On Upendranath Ashk's गिरती दीवारें (now in translation as Falling Walls)

[Did a version of this review for Open magazine]

The announcement that an Important Book has arrived usually makes me wary, because publisher-speak is hyperbolic by its nature, and also because “important” is sometimes synonymous with “self-consciously serious”, or “dull”, or “this weighs five kg in hardback”. But I wouldn't argue with the description being applied to the English translation of Upendranath Ashk’s 1947 epic Girti Divarein. Falling Walls – completed by Daisy Rockwell 20 years after she began it – is not just one of the year’s publishing events, it is a terrific, deeply engrossing read too. And it is just the first volume in a seven-book cycle that Ashk worked on for half a century, and which he hadn’t completed when he died in 1996. (Endeavours on this scale are never quite finished, even when they are.)

The simple way of describing this book is that it is about a young man named Chetan – coming of age in 1930s Jallandhar, later living in Lahore and making an extended trip to Shimla – who wants to be a writer (or really, do any sort of creative work), and the impediments in his path, some of which are rooted in his own personality, others in external circumstances. But this description is insufficient: Falling Walls is also a multilayered portrait of intersecting worlds, with Chetan as the fulcrum. It is about relationships in a lower-middle-class family, about young people trying to find their way, about missteps and successes, sexual awakening and minor transgressions. It is a ground-level view of three cities at a very particular time in a nation’s history. And it is an enquiry into what it takes to be an artist, and whether the effort is worth it.

That makes it a book with big themes (Ashk’s novel cycle has been compared with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past), but you rarely think about this while reading it, because its many little episodes work so well on their own terms. There are well-observed character portraits, such as the one of Chetan’s alcoholic father who believes fervently in the folk-saying that a parent’s curses are like drops of milk and ghee on a child (and who, like most bullies, turns self-pitying when the tables are turned on him), or Chetan’s sister-in-law, who grew up in a strife-ridden household and carries that discontent within her (“in view of her training, it was hardly possible she’d allow an undivided reign of peace in her married home”). There are details that movingly illuminate a state of mind, such as the observation that when Chetan’s mother got married and left for her husband’s house, “her crying was not for the loss of the joy that girls feel at their natal homes, but for the lack of joy she’d felt there”. And there are amusing descriptions: sleepy-eyed clerks at a railway platform are likened to yogis, far removed from earthly matters; a poets’ soiree is compared to a beehive that gets jostled – “just as the bees fly out this way and that but eventually settle back in the very same place, the audience and the baitbaazi poets eventually began to gather at the Pona again”.

As the months (and pages) rush by, we see Chetan experiencing the many faces of love and attraction, along a spectrum that ranges from idealised romance to uncomplicated lust. Ashk shows how forbidden love might play out in this setting – early passages involve Chetan’s oblique “conversations” with a girl named Kunti, whom he likes (they can’t speak directly to each other, but each says meaningful things to a friend in the other’s earshot) – and how this can segue into bolder forms of intimacy and unexpected encounters with strangers (a co-traveller in a train; a coquettish neighbor in the house opposite). Or how, in a large extended family, when a young man interacts with his new wife’s attractive cousins – prone to hero-worshipping a jijaji – a conversation can acquire flirtatious shades and threaten to rupture the social fabric.

A whole setting and a way of life is thus brought alive, complete with its bucolic, often ribald Punjabi chatter (an old woman’s breasts, which she tries unsuccessfully to keep covered while she quarrels with her neighbours, are referred to as “yellow papayas”) – some of which is probably untranslatable, though Rockwell captures its spirit as well as anyone could. She provides valuable insights about Ashk in her preface too, observing that though he was once associated with the Progressive Writers’ Association, he distanced himself from it and chose, through his writings, to create awareness of social evils rather than offer clear-cut solutions to them. "He needed to find a new ‘pattern’ as he called it […] for the sort of book he wanted to write, which would depict the vast sweep of lower-middle-class reality, a creative quest and a struggle, but not, he explains, a story with a traditional plot."

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One of this narrative’s achievements is that it is so fluid even though the structure is really very intricate (try putting yourself in the author’s place, “flowcharting” the book, and this becomes clear). As Rockwell notes, it is full of “memory-triggers” – often a single sentence, set apart from the text around it by a visual break, heralds an excursion into “the boundless and pure pastures of the past”. These memory-triggers unpeel layers for us and demonstrate one of the advantages of this sort of immense, detailed narrative: our view of the characters and their personal equations keeps shifting; the effect is akin to life itself, where you move from the comfortable certainties of youth to a broader understanding of the many dimensions of people.

