A life salvaged, offering few lessons
Readers have become well familiar with what essayist Sven Birkerts calls the “traumatic memoir,’’ works that are “private salvage operations’’ seeking to address the discontinuity, the fracture, at the center of a damaged life, aiming to recreate through the narrative’s structure not only the pain of the author’s experience but also “the overcoming of the wound, whether through repair, reconciliation, or redemption.’’
Cheeni Rao’s memoir “In Hanuman’s Hands’’ sits squarely in this tradition, shifting forward and back in time, from the physical world to the spiritual realm, from concrete detail to grand abstraction to get its story told. Rao wants the reader to see and feel the full dimensions of his life’s ruin. And only chaos and confusion, only a fractured tale, can adequately steer a path through so dark and daunting a landscape.
“In Hanuman’s Hands’’ is a harrowing, skillfully written account of a young man’s descent into drug addiction, crime, and homelessness and the difficult, uncertain path toward recovery. The Chicago-born son of immigrant Indian parents, Rao details his transformation from a timid young boy who worships his physician father into an adolescent addicted to “the euphoric rush of adrenaline’’ provided by violence and then, over time, by alcohol and drugs. Much of the memoir is set at the college Rao attends, an expensive, prestigious (unnamed) New England school where he manages to become ensnared not only in the college’s drug culture but also in the nearby underworld of junkies, drug dealers, and even murderers.
This central narrative, which consists of Rao again and again wreaking havoc on others’ lives as well as his own, is interrupted by leaps forward to his desperate arrival at a Chicago halfway house and by even greater leaps into Hindu mythology and the relationship Rao develops with the monkey god Hanuman.
Here is the lesson Rao learns, the path he undertakes: “I found a shortcut to Hanuman by smoking rock. I thought all those Hindu priests with their mantras, pujas, homas, oil lamps, and incense were doing it the hard way.’’ Rao’s relationship with his own version of the monkey god becomes the metaphorical linchpin of the story.
The problem with the scenes depicting Hanuman’s guidance of Rao is that we never really understand (or feel) how they have helped Rao reassemble his fractured life. We know that he has done so, that his ability to compose this memoir is the testimony of his recovery, but the process remains inexpressible. And what we are left with, then, is a memoir that seems somehow to revel in all its squalor and violence.
In the final pages, Rao offers a quickly sketched conversion scene, one where the metaphorical and the literal remain jumbled: While a jealous Rao is viciously attacking a young man outside the Chicago apartment of a girl he knew in college, Hanuman intercedes and steers Rao off to detox.
In a novel, we would understand that the presence of Hanuman in such a scene was a means of providing a window through which we might better glimpse the psychological complexity of a character, but in a memoir such scenes are troubling.
Rao seems to address this very problem in the author’s note that precedes the text, one that reads a bit like the one James Frey appended to “A Million Little Pieces’’ when readers learned that he’d exaggerated or even invented some of the memoir’s crucial scenes.
I’m not sure every reader would agree that the line between fiction and nonfiction or between myth and history is quite as thin or indefinable as Rao asserts. And I certainly felt, by the end, that contained within this unconventional memoir are the seeds of something far more ambitious and satisfying: a complex novel of physical ruin and spiritual redemption, of how a life that appears wholly lost might be improbably, miraculously regained.
John Gregory Brown is the author, most recently, of “Audubon’s Watch.’’ He teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. 
