Name: Evening is the Whole Day
ISBN: 9780618874477

Preeta Samarasan

The lives of six-year-old Aasha Rajasekharan and her prosperous family are turned upside down by the death of her grandmother and the departure of her older sister, Uma, for Columbia University, in a saga of one immigrant family's secrets and lies.

Evening is the Whole Day

A “psychologically acute and boldly plotted” tale of a wealthy, dysfunctional family in Malaysia (Booklist, starred review). Set in Malaysia, this internationally acclaimed debut novel offers an unflinching look at relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, the wealthy and poor, a country and its citizens—all through the eyes of the prosperous Rajasekharan family. When Chellam, the family’s rubber-plantation-bred servant girl, is dismissed for unnamed crimes, her banishment is the latest in a series of losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha’s life. A few weeks before, Aasha’s grandmother Paati passed away under mysterious circumstances and her older sister, Uma, departed for Columbia University—leaving Aasha to cope with her mostly absent father, bitter mother, and imperturbable older brother. Moving backward and forward in time, Evening Is the Whole Day explores the closely guarded secrets that haunt the Rajasekharans: What was Chellam’s unforgivable crime? Why was Uma so intent on leaving? What did Aasha see? And, underscoring all of these mysteries: What ultimately became of her father’s once-grand dreams for his family and his country? “A delicious first novel . . . [Samarasan’s] ambitious, spiraling plot, her richly embroidered prose, her sense of place, and her psychological acuity are stunning.” —The New York Times Book Review “A surpassingly wise and beautiful debut novel about the tragic consequences of the inability to love.” —Booklist, starred review “The language bursts with energy.” —Publishers Weekly

A Novel

Evening Is the Whole Day

Simon Haisell

𝗟𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗻

"I was 21 years when I wrote this song. I'm 22 now but I won't be for long."

So begins a song by Simon and Garfunkel on a mixed tape, played over and over in our small house in England in the 1980s.

Crouched over the cassette player, I wasn't even half the age of Paul Simon. Although I shared his name. Simon Paul. Backwards, like the pieces of a puzzle.

It's a song about time's disappointments. A lover fades in the night. Water ripples run away. Leaves crumble in your hand.

"That's all there is."

God knows what child-me made of those lyrics. I was still in life's morning. Writing beginnings on school notepaper. A child's uneven scrawl.

Now that song is a ghost. When I listen to it I remember long summer evenings and autumns yellowing in the park.

Back then, child-me didn't know there were places where time worked in different ways.

Springless summerless autumnless winterless lands near the equator. Where the nights never lengthen. Where evening is the whole day.

Gabriel García Márquez sits down to write a short story:

"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning..."

He begins by telling how it ends. The story is about the why.

Preeta Samarasan's novel starts the same way.

A grandmother dead, a servant dismissed. An unhappy family and a Big House full of secrets.

What did Tolstoy say?

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Here's something else about families:

We all have one, but we never see the whole of things.

We know the parts where we are present. But down corridors, rooms stay locked.

Conversations go on without us. Confessions made. Secrets told.

The art of the novel is a key to every door & a spyglass into each life.

Omniscience. Like Dickens parting his way through London's fog.

Or a Malaysian Indian family in September 1980.

The eldest child has left for New York. In her room now, only the sounds of silence.

Her sister talks to ghosts. Her parents aren't speaking. Dreams made long ago have long since flown.

The story moves backwards. Like the pieces of a puzzle.

Until we come to an end where we can begin.

𝗙𝗼𝗼𝘁𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲𝘀  

[1] Published in 2008, Evening is the Whole Day was longlisted for the 2009 Women's Prize for Fiction.

[2] Book description:

When Chellam, the family’s rubber-plantation-bred servant girl, is dismissed for unnamed crimes, her banishment is the latest in a series of recent, precipitous losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha’s life. A few short weeks before, Aasha’s grandmother Paati passed away under mysterious circumstances & her older sister, Uma, departed for Columbia University - leaving Aasha alone to cope with her mostly absent father, her bitter mother, and her imperturbable older brother.

[3] Leaves That Are Green is the second track on Simon & Garfunkel's 1966 album Sounds of Silence. The character Uma is often caught listening to them. The author is also a fan.

[4] Like the pieces of a puzzle... a child's uneven scrawl. Lyrics from Patterns, a song on their third album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

[5] Springless summerless autumnless winterless. A line from the opening paragraph of Evening is the Whole Day.

The full passage reads:

"There is, stretching delicate as a bird's head from the thin neck of the Kra Isthmus, a land that makes up half of the country called Malaysia. Where it dips its beak into the South China Sea, Singapore hovers like a bubble escaped from its throat. This bird's head is a springless summerless autumnless winterless land. One day might be a drop wetter or a mite drier than the last, but almost all are hot, damp, bright, bursting with lazy tropical life, conducive to endless tea breaks and mad, jostling, honking rushes through town to get home before the afternoon downpour."

[6] The short story by Marquez is Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Read it. It's very good.

[7] The Tolstoy quote is, of course, the opening line of Anna Karenina.

[8] Dickens. The allusion is to the opening of Bleak House, a touchstone for Samarasan's writing.

Evening is the Whole Day

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