narrates to us the story of Nomita ‘Nomi’ Frederiksen, who becomes a victim of sexual abuse during her stay at the ashram. She escapes to an orphanage before being adopted and making her new home with her foster mother in Norway.
Told in a series of flashbacks of Nomi, the 25-year-old filmmaker, the tale is centred on the grim reality of child sexual abuse. Nomi, who returns to the temple town of Jarmuli, is depicted as a girl whose hair is like a bird’s nest, streaked brown and black, some of it braided with coloured threads. She wears jewellery — silver and copper but for two tiny circles of gold at the lobes. Huge black eyes in a pointed face.
She gets acquainted with a group of three old women — Gouri, Latika and Vidya — on a train to Jarmuli. She is going there to research a documentary on religious tourism. From here the story weaves in and out fleshing out places and characters. There is Badal, the temple tour guide, who harbours a soft corner for Raghu, a boy who works at a tea shack on the beach; the owner of it — Johnny Toppo — is another interesting character. He keeps singing songs with tunes infused with folk while plying customers with ginger and cardamom infused tea.
There is the white haired monk who meditates standing in the sea with his sunglasses on, and there is the pilgrim, who after zealously visiting shrine after shrine in the temple, painfully rolls his bare body on the stone floor of the courtyard.
There is Suraj, the photographer who assists Nomi. He has a troubled personality, prone to anger and violence. He tells Nomi about the miniature models he carves on sandalwood using his father’s foreign bought knives. The temple is filled with erotic carvings on its wall, while its priests make a big fuss about women being properly attired, even as they themselves go about bare bodied.
The characters are vividly portrayed. The settings are life like and there are references from the epics Ramayan and the Mahabharat. There are snatches of poetry from Bengali poet Jibananda Das’ poem Banalata Sen written in 1942.
The landscape is beautifully captured, from the white turbulent beaches of Jarmuli, the gape trees that bear pale yellow fruits with stipled skins as big as melons and the pomegranate tree, which is described as “hung with what looks like organs cut into half”!
The title of the book seems to have come from Badal’s reminiscings. In school he had been taught of Jupiter and its 16 moons. He dreamed of living on Jupiter and sleeping on its many moons, something he still did, when he wanted to escape the humdrum life.
Take a look at this narrative about Gouri. The coast was a sand-white strip bristling with coconut trees. She could see herself as if from a great distance, as a mound of clothes in a plastic chair in a veranda facing an ocean. She soared higher. She was an immaterial speck, an atom dissolved in the elements. She was helpless to resist. She did not want to resist.
The whole narrative is sheer poetry, graceful, intimate and mesmerising.