Ganesh's Book

This appeared in yesterday's The Indian Express

LEELA'S BOOK Alice Albinia

In The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor came up with the sterling premise of grafting The Mahabharata onto the post-1947 Indian political scenario. Though it suffered somewhat in execution, it remains his best work. While it’s a pity that more Indian authors writing in English haven’t examined the possibilities of re-imagining and subverting the country’s epics and myths, there’s consolation to be found in Alice Albinia’s first novel, Leela’s Book.

This, too, takes as its starting point the interweaving of some of The Mahabharata’s tales with contemporary India – specifically the epic’s origin and mode of transmission -- and it does so with skill and verve. Albinia’s first book, a work of non-fiction about following the Indus to its source, was notable for its empathy, insight and linking of past and present. One finds the same qualities in her novel.

It features a bustling cast, comprising members of various families brought together on the occasion of a wedding. Each one is impelled by his or her particular desires, and many episodes are handled with a touch of Austenesque mischievousness that occasionally brings to mind Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.

The Leela of the title, when we first meet her, is returning to India with her husband after two decades in New York to attend the nuptials of Sunita and Ash in New Delhi. The former is her husband’s niece, betrothed to the son of Shiva Prasad, senior functionary of a right-wing party and a “guardian of the national identity, saviour of pure India”. The oily Shiva is at loggerheads with the crafty Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi, Ash’s father, a louche Sanskrit scholar, for the way in which he interprets Indian mythology. Leela is connected to Vyasa, too: she’s the adopted sister of his wife, killed in a road accident years ago, and there are deeper secrets that they share.

Some of the others who clack against each other like billiard balls against the city’s shifting surface include Aisha, a demure maidservant; Humayun, a chauffeur  driven by impulse; the bohemian, London-returned Bharati, Vyasa’s daughter; Pablo, a journalist attracted by Bharati who uncovers a generation-old concealment; and Ram, Bharati’s brother, who has a fling with Ash. As though these weren’t enough, there’s also Linda, young British academic and friend of Bharati’s, whose role, it must be said, comes across as a tad contrived.

Given all of these people and their separate arcs, it would have been wise to include a list of characters at the beginning of the novel; fortunately, Albinia is deft in plotting their appearances and re-appearances.

Over and above all this is the benign presence of Lord Ganesh, who, as he himself reveals to the reader, has created and then set all these characters in motion to rectify his centuries-old dispute with Vyasa over the manner in which the latter composed his saga. (There’s even a section featuring Leela’s varying avatars over different periods of Indian history.) The elephant-headed one now attempts to write his way back into the epic and discredit the “Vyasa Propaganda Machine”.

As such, references to The Mahabharata are everywhere, some explicit, others to be inferred. Leela, like Ganga, refuses to tell her husband anything about her past. She and her sister are compared to Amba and Ambalika, and at one point, Bharati declares that she wouldn’t mind having five boyfriends at the same time. There’s also a parallel to Ganesh and Vyasa when Shiva Prasad narrates his memoirs to a scribe.

Characters aren’t the only thing Leela’s Book is teeming with. In these pages are to be found rape, fire, police brutality, elopement, surprise revelations and furtive coupling underneath a food-laden table at a wedding venue. In the midst of all this, it also records the changes in New Delhi, be it of attitudes of rich and poor or the composition of its neighbourhoods. Though the capital is clearly the backdrop against which the characters’ stories unspool, the book also segues into London, New York, Mumbai, Kolkata and Santiniketan

Ultimately, as Ganesh informs us, he succeeds in his efforts to “reunite siblings, to bring together mothers and daughters – to remove from my characters’ lives the obstacles that impinge on their happiness – and to expose Vyasa’s wrongdoing”. It’s been said often enough that what is not in The Mahabharata does not exist elsewhere. By imagining and then bringing to life aspects that are not in the epic as we know it, Albinia has created a charming and capacious work of fiction.   

Walk Of Life

A slightly different version of this appeared in today's DNA.

OPEN CITY Teju Cole

A young man walks the streets of New York City. He talks to strangers, meets friends, gets mugged and muses on incidents from his childhood. He visits Brussels and returns to New York, where he resumes his rambles, observing changes and drawing associations.


Those don’t sound like ingredients for an especially remarkable novel. Yet, debutant Teju Cole’s digressive Open City is noteworthy for its portrayal of pauses in life’s frenetic rhythms and for the links it forges in the midst of disparity. Opportunely, it also takes forward the form of the novel in the manner of W.G. Sebald.