So, for instance, Chetan’s elder brother Ramanand is initially presented as a naïf and dabbler, never destined to come into his own, a burden on his parents. As he fumbles, with funny results, from managing a laundry business to being a minor-league Congress leader – being equally inept at both, and treating both as the same thing – we are told “Bhai Sahib devoured the heaps of knowledge contained within books like a white ant; and like a white ant, his mind remained a total blank.” And that even thought was so alien to him that when he attempted to think seriously about what he was doing, “he always found himself like a player who doesn’t have even rudimentary knowledge of the game he’s joined”.

In a different sort of book, this may have served as the final word on Ramanand, or he may have remained so peripheral that this one-dimensional view of him, at a particular point in time, would have sufficed. But here, it’s different. Much later, when Bhai Sahib, having become a dentist’s assistant and now preparing to start his own practice, visits Chetan in Lahore, we see him – and the brothers’ relationship – in a fresh light. Living independently from their parents, they have candid, grown-up conversations, face new sets of challenges. If the Falling Walls structure resembles a jigsaw puzzle at times, it also made me think of a magnifying glass slowly moving from one section of an enormous canvas to another; hovering above a character, giving us some information before drawing back so we can once again appreciate how all this is an essential part of our protagonist’s world and memory-bank.

Interestingly, each of the story’s major settings informs the mood of the book itself. It begins in Jallandhar, where Chetan is a child of a family, cowed down, under his father’s strict eye and heavy hand; then comes the mid-section in Lahore, where he moves into the “grihastha ashram” phase of his life, working as a newspaper reporter and dealing with the rigours of domestic life (having married a plain-looking girl named Chanda, whom he had determined not to marry at the beginning of the narrative); and finally a long section – taking up the final 200 pages – set in Shimla, where Chetan is persuaded to go with an ambitious vaid named Kaviraj, who exploits him while donning the mask of a benevolent patron.

The Lahore passages are the busiest, most conversation-driven: this warm, dynamic city leaves Chetan little time for anything other than his daily routine. He tries to write a dramatic novel, but his notebook is washed away in a sewer on a rainy night, much as his own life is being swept along by the imperatives of being a householder. But the tone shifts notably when he goes to Shimla – he is alone now, perfunctorily working on a medical book for Kaviraj, no Chanda or Bhaisahib for company – and in this cold, relatively quiet place he has time for anguished, drawn-out introspection; he frets about his condition, contemplates the unfairness of the world, imagines a new one where ancient walls will be pulled down. At one point he thinks to himself:

Lahore! The city was alive, despite its trash, dust, smoke and haze, the haze that quivers from the touch of life moment by moment by moment, the city that’s never ever empty even if it’s not that clean […] if there’s ugliness somewhere nearby, then very close by there’s also beauty and grace […] there isn’t the stillness and silence of Shimla.

For this reason, the Shimla passages are sometimes a little pedantic compared to the Lahore ones. But the contrast between the two places serves a purpose, raising the old question: what does a writer really need – solitude or chaos, to be alone or to throw himself into life’s rich pageant? “Whenever Chetan ran from life he could only find peace in the bosom of nature or art,” we are told. Yet art doesn’t always bring him peace either – sometimes it results in humiliation, as when he sings the Raag Bhairavi during an evening concert, or goes on stage wearing his glasses while performing in the medieval play Anarkali. He is dreamy and passive in many ways (attending a Congress Party meeting as a teenager, he “didn’t want to move like a wave in a sea of volunteers. He wanted to stand by the side and watch the splendor of the sea”) and his artistic aspirations are scuttled by the disorder around him; in one notable passage where he sits down to play a precious, newly bought flute at a railway station, bliss soon gives way to heartbreak. He writes letters with colourful descriptions (“You know how there’s lovely tasty fruit inside the ugly bumpy skin of a chikoo? It’s the same with this beautiful, tasteful house in our filthy neighbourhood”) but can’t go much further.

