Voices From The City

This review appeared in today's Indian Express.

Engglishhh

Altaf Tyrewala

Fourth Estate/Harper Collins

We bemoan the crumbling infrastructure of Indian cities, but there’s another substructure that we all depend upon, one that’s essential for us to go about our day-to-day lives with a semblance of normality. These are the cooks, drivers, security guards, maids and others who do their work behind the scenes so that we can do ours. Often, it’s only in their absence that we sense their worth.

Unsurprisingly, one doesn’t come across too many such characters in fiction from India written in English -- even though there are exceptions, such as those who populate Murzban Shroff’s story collection, Breathless in Mumbai and Balram, narrator of Aravind Adiga’sThe White Tiger. Now, as if to redress the balance, there are a great deal of them who crop up in Altaf Tyrewala’s short story collection,Engglishhh.

Many of these stories have previously appeared over the last few years in periodicals such as Caravan and Tehelka, but what holds most of them together – apart from a Mumbai setting -- is this attention to a class of people whose inner lives are often ignored, a trait that was evident in Tyrewala's debut novel as well. Here, for example, we track a harried maidservant during the course of a day in which nothing is more precious to her than a bottle of mineral water; eavesdrop on the thoughts of a building security guard obsessed with premonitions of death; and, in a maneuver similar to No God in Sight, come across linked vignettes of dashed hopes from the lives of a liftman, a security guard and other service staff in a large office building.

This is not to say that Tyrewala offers up turgid slabs of social realism that are hard to digest. There’s an undercurrent of light heartedness, almost cheekiness, in most that make them a pleasure to read, a large part of which is because of the use of demotic Mumbai rhythms. There is a satirical edge, too, chiefly to do with the behaviour of the middle class as well as others in thrall to their own hypocrisy, such as in the tale of the director of Indian porn. Similarly, the title story hilariously sends up a blind belief in numerology and its assumed advantages by creating a new form of English, one that’s “the most fortune-fetching and life-altering language in the history of the world”.

However, the longest story here, the extended saga of a multinational fast food company’s clown mascot who comes to life, is less than satisfying, not only because of the over-determined nature of the narrative but also because of its uneasy mix of broad-brush burlesque, realism and mockery. Constrictive plotting is to be found in other stories too, such as the tragicomic saga of a man who steals a cellphone to discover unpleasant truths close to home, but it works better here because of a more focused narrative zest.

In one of the stories in the collection, a son accompanying his father’s body in a hearse muses on “the advantage of living in an overpopulated nation: the individual experience could be made pedestrian in an instant by setting it against the collective.” In the acts of ventriloquism in Engglishhh -- “fictional dispatches from a hyperreal nation”, as the subtitle has it -- Tyrewala does the opposite: he plucks out pedestrian and not-so-pedestrian experiences from the collective and renders them unique.