The narrator, working in a hospital on a psychiatry fellowship, is not as much self-aware as he is aware of the people and places around him. His rambles across the city, from Wall Street to Harlem, from the 92^nd Street Y to Tower Records, are matched by rambles within, and the connections he makes give the novel its unique flavour. This is a narrator whose mind is more well-stocked than most. He spots a woman wearing black on the subway, and this puts him in mind of paintings by Velasquez; later, the architecture of another subway station in lower Manhattan evokes the interior of Winchester Cathedral.

He’s also fascinated by the living city as a palimpsest, recording forgotten aspects of its Dutch heritage as well as the rise and fall of small and big businesses. He ponders on subjects as diverse as changes in the way we read to icons from Vito Corleone and Cannonball Adderley. At other times, he obsesses over the quotidian, be it the persistence of bedbugs or forgotten ATM pin codes.

Cole’s sentences are graceful and lucid, with loping rhythms that match the flâneur-like mood. Of his meditative sojourns, he writes: “…I was one of those people, the overinterpreters. This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more towards snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy, it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence.”

As the narrative progresses, a central concern becomes apparent: that of assimilation and the differences that remain when one immigrates. The narrator, born of a Nigerian father and German mother – like the author himself -- comes across others from Africa, Haiti and the Caribbean: illegal immigrants, cab drivers, museum attendants, bootblacks. Some of their stories merge into the narrative through the expedient of doing away with quotation marks. This concern with the Other, with blurred identities, is also brought out in a long novelistic detour, when the narrator visits Brussels as a counterpoint to New York. Here, among other things, he engages in theoretical yet fascinating conversations with an autodidactic Internet café manager with a “seething intelligence”.

We learn a little about the narrator’s upbringing in Lagos, in particular his stint at a military training school and relationship with his parents. Despite mentioning an estranged girlfriend, picnics with friends in Central Park and visits to an ailing former professor, he remains something of an enigma. The reason for this is made clear towards the end, when a disturbing revelation disturbs the book’s languid surface. This makes one reassess all that has come before: his obsessive wandering, musings on the mind’s blind spots or even the choice of psychiatry as a profession.

The form of Cole’s novel emerges organically from its content; it would be a mistake to look for conventional structure and incident here. These observations are held together by an incisive, mediating consciousness, and much of the pleasure of reading Open City arises from simply following it in operation.  

When Authors Borrow Characters

Daniel Defoe died three centuries ago. Yet, in December 2003, at a Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, the world listened to him musing on Robinson Crusoe's later career. The voice and imagination were those of J.M. Coetzee, who co-opted the earlier author and his creation for his enigmatic acceptance speech. Read the rest of my Yahoo column here.

Tweedledee, Tedium

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka.

THE PALE KING David Foster Wallace

Towards the middle of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous, unfinished The Pale King, a character identified as “David Wallace” pops up to assure the reader that he’s the author of the novel, asserting that it’s a true story, a “vocation-based memoir” about “negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes”.  If his earlier Infinite Jest, then, was about the ways we distract ourselves with entertainment, this one was planned as a counterweight, the ability to deal with tedium.

It’s evident that this  is a work in progress; Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, points out in his introduction that he sifted through a morass of material to assemble “the best version” he could find, despite there being no “outline or other indication of what order David intended for these chapters”. As such, fully realized pieces co-exist with fragments, repetitions and narrative strands that aren’t fleshed out.

Despite this, there is ample evidence of Wallace’s trademark, prodigious talent. That means plenty of hyperkinetic sentences, arcane knowledge, meditations on the changing shape of American culture, sly, occasionally bawdy, humour, sections with footnotes and acute visual observations. (A paperback has “a bookmark's tongue”, car seat headrests possess “the dull shine of unwashed hair”, and the knot of a man's tie is “as tight as a knuckle”.)

The plot, such as it is, comprises the coming together of a disparate set of characters at the American revenue services’ Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, and reactions to the monotony of life there. As such, there is much taxation jargon – surely intended to make the reader work though some of the boredom himself – such as, “RA ’78 revised the expansionist tendencies of the ’76 provisions by removing both long-term capital gains deduction and excess itemized deductions from the index of relevant preferences”. Phew.

Of note are evocative set pieces, some of which have been published earlier. There’s an account of the growing years of David Wallace before he came to join “the Service”, for example, as well as the tale of a boy whose aim was “to press his lips to every square inch of his own body”.

Overall, the novel works towards the merits of transcending boredom and Sisyphean tasks, “to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex”. As he’s mentioned in one of his notes: “Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” That, intentionally or not, is what The Pale King in its current form lives up to.