Yet, throughout the book, there is the suggestion that his only real chance of becoming what he wants to be is through participating in the world and savouring new experiences, both good and bad. Often one gets the impression that Chetan, in the act of remembering incidents from his own past, or thinking about the stories he has heard about someone else’s life, is performing the writerly task of constructing a narrative: shaping in his mind things that he might never get around to putting down on paper. Perhaps he does achieve this in future volumes of Girti Divarein. For now, how fortunate that he has Upendranath Ashk to do it for him.

Found in translation

[From my Forbes Life column - about some notable translations of books from regional Indian languages into English]

In Anita Desai’s short story “Translator Translated”, a lecturer named Prema is eager to translate an unassuming Oriya writer’s works into English so that they may reach a larger readership. But our view of Prema’s motives is altered when we learn she is a failed writer herself and that this could be a way of realising her suppressed ambitions. At one key point she exceeds her brief by taking liberties with the original text, and Desai underlines this transgression by changing the form of her own story; the narrative shifts from the third person to Prema’s voice.

The proprietorial translator exists in the real world too, of course. Recently I heard the veteran Tamil writer C S Lakshmi speak of her experience with translators who fancied themselves as critics, providing suggestions for changes to the original text, rather than focusing on their own work. But even when a translator has no hidden agenda, the process is a tricky one. A question that often arises is, what does being “faithful” to a text mean? Does it mean a literal, sentence-by-sentence rendition – which can result in stilted prose, given the inherent differences between languages – or should one set out to capture the "spirit" of the original? There are no easy answers – it usually depends on the nature of the writing, the envisioned readership, and the cultural assumptions involved. (As Lakshmi pointed out, the line “Someone touched me with cool hands” implies a pleasant experience when the reader is in Tamil Nadu, but when translated into an Eastern European language it may be changed to “someone touched me with warm hands” to achieve the same effect within a single sentence. However, making such a change can cause other problems within the narrative.)

During a panel discussion about translation in Delhi, the publisher Ritu Menon noted, half-jokingly, that the panel had only women on it “because translation has a long and difficult gestation period, with huge investment and slow returns”. In a country as culturally varied as India, the obstacles can be particularly daunting: as Geeta Dharmarajan pointed out during the same talk, we can’t give, say, an MT Vasudevan Nair to all our literate children in the way that the US can give Nathaniel Hawthorne to its students – “Bihari and Rajasthani children will have different behaviour types, different cultural reference points. And as a nation that is still going from the oral to the written traditions, how do we get illiterate people into the joy of the written world?” How to convey the subtle shifts in dialects within a particular language such as Bengali, wondered Anjum Katyal shortly afterward - "do we use a Cockney-fied English to indicate the differences?"

Despite these difficulties, there has lately been a surfeit of fine translations from the various Indian languages into English. Until a few years ago there was a dedicated but small band of translators, such as Arunava Sinha, who continues to bring a wide range of Bengali writings – from classics like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini to contemporary avant-garde works like Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Harbart – to new readers. But the net is spreading wider now, and encompassing literature from across the country.

Given that the very act of translation from a regional language into English can be seen as a comment on the clout of Indian Anglophone writing, it is poignant that many of these books and stories are tales of marginalisation to begin with. A strong expression of the sense of neglect felt by non-English writers occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator here, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences.” The mollusc’s voice is being heard now: “Mangosil” appears with two other Prakash stories – about other forms of inequalities – in The Walls of Delhi, translated by Jason Grunebaum. The translation does contain the odd jarring note – phrases like “Isn’t this peachy?” feel out of place – but Grunebaum has clarified that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership.

A cheekier take on hegemony occurs in the Tamil Dalit writer Bama’s Harum-Scarum Saar (translated by N Ravi Shanker), about lower-caste Dalits' refusal to kowtow to their landlord “masters”. The rebellions here are not violent or dramatic (the circumstances of these people’s lives would permit no such thing), but the societal order is overturned in subtle ways, through rude speech and small acts of defiance: in one story, “Pongal”, the son of a labourer refuses to accompany the rest of the family on an obligatory gift-bearing visit to the landlord. The writing is conversational and salty (something the translation captures nicely), full of rhetorical questions (I knew people were there in the well, otherwise would I have jumped?) and phraseology that isn’t grammatical in the strictest sense but conveys the flavour of the setting.

