Summary

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

Set in Trinidad, Shiva Naipaul’s birthplace, Fireflies is a massive chronicle, in two parts, of the fortunes (good and bad) of Vimla Lutchman (nicknamed Baby). At first she is the rather passive wife of an undistinguished bus driver, but being the great-niece of the elder Mrs. Khoja, she is circumscribed by the impressive social and material background of the Khojas, one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most important families in the region. Baby is powerless in that family, in which all veneration is paid to Govind Khoja and in which all domestic affairs are influenced by his six sisters. After her marriage to Ram Lutchman, Baby discovers another side to her life: a submission to Ram’s sordid bouts of violence, drunkenness, and unapproachable taciturnity. She grows fat, and her lust for commerce waxes. She remains devoted to her husband even when he has an affair with Doreen James, a purported anthropologist. Baby worries about her two sons, Romesh and Bhaskar, and occasionally seeks refuge with Gowra, a distant cousin.

Ram Lutchman develops fitful obsessions—with Doreen, gardening, swimming, photography—but these come and go. His life becomes a sequence of ridiculous failures. His wife stays with him, however, through all of his quirks of fortune, sometimes defending him with a ferocity as comically useless as it is poignantly loving. When Ram dies suddenly after a heart attack, her grief prompts her to collect some of his charred bones from the cremation site, but when she begins to suffer nightmares, she throws the bones into a river, and her nightmares stop.

The second part of the novel opens with the gradual disintegration of the Khoja clan, as a rebellious faction of sisters develops (headed by Urmila-Shantee, and Badwatee) against Govind. This conflict is part of the important subplot that fuels Baby’s struggle for independence. As a widow, she is drawn more strongly into the Khoja sisters’ circle, and deciding to follow Urmila’s commercial example, she takes in lodgers to finance her dream of success for her sons—particularly for Bhaskar, who wants, very unrealistically, to be a doctor. She comes to depend naively and foolishly on the fraudulent prophecies of her neighbor, Mrs. MacKintosh, a rather desolate, impoverished Scottish woman, deserted by her husband and left with a polio-stricken son and a daughter. Seeing her opportunity to trade her crackpot predictions for free food, Mrs. MacKintosh delivers whatever prophecies she knows will appeal to Baby’s hunger for good news.

To inspire the mediocre Bhaskar, Govind spins a parable of a boy who overcomes economic deprivation by his resourcefulness. Lacking the convenience of electric light, the boy captures fireflies in a bottle and studies by their light. It is an absurdly exaggerated tale, perfectly in keeping with Govind’s propensity for moralizing but comically irrelevant to Bhaskar’s essence as a youth. When Bhaskar goes abroad to an Indian university, his brother Romesh develops quickly into a dangerous failure. His passion for cinema so warps his personality that his life is overrun by violent fantasy. Festering with contempt for the memory of his dead father and filled with hate for the Khojas, he brutally attacks Govind and his wife, Sumintra.

The whole edifice of Khoja respectability cracks. Trouble brews in the home of Saraswatee, another of the Khoja sisters, when her daughter Renouka, influenced by her Catholic education, turns against Khoja values. Rudranath, Saraswatee’s husband, turns against this modernity and goes berserk. He never recovers from the blow to his puritanical mania. Renouka takes up with her cousin Romesh, while also pursuing an affair with a “commercial traveler.” Govind, who has been deprived of his authority...

(This entire section contains 761 words.)

Unlock this Study Guide Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

as the head of the family, decides to play the guru to the people at large and forms the People’s Socialist Movement, which he leads disastrously in an election. Assassination threats are made against him, and the Khoja rebels campaign against him.

Baby survives all the shame brought on her by her criminal son, just as she survives Bhaskar’s sequence of career failures. Bhaskar’s newly developed cynicism—he eventually dismisses Govind’s tale of the fireflies as pure rubbish—counterpoints his mother’s optimism. Yet the heroine’s life is cast in a downward spiral. She loses the friendship of Mrs. MacKintosh and the sympathy of her lodgers. She therefore sells the house and moves with Bhaskar into cousin Gowra’s home. She assists Govind with his “naturalist” school, but the venture fails. Bhaskar embarks for England with a bride, and Baby is left alone and empty.

Next

Themes

Loading...