“When we were orphans” is a book that oozes gloom and depression like many others by Kasuo Ishigro. The book, which is set in the third decade of the twentieth century hops between Shanghai and London. And is set in the inter war years between World War I and II. It captures the pomp of imperialism as well as the decline of the British Empire very well. The elite Europeans live in the international settlement – a plush, secluded neighborhood while the Chinese live in crowded ghettos and work in the factories so that the rich live their comfortable lives.
At one level, it is the story of a successful detective, Christopher Banks and his quest to discover his roots and solve a case from his own life. Banks had grown up in Shanghai where his father was an officer with a British company dealing with opium – importing it from India and selling it in China. Christopher’s mother is an avid anti opium campaigner who passionately believes that her husband’s company is involved in enslaving the Chinese people by abetting their addiction to the drug and they often have domestic arguments on the issue. In fact for those of us, who have read about the opium wars only in history books, the book offers some interesting insights and background. Christopher has a best friend – a Japanese boy growing up next door by the name of Akura.
One morning his father disappeared from home and never returned back. Shortly thereafter, his mother disappeared too. After the police enquiries turned up nothing, it was arranged for Christopher to return back to England to be brought up by a wealthy aunt. There he goes to a proper public school, trains to be a detective and becomes famous. But as his fame increases and he becomes one of the movers and shakers of London society, he is tormented by the guilt of the unresolved mystery of his parent’s disappearance.
Most of the book is dominated by this over arching theme of Christopher returning to Shanghai, many years later in a world that is rapidly changing – British imperialism is already on its wane and in Shanghai, soldiers of the Japanese Army, the Kuomintang and the communist guerillas as the British and the French watch by nonchalantly from their cosy clubs and hutments in the tony “international settlement” which was parceled out between the various European powers with a base in China. The evening entertainment is punctuated by Japanese bombs falling over the city and imparting it with an other worldly luminescence even as the band plays and the elite waltz in the ballroom.
The concluding chapters of the book will haunt the reader for long. Christopher has for long believed that his father and mother’s disappearance has something to do with his mother’s long crusade against opium trade and his father eventual y beginning to take a stand about this. In fact, he as a detective has built his investigation around this very hypothesis. It therefore stings when it is revealed to him near the end of the film that the reason his father disappeared was that he ran off with his mistress and that his mother allowed herself to be sold as an concubine to a Chinese warlord who in turn paid for Christopher’s schooling expenses.
Kazuo Ishiguro, who has won the Booker and been awarded an OBE conveys the atmosphere of a brooding sense of foreboding right through the opening pages of the book and captures the atmosphere and mood of imperialism at its peak as well as in its decaying days. When we were Orphans” is in spite of the many melancholic themes it addresses through out its pages, still a page turner and that makes it an eminently readable book.