Those new to David Foster Wallace may wonder what the fuss is all about. For the devotee, there’s much to mull over here. Yet, the best way to remember the man would be to return to his earlier essays, short stories and novels -- the ones he finished, that is.

Border Ballads

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge.

THE WANDERING FALCON Jamil Ahmad

It was Kipling who was largely responsible for the myth-making about the clans of what was known as the North-west Frontier. His tales and poems of men who would be kings, Pashtun traders and barrack-room ballads spread the legend of time-trapped tribes who were noble and fierce, enmeshed in a matrix of honour that they were prepared to defend to the bitter end.

Echoes of this are to be found in 78-year-old Jamil Ahmad’s debut novel, The Wandering Falcon. The setting of his book, identified on the first page, is largely the “tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten and broken hills, where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet”. The novel comprises a series of episodes dealing with the tribulations of nomadic tribes who inhabit this inhospitable terrain, covering a period after the departure of colonial powers and before the rise of the Taliban.

Nominally, this is the story of the coming of age of Tor Baz, the wandering falcon of the title. He appears, sometimes in little more than a walk-on part, in almost every one of these nine tales: first, as abandoned infant, then as a boy passing from tribe to tribe, as a witness and observer, and finally as an informer and guide to the region.

The circumstances of his birth are narrated in the brutal, somewhat over-determined events of the first story. The child of an alliance brutally torn apart by an honour killing, he is almost left to the mercy of the elements. As he comes to manhood, however, he adapts and thrives in a hostile environment. He’s something of a cipher, though; there’s little, barring revelations of shrewdness and cheerful amorality towards the end, of Tor Baz’s own feelings. His character, then, is something of a peg to hold the individual episodes together.

The other characters who inhabit The Wandering Falcon range from cataract-afflicted tribal leaders to peripatetic, tricky mullahs to women losing control over their fates in an environment in which they are little more than chattel. The author’s aim is not to vilify or to defend, but simply to portray, although there is clear sympathy in his depiction of tribes forced to abandon their grazing grounds because of passport controls and border checkposts. The old, however settled, gives way to the new and Ahmad contrasts “settled life as opposed to nomadic life, and the writ of the state as opposed to nomadic discipline”.

The prose is bleached-bone clean, sometimes rising to the level of stark poetry: “Where the fields end, the convolutions and whorls of bare, cruel rock once again resume their march across the land – occasionally throwing up spires and lances of granite into the sky”. (Some of these  passages, in fact, make the book sound like a blanched, distant cousin of Cormac McCarthy’s novels of ranchers and cowboys adrift on American borders, grimly facing bleak landscapes and changing times.) The dialogue, though, can sometimes be arch and folksy: “Wailing in a man is like honey in a pot. As honey attracts flies, so does wailing attract trouble”. More echoes of Kipling to be discerned there.

Clearly, Ahmad has spent time in close quarters with the people he writes about. There are knowledgeable details of daily life, customs and terrain, in all their cruel as well as hospitable aspects. Once in a while, there’s bitterness at an acknowledgement of the outside world: “No politician risked imprisonment: they would continue to talk of the rights of the individual, the dignity of man, the exploitation of the poor, but they would not expose the wrong being done outside their front door”. That sounds familiar.

“To live outside the law,” Bob Dylan famously sang in Absolutely Sweet Marie, “you must be honest”. The Wandering Falcon relates, with honesty and grace, chronicles of those who live outside national laws, gazing upon the twilight of their anachronistic codes of conduct.

Up In The Air

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

THE CLOUD MESSENGER Aamer Hussein

At one point in Aamer Hussein’s The Cloud Messenger, the central character writes a letter mentioning “Kalidasa's poem about the cloud messenger, carrying love messages back from a man in exile to the city he'd left behind...letters of infinite longing." A little later, he realises that “one day he would have to be a messenger to himself, carrying stories from the places of his past to his present place, and back again from present to past”. This, then, is the shape of the novel: a mélange of memories held together by a elegiac sensibility.

The Cloud Messenger tells of the peripatetic life and longings of the bookish, sensitive Mehran, whose story switches between first and third person in the telling. We follow Mehran from youth to middle age: he’s brought up in Karachi, spends long sojourns with maternal relatives in Indore, studies and works in London and travels often to Italy, among other places.

