The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha

The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha
ISBN:9780156010887
About the book:
In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed
man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost
sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim
his sisters orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next
day.
During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be
indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the
man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for
her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He
doesnt know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the
baby someday might.
Raj Kamal Jhas ethereal, poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition.
About the author:
Raj Kamal Jha lives in New Delhi, where he is the managing editor of Indias largest national
newspaper, The Indian Express. This is his first novel.
Discussion Questions:
Q. Why does the narrator feel the need to write out his and his sisters stories for the newborn
baby? Why do you think the author, in turn, has the narrator tell his stories through shifts among
actual and imagined past times, the present, and imagined futures?
Q. To what extent might the narrator struggle against failing memory, distorted memory, and
even an aversion to memory-to recall the specifics of his and his sisters painful lives? How
reliable is his memory, and how truthful are the stories he writes down?
Q. Why do the principal characters remain nameless and known to us only by generic titles-
Brother, Sister, Father, the Old Man, and so on? Why does the author not present physical
descriptions of the characters?
Q. The narrator tells the baby, In short, I will tell you happy stories and I will tell you sad
stories. And remember, my child, your truth lies somewhere in between. What is the
relationship-and the ratio-between the happy stories and the sad? What might the childs truth be,
and in what ways does it lie between the happy stories and the sad?
Q. How important is writing things down-to the narrator, to the author, and to us? Why does the
narrator consider writing things down the most important lesson my father taught me?
Q. To what extent may the destructive, corrosive behavior of one generation be rewritten by
those who come after?
Q. The narrator comments that it was his and his sisters daily theater of pleasure and fear,
played out on our blue bedspread, that carried us from one night to the next. What pleasures,
fears, and feelings of guilt does the narrator identify throughout his stories? In what ways are
they similar to or different from the pleasures, fears, and guilts characteristic of normal family
life?
Q. Describing the Blanket Game, the narrator enjoins the baby to remember that with a little bit
of imagination, you can always find some love trapped in some fear. What specific instances of
love trapped in fear occur in the lives of the narrator and his sister? How does love become
trapped in fear? In what ways does imagination provide a means to overcome or transform fear
and pain?
Q. What is the importance of the one image that emerges on this night of storytelling, the
image of a child lying on his stomach in a tiny garden? What images of and scenes in gardens-
real and imagined, from this tiny garden to Eden Gardens-occur in The Blue Bedspread? What is
their importance?
Q. What incidents and details of violence, cruelty, and abuse does the narrator present? What
might be the ongoing significance of those incidents and details? What are their effects on the
narrator, his sister, and us?
Q. Remembering the night on the train, the narrator recalls that his father could not beat his
mother in the presence of others and that its this heavenly comfort of strangers that the child
covers himself with. In what ways, in this incident and others, do strangers provide the boy and
the man the heavenly comfort not found in the family?
Q. This city likes lonely people, the narrator tells the baby, the city likes this man. What
have been the role and importance of loneliness in the lives of the narrator and his sister and the
lives of others? What has prevented the narrator and others from escaping loneliness?
Q. Does the narrator imagine the incidents of his sisters life after she left home, or do you think
he is reporting what she has told him? In what ways might these incidents-actual or imagined-
explain her return, following her husbands death, to what was once her home and to her
brother?
Q. How do the white washbasin, the black iron hook, and the brown hinge of the bedroom door
determine an absolutely straight line, as the three points where three things happened to your
mother and me? What is the importance of these three events? To what does this straight line
eventually lead?
Q. Why is it that No one noticed the strong wind and subsequent four-day storm that began on
the evening of Sisters planned departure? Why is it that No one noticed her preparations, the
reasons for her running away, and the suffering endured for so many years by two children and
their mother? What does the narrator mean when he later writes of himself and his sister that
both of us know that both of us noticed the wind and we knew, long before the world did, that it
was a strong wind?
Q. The color blue appears in various contexts and with various associations throughout the
novel. What specific objects are blue, and what is the significance of each-including the blue
bedspread itself-to the narrator and his sister? What does the color blue come to signify for the
narrator, and for us?
Q. Why is it important that, as dawn approaches, the narrator finds the thirty-year-old cane
lampshade So that the light falls in a million specks on the blue bedspread, making our sky
shimmer with stars? In what ways have the nature and significance of those stars changed over
thirty years?
Q. What is the significance of the narrators ultimate spoken public confession, however
imaginary it may be? What is the importance of the statement, he doesnt have to lie anymore,
twist facts to flesh out his fiction? What effect does this statement have on our understanding of
everything that has gone before?

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