Discussions about contemporary Indian fiction in English often touch on the lack of truly startling work that aligns stylistic experimentation with political engagement. One of the most formally provocative books I have read is P Sachidanandan’s The Book of Destruction (original Malayalam title Samharathinthe Pusthakam), about a man trapped in a series of surreal situations involving the bombing of a discotheque, a mysterious stranger whom he regularly meets during train journeys, and a tailor cannibalised by the people whose personalities have been shaped by the clothes he stitched; the human race is bound by the destructive impulse, says this hard-hitting critique of social conformity. But there are more linear, narrative-driven works available in translation too, many of them by Penguin’s Modern Classics imprint. These include fine translations of important Indian writers such as Yashpal (This is not that Dawn), Sundara Ramaswamy (Tamarind History) and Fakir Mohan Senapati (Six Acres and a Third). One of the imprint's lower-profile gems is the Telegu writer Chaso's Dolls’ Wedding, a collection of  deceptively unfussy stories that have spare “plots” but provide tangential entry points into people’s inner lives through an accumulation of detail: as an ancient great-grandmother tells tales of her childhood, the reader is made aware of the significance of what is not explicitly said; how the old woman appears dimly aware of, and resigned to, the injustices of her life.

Elsewhere, genre and popular writing are also reaching new readers. The Urdu scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi recently expanded his own novel Kai Chaand thay Sar-e Aasmaan into a multigenerational 19th century epic titled The Mirror of Beauty – a respectable “literary” venture, if there ever was one. But a few years ago Faruqi had indulged himself with a more light-weight project: translations of four “Jasoosi Duniya” thrillers written by the legendary pulp writer Ibn-e Safi in the 1950s. These adventures – with such titles as Laughing Corpse and Poisoned Arrow – “star” the imperturbable super-sleuth Colonel Faridi, his assistant Captain Hameed and a pet goat named Bhagra Khan, and are set in an improbably Westernised city with posh nightclubs, harbours and skating rinks. It is easy to dismiss such books as trivial, but their storytelling energies and plotting skills have influenced writers and artists for decades, and seeped into our popular culture, and in his translations Faruqi has combined his writerly strengths with the childlike enthusiasm of a fan who was mesmerised by Safi as a boy. That combination lies at the heart of so much good translation.

[Some earlier posts about fine books in English translation: Lal Singh Dil’s memoirs, Revathi’s A Hijra Life Story, Nirmal Verma’s Ve Din, Geetanjali Shree's Khaali Jagah, Blaft's Tamil folk tales and pulp fiction, Syed Muhammad Ashraf's The Beast, MT Vasudevan Nair's Randaamoozham]

Love and longing in Prague - on Nirmal Verma's वे दिन

[Did this piece for the Sunday Guardian]

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“Happiness always takes us by surprise, or perhaps it is not happiness. It is one’s unhappiness diminished in size.”

Is this a happy book or a sad book? The question sounds trite and reductive, but it leapt to mind as I turned the last page of Nirmal Verma’s Days of Longing, an English translation - by Krishna Baldev Vaid - of the 1964 novel वे दिन, now out in a new edition by Penguin’s Modern Classics. Depending on one’s perspective (and possibly depending on what stage of life one is in), this could be an essentially sad story disguised as something brighter, or the converse, a breezy, slice-of-life tale pretending to be a tragic love story. Either way, this is among the most moving novels I have read in a while – and in one sense at least, among the most unusual.

Here is a book by an Indian writer, about an Indian student who has lived in cold Prague for over two years, and is spending the Christmas holidays (a time of year when overseas students typically go home) in the city, with the few friends who are still around: among them a Burmese student named Than Thun (TT), a restless German named Franz, who is studying cinematography but getting nowhere, and Franz’s girlfriend Maria, who is unable to get the visa that will allow her to leave the country with him. Much of their time is spent visiting pubs or lolling about in their gloomy hostel, drinking vodka or beer or sherry almost throughout the day, not so much to get drunk as to stay warm (as in so many Eastern European novels, the weather seems a constant factor in the characters’ lives, informing their actions and attitudes). They often go without hot water and don’t seem to sleep for more than a couple of hours, but subsist – more or less cheerfully – in each other’s company; they joke about living in “the city of empty pockets and full bladders” (because there are very few public urinals).