Specifically, the novel revolves around Mehran’s interactions with the three people who most affect his life: Marco, his flighty fellow-student; Riccarda, the magnetic older woman with whom he has a short-lived affair; and the damaged, charismatic Marvi, with whom he embarks upon a choppy romance. Mehran’s life segues between meetings with these three in different parts of the world, and the novel details the ups and downs of their relationships with the passage of time.

Mehran and others are deeply influenced by Urdu and Persian language and poetry, often discussing and introspecting on its practitioners, especially the Sufi mystic Shah Abdul Latif as well as others such as Khusro and Faiz. The treatment of the novel, thus, is suffused by an intense, almost pained, romanticism and though there are evocative moments, this distilled sensitivity occasionally comes close to effete posturing.

There’s often a touch of haziness, too, as we skim along the events of Mehran’s life. Some passages appear overly diaristic, and at other times, he appears a distant, indolent figure. "If there was any excess at all, it was not of verbiage but of emotion,” he writes at one point, and the danger of drawing a map of the emotions is that the topography can become quite indistinct.

There’s no question, though, that it’s a deeply-felt piece of work. In particular, some moments between Mehran and Marvi are moving, and at other times, the mood of melancholia is deftly handled. Hussein has produced notable short fiction in the past, and from the evidence of such episodes in The Cloud Messenger, that appears to be where his particular strengths lie. 

Where Have All The Myths Gone?

Abandoned children, scorned suitors, valiant women and men struggling against fate, shape-shifting tricksters, Pyrrhic victories and rites of passage. All this and more, one would imagine, is rich fodder for the novelist. However, mythology and its tropes -- "public dreams", as Joseph Campbell once called them -- seem to be all but absent from the contemporary novel. The rest of my Yahoo India column is here.

Balkan Beast

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

THE TIGER'S WIFE Tea Obreht

You can erase national boundaries, but memories and myths will always prevail. Such recollections and legends run “like secret rivers” through Tea Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, set in the villages and cities of the Balkans. The upheavals that the area has witnessed may have redrawn the map, but, as this book exuberantly illustrates, storytelling has its own contours.

For a contemporary novel, Obreht’s tone of voice is both unusual and apt, being a blend of the real and the folkloric. On occasion, she draws from the well of magic realism that others such as Rushdie and Marquez have dipped into. The warp and weft of this sprawling tapestry comprise two interlinked narratives, the first concerning the narrator’s present circumstances, and the other, fables from her grandfather’s coming-of-age years. As such, it features a picaresque cast, also managing to touch upon faded Ottoman glory, Nazi depredations and later religious strife.

The Tiger’s Wife opens with Natalia, a 20-something clinician, travelling with a feisty colleague to deliver inoculations and other medication to an orphanage across the border. She learns of the death of her grandfather, a doctor and cancer patient, under somewhat mysterious circumstances; soon, she gets involved with an itinerant crew trying to find the buried corpse of a relative, convinced that it is responsible for their ill-fortune. The story proceeds by alternating between Natalia’s actions and reconstructions from her grandfather’s youth.

The centerpiece of the grandfather’s story is of his meetings with a “deathless man” and the wager he makes with him involving his favourite novel, Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Death, in fact, is a concern that shadows the book: characters fight it, overcome it, are haunted by it, make Faust-like pacts with it, rely on superstition to banish it, and, of course, succumb to it.

This is not to say that the book suffers from a surfeit of sorrow: there’s an undercurrent of humour, often black. At one point, a person who protests against the bombing of a cotton factory bears aloft a placard that reads: I Now Have No Clean Underwear.

Colour and incident aren’t qualities this novel is short of. The tiger of the title is one that has escaped from a city zoo after a bombardment and goes on to inhabit a forest at the outskirts of a remote village, creating panic amongst its occupants. Obreht takes us into the consciousness of this creature as he prowls in search of food and shelter, finding an ally in the battered deaf-mute wife of the village butcher. The tale of the butcher – once a sensitive, musically-inclined youth – is also revealed, as well as those of others, including a valiant blacksmith, an peripatetic bear-vanquisher and the local apothecary.

All of this is grounded by Obreht’s attention to detail, often rendered in the form of lists. The tiger, at one point, scents “the thick, woolly smell of sheep and goats; the smell of fire, tar, wax; the interesting reek of the outhouses; paper, iron, the individual smells of people; the savoury smells of stew and goulash, the grease of baking pies". A pasha’s palace-turned-museum comprises “portraiture halls with ornate hangings and brass lamps, court tapestries depicting feasts and battles, a small library annex where the young ladies could read, and a tearoom where the pasha's china and cookbooks and coffee cups were on display.”

The war and strife that have bedevilled the region are often referred to in terms of their effects: the shortages, the petty black marketeering, the implications and sense of nearby hostilities. As the narrator says at one point, "Conflict we didn't necessarily understand -- conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn't go anywhere, do anything, be anyone -- had been at the centre of everything." A little later there’s another reflection: “The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented parts of the whole. Previously shared things -- landmarks, writers, scientists, histories -- had to be doled out according to their new owners.” Putting the pieces together is one of the things that Obreht’s work sets out to do.

There’s a lot, then, that’s crammed into this novel, and certainly, there are times when one feels adrift on a sea of stories, with the links between them being tenuously articulated. However, it’s Obreht’s assured storytelling instincts that come to the rescue, making The Tiger’s Wife a saga that burns bright.

Unfinished, Not Unpublished

After what Amit Varma calls "the longest drinks break in history", the Yahoo India columns are back. And my piece on unfinished manuscripts that go on to become published novels -- by those such as Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Foster Wallace and more -- is here. Should be easy for you to finish reading it.

Hollywood's Bombay

This appeared in Saturday's The Indian Express

NIGHT IN BOMBAY Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield’s Night in Bombay isn’t a novel with a real city as its backdrop. It’s a novel that exaggerates and magnifies those aspects of the city that fit into Hollywood’s perceptions of it in the Thirties and Forties. Published in 1940 and now re-issued by Penguin, it’s the second of Bromfield’s novels to be set in India. The first, The Rains Came, was made into a film in 1939 starring Tyrone Powers and Myrna Loy, achieving a degree of success as well as an Academy Award for special effects. No doubt the author hoped that Night in Bombay would be filmed too, which accounts for the novel’s melodrama, exoticisation of locale and cast of colourful if one-dimensional characters.

The book, then, is anything but a precursor to what we’ve come to think of as the “Mumbai novel”. Titles in that category ought to reflect a quality of lived experience, a characteristic shared by novels as disparate as Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey, parts of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Chandra’s mammoth cat-and-mouse saga, Sacred Games, among others.

There’s no such quality in Night in Bombay, whose flavour can be summed up in the musing of one of its characters early on. Gazing upon the city, he recalls "memories of parties, of drinking, of easy seductions, of extraordinary nights beneath a sky of blue velvet in which skies glittered like diamonds, of rides in gharries, down from some garden suspended on the side of Malabar Hill, to the Hotel Taj Mahal”. Casablanca, anyone? Later, another character looking around the race course thinks: “Nowhere but in Bombay did you find Maharajas and millionaires, Ranis and British governors, rich Americans and Arab horse dealers, visiting French and beautiful Indian women".

This, then, is the meretricious background against which Bromfield’s American characters collide like billiard balls. There’s Bill Wainwright, on an Asian tour to oversee his father’s business; Homer Merrill, a saintly social worker who toils for the uplift of India’s villages; and Carol Halma, a former Miss Minnesota and Bill’s divorced wife, who cavorts with princelings, but whose soul harbours hidden depths. Circling around these are some dissolute Europeans, each one with secrets and weaknesses to hide. They spend days and nights betting at the races, attending parties in royal mansions and drinking gin at the hotel bar. (The hotel itself is described as “having the air of a vast and dreary county jail”.) It’s when Bill and Homer both begin to nurse feelings for Carol that the actual plot kicks in. The Indians are primarily hotel staff, apart from one Mr Botlivala, a greasy social climber, and the implausibly-named and very upright Colonel Moti, head of an institute of tropical diseases.

All of this could well have been interesting to read in the present time, in the manner of a museum piece revelatory of the attitudes of an earlier era. However, Bromfield’s occasional attempts to “explain” India  give rise to generalities that range from the lazy to the comic. For example: "He knew suddenly why the Indian got beneath the skin of the stolid Englishmen, why it was that always the Indian won out. You could beat him or shout him down or even shoot him but still he knew all the answers and had a jump on you. That was the secret of Gandhi”. At other times, he makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat: “The automobile, it seemed, always produced an astounding effect upon coolies in the East; it intoxicated their downtrodden, starved beaten souls to feel beneath their bare souls an engine of great power, capable of immense speed, over which they held absolute power."

It’s also strange is that, given that this is the India of the late Thirties, there’s no mention of the turbulent political scenario, or even of the reactions of the British. Instead, Night in Bombay presents us with an insular hothouse environment in which the motivations and musings of the central characters are spelt out time and again. Even if it had been made into a movie, one suspects it would have been snubbed at the Academy Awards.