And through all this, the Indianness of the unnamed narrator-protagonist scarcely seems a factor at all***. For a reader used to the many soul-searching narratives about displacement or exile in Indian English fiction, this can be startling. We learn nothing about this young man’s family, his background, even which part of India he comes from. (For the longest time, I didn’t picture him as Indian at all; instead, drawing on a prior reference point for a story set in Czechoslovakia, I saw him as a version of the wide-eyed, sallow-complexioned Milos in the film Closely Watched Trains.) There is a mention of a letter from home, which he isn’t eager to open (“I remembered that I had not yet read my sister’s letter, but then I remembered that there was no light. I felt happy at the thought that I wouldn’t have to read it that night”), but it isn’t the case that something dramatic led him to “escape” to a foreign land – it is more as if he has settled into a cocoon beyond ideas of country or culture or nostalgia, a cocoon woven around new friendships. “We had left home at a stage when our childhood connections had been cut off and we hadn’t yet forged adult links with people and places,” he tells us, speaking of himself and TT, “Our homes seemed unreal from afar, like someone else’s homes, alien memories. They seemed meaningless, even ridiculous.”

Into this languid, drifting life comes the seed of a “plot” when the narrator (I’ll call him Indy for convenience, as his friends sometimes do) gets a temporary job as an interpreter for an Austrian woman named Raina and her little son. Indy and Raina grow close, and over the three days they spend together he experiences a range of emotions, swelling, then subsiding and swelling again: from hesitance and doubt to intense longing and awareness of hours spent apart, to quiet jealousy and possessiveness, built on the knowledge that her previous visit to Prague had been in the company of her now-estranged husband Jacques, and that she may be attempting to relive it by going to the same spots again.

“It bothered me,” he says, “I wanted her to look at everything for the first time. But she seemed to be keen about revisiting places she had already seen.” And then the simple yet powerful pathos of this line: “After knowing some people, one can’t help feeling one’s met them a bit too late.”

“It wasn’t age that separated us. It was her past, completely concealed from my knowledge. There are houses that you can’t really enter even through their wide open doors. They are alien, unpossessable.”

These could be the thoughts of anyone who has wondered about a lover’s romantic history, but here they also have to do with Raina’s experiences in the Second World War. It occurred to me that with a shift in narrative focus, this novel would strongly resemble William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (which came 15 years later), about a young man besotted by an older woman but also permanently cut off from her by the terrible things she went through in the past, and unable to compete with the ineradicable, sado-masochistic relationship she has with the man who shared that past with her.

Days of Longing is not as obviously driven by political events as Styron's novel – it is sparer, more abstract, more concerned with a young man’s interior life than with larger histories. Yet the shadows of those histories do loom in the background: in the brief allusions to WWII (Raina makes the strange but believable admission that her relationship with her husband, secure when they were living in turbulent, war-fractured times, began to dissolve when peace arrived), but also in the little reminders – through the parallel story of Franz and Maria, or a reference to a sad, accordion-playing hostel inmate who can’t go home to Belgrade to be with his family – of troubled relations between the European countries in the present day of the narrative. Throughout, there is a sense of how the personal is affected by the political.

And hanging over Indy and Raina is the knowledge of how short-lived their relationship is. In a sense, all their time together is preparation for being separated (not unlike the lovers in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise) and the very temporariness makes it more intense, making him more aware of the need to hold on to things and remember them; to be seduced by the idea of love rather than the tangible presence of it. (“Remember the day we went to the skating rink?” she asks. It is an oddly put question on the face of it, since it refers to something that happened only 48 hours earlier. Yet it makes sense – they are trying to fit a lifetime of longing into this short period.)

In fact, a possible key to this book’s mysteries is a description of love as a temporary respite: “It was like an invisible fire that we could feel, that had been trying to pierce through our mutual darkness […] Three days or three years don’t make a difference unless we can catch hold of a burning moment in the darkness, knowing full well that it won’t last and after it is extinguished we will slide back into our own chilling solitude.” That burning moment set against darkness finds an echo elsewhere in the book. At one point Raina relates something she had once been told, about there being two kinds of happiness, big and small. Small happiness includes the warmth provided by fire or sherry, or the company of friends. “And the big happiness is to be able to breathe, just to be able to breathe in open air.” The words, tellingly, came from a Jewish man who was laughing and handing out cigarettes at the time, but was later killed by the Germans.

This elegant, hard-to-classify novel doesn’t quite provide a sense of closure or even development, which is why it is difficult to think of it as a coming-of-age story – it seems Indy’s life will continue along a circuit, much like the city’s trams gliding along their familiar routes (and perhaps I can call to mind here the ending of a favourite novel, also set in an Eastern European city, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled). But perhaps his time with Raina has helped him come to terms with the crucial idea of “small” happiness, and the possibility that this romance, so all-encompassing while it unfolded, could in the larger view of things be just another addition to that list. Most of all, perhaps the lesson he is learning is that there may not be anything so grand or lasting as a big happiness.

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*** Of course, the question arises: if one were reading this book in the original Hindi, would it be possible to "forget" or disregard Indy's Indianness? I imagine not, having read an excerpt from वे दिन on Pustak.org.  

P.S. Krishna Baldev Vaid, a renowned writer himself, was a contemporary and sometime friend of Nirmal Verma; for a sense of Vaid’s often-ambivalent feelings about Verma and his work, read this tribute.

P.P.S. The Modern Classics imprint also has a new edition of The Red Tin Roof, a translation of Verma's लाल टीन की छत

Of snails and superhumans - Uday Prakash's tales of deprivation

[Did a version of this review for Mint Lounge]

With the surge in Indian English publishing and a concurrent increase in literature festivals with an Anglophone slant, it is no secret that writers who work in the other Indian languages have felt increasingly neglected and undervalued. A particularly sharp expression of this occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator, a possible stand-in for Prakash himself, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder.”

The chilling sense one gets from this passage is of someone trapped in a hermetically sealed room, failing to be heard (much less understood), the echoes of his own cries bouncing off the walls. It is unsurprising then that Prakash’s collection The Walls of Delhi - three stories translated by Jason Grunebaum - contain powerful representations of other forms of marginalisation too. The world of this book is one of spectral tunnels in which the untold chronicles of the dispossessed lie hidden (“walk outside your home and take a good look at the little crowd that hangs out at the shop or stall or cart – and who knows? You might find where the tunnel comes out”) as well as hollow walls containing the dark secrets of privileged people.

Thus, in the title story, a poor man named Ramnivas finds seemingly limitless treasure in an improbable but oddly appropriate place: inside a wall of a south Delhi gym to which the children of the rich come to work off the weight they have accumulated from eating too much (even as Ramnivas mulls that one of his own children died after eating fish caught from the sewer). The stacks of currency notes change Ramnivas’s life – and a man who had looked like an emaciated version of the actor Jeetendra transforms into a “gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile” – but soon his dream begins to unravel. In “Mohandas”, a lower-caste man discovers that his name and job have been stolen by an upper-caste loafer, and then comes upon what seems to be a village of doppelgangers, each usurping another’s rightful place in the world. (“Were all the people who had good jobs and held high positions and ran around in automobiles and caroused who they really claimed to be?” he wonders.) And in “Mangosil” a child’s head grows at an abnormal pace because it knows things other heads don’t know, or don’t want to know; the virus that causes this mysterious disease, we learn, is poverty.

These are angry, sarcastic stories, infused with the rage of someone who has seen far too much meaningless injustice to want to withhold judgements or trade in nuances. It is the rage that comes with seeing the cities of a half-developed country from the sky, as “incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud”. Prakash’s writing is full of poetic imagery. “One more stomach had delivered itself to the house that morning,” it is said of a child’s birth in a poor family. Insects seem to recognise the cough of a dying man and arrive in droves as his phlegm hits the ground. When Mohandas wades into a river to pray, “tiny kothari fish swam to the surface and fought to nip at the salt from his teardrops”. And the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall by giving us parenthetical asides about politics or the economy, showing a sense of curiosity about the wider world and about the lives of distant figures like Bill Clinton, almost as if trying to convince himself that his derelict protagonists really do inhabit the same planet as the one on which these other, “important” things involving supra-humans are taking place. (One thinks again of the snail and the well-cushioned bipeds.)

Not having read these stories in the original Hindi, Grunebaum’s translation seemed serviceable to me, though there is the odd jarring note: an old man says “hey blindy” – an awkward, slangy rendering of “andhi” – to his wife, and some phrases – “Isn’t this peachy?” – feel culturally discordant. But Grunebaum clarifies that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership, which is as well, for their content is unsettling to begin with; there are some obviously fabulist elements in them, especially in the story of the large-headed Suri. At the same time it is useful to remember how strange reality can be. In his Afterword, Grunebaum mentions a trip with Uday Prakash to Chhatisgarh, where they just happened to run into the “real Mohandas”, walking on the road, “looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story”. They spoke for a bit, took some photos and then went their separate ways – “Mohandas” presumably to continue fighting his small battles against shadowy imposters, Grunebaum returning to translate stories about deprivation for a readership that can sympathise but perhaps not fully understand.

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[Also see: Jason Grunebaum speaks with Trisha Gupta about translation here]

Colours of funny - a column about satires

[Here's my latest column for Forbes Life, on some favourite literary satires and black comedies]

Humour at its core is accuracy, the novelist Manu Joseph said in a recent interview – when you’re uncompromisingly precise about something, it becomes funny. The best satirists have always known this, but it is also one reason why satire itself can be such an imprecise category in art. There will always be books and films that you can immediately identify as satirical because their tone is unmistakeable: even the most naïve readers and viewers will “get” it. But there are equally cases of understated works where one is not always sure of the line between plain realism and tongue-in-cheek comedy – or if such a line even exists.

Besides, real life usually stays a step ahead of the most acerbic spoofs; even when a satirical work is intended to be over the top, a time may come a few decades or even just a few years later when some of its content appears relatively commonplace. Discussing his 1968 novel Raag Darbari – a modern classic of Hindi literature, about corruption and factionalism in a small village named Shivpalganj – the writer-bureaucrat Shrilal Shukla noted that one of the criticisms directed at the book was that “it didn’t say anything new – it just described what everybody knew already”.

Even if this were true, it would take nothing away from Shukla’s incisive yet good-natured account of life in a place that the narrator likens to the all-encompassing Mahabharata: “What was to be found nowhere else was there, and what was not there could be found nowhere else.” Gillian Wright’s 1992 translation of the novel captures its many droll sentences and throwaway observations (“the theory of reincarnation was invented in the civil courts so that neither plaintiff nor defendant should die regretting that his case had been left unfinished”), of which there are so many, in fact, that it seems a waste to read this book over just one or two sittings. The experience has to be savoured, stretched out.

The story, filtered partly through the gaze of a visiting city boy named Rangnath, gradually reveals the self-deception in nearly every aspect of Shivpalganj’s life. A slothful sub-inspector mulls the great burden of his responsibilities: “There was so much work that all work had come to a standstill.” Doctors and engineers are in short supply, we are told, because “Indians are traditionally poets”. When politicians come to the village to make speeches, we learn that “a speech is really enjoyable only when both sides know that the speaker is talking absolute nonsense” – when some overenthusiastic speakers begin taking themselves seriously, the audience develops indigestion.

Two decades after Raag Darbari was published, another bureaucrat wrote a novel about a young civil servant posted in “a tiny dot” somewhere in the Indian hinterland. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August was rightly hailed as a milestone in modern Indian-English writing, but true satire fans – especially those with high tolerance for scatological content – should set themselves the task of rediscovering his other work. None of them are as consistently funny as August, but they all have passages that measure up to its heights. Consider the opening of his 2010 novel Way to Go where a man named Jamun comes to a police station to report that his 85-year-old father has vanished, the local constable interrogates him, and what ensues is funny not so much in a laugh-out-loud way but in a chuckle-hopelessly-to-yourself-until-you-choke-on-your-own-phlegm way. As bureaucratic procedure takes centre-stage (a recurring theme in Chatterjee and in much Indian satire), time and common sense are suspended. The conversation is shaped by the bizarre order in which the questions are printed on the form; there is no indication that the constable is capable of making a sensate connection between what he is asking and the information that has been supplied to him. Soon Jamun is in a practically comatose state, reeling off sentences mechanically. When he replies “Such was not the case in the present instance” to a question, the constable nods approvingly – at last they are speaking the same language.

In fact, satire often thrives on a premise where two people discuss an urgent matter but fail to get anywhere because, for all their eagerness to understand each other, the gap between their beliefs and cultural reference points is unbridgeable. Aubrey Menen’s extraordinary 1947 novel The Prevalence of Witches contains just such a conversation between a village headman and an English administrator named Catullus. The former is patiently trying to explain how a witch goes about her spiteful work (witches being an accepted fact of life in the imaginary British Indian region of Limbo, populated by people who have no use for modern education or scientific thought), why she must be interrogated in a very precise fashion – by hanging her upside down and beating her – and why she may “choose” to be either alive or dead; the latter is making an honest effort to understand what is being said.

One might think Menen’s intention is to mock easy targets: the superstitions of “primitive” people. But The Prevalence of Witches is equally mindful of the hypocrisies of those who think of themselves as modern, and the often-dubious building blocks of what we call civilisation. Reading it, one understands why Menen’s equally forthright retelling of the Ramayana (“Despite following his moral and political preceptors with devotion, Rama finally managed to recover his kingdom, his wife, and his common sense”) has been one of India’s most high-profile banned books for decades.

****

Humour is most effective, it is often said, when its shafts are pointed upwards: its targets should be those who are more powerful and privileged than the humorist. It is in this context that one must consider the 19th century social reformer Jotiba Phule’s scathing attacks on the caste system and on the Brahmin way of life. Phule’s tract Gulamgiri (Slavery) reveals him as an abrasive, first-strike radical, not above expressing strident views if it made a larger point about social hypocrisy.

The graphic novel A Gardener in the Wasteland, written by Srividya Natarajan and drawn by Aparajita Ninan, tells the story of Phule’s life and work with a panache that the man himself would have approved of, beginning with a passage that likens 1840s Poona to the lawless American Old West: “it was a hellhole of a town. A mob runs it: a Brahman mob”. Decadent, hoodlum-like Brahmins (“Pass the Gangajal, will you,” one says to another, crudely probing his ear with his finger) lord it over the “lower castes”. Subtlety is beside the point here: this is satire that sets out to wound and shock, as a way of getting its back on centuries of oppression. Righteous anger fuelled Phule’s skewering of the creation myth about the four castes being born from Brahma’s mouth, arms, groin and legs (did Brahma menstruate in all four places, was his sarcastic response) and his irreverent deconstructions of the Vishnu avatars.

In any case the line between “cutting” and “outright nasty” can be as thin as the line between those classic categories Horatian and Juvenal satire – what matters more is the execution. It is also worth noting that the best judges of such works are not those with weak stomachs or an easily offended aesthetic sense. When Jonathan Swift wrote his famous essay “A Modest Proposal”, proposing that poor people might sell their infants to serve as food for society’s rich (“a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled”), some readers were outraged because they took the suggestion at face value; others were offended because, though they understood Swift’s intent, they didn’t much care for the tastelessness (pun unintended) of the thought.

Among modern works, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho turned many readers off with the grisliness of its narrative about an attractive young investment banker who is also a psychopath (or deeply delusional), but the book was a startling indictment of a consumerist society, and its narrative form was vital to its effect (it’s another matter that barely 20 years after its publication, parts of it already seem dated!). This is equally true of some of the work of Chuck Palahniuk, notably Fight Club, which uses unsettlingly staccato language and narrative misdirection to comment on such aspects of modern life as hyper-masculinity and the inability of people to connect with one another, or with themselves.

At the same time, mere shocking isn’t enough. Another graphic novel, Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India – written by Gautam Bhatia and drawn by the Rajasthani miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa and Birju Lal Bhopa – has much going for it: it is an unremittingly dark work that satirises many aspects of modern Indian life, notably the class divide and the apathy of politicians towards their constituencies. The many little vignettes include a just-born baby girl being deposited into a movie-hall’s trash can with the family-size popcorn bag, and a state chief minister flying over a drought-ravaged area in an aircraft that has been retrofitted with a swimming pool and a shopping arcade. But the book is often heavy-handed and there is a disconnect between content and form; the drawings are barely given the space they need.

Too much anger can also undermine the effect of a good literary satire. “I sat down to pass moral judgement. I was not wise enough then,” Mahesh Elkunchwar noted several years after writing his play Party, a coruscating satire of Bombay’s intellectual circles. The play is about a party held at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane, the guests including writers and poets at various stages of their career: fat cats made complacent by fame, lean hangers-on desperately aspiring for it, sermonising faux-liberals. Over the evening details of character emerge, epiphanies are experienced and the conversation converges on an absent figure, a poet named Amrit, who is fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic man becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers – their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to contempt – and for a penetrating examination of the artist-human being divide.

The play (which was also the source material for one of our cinema’s most skilfully crafted chamber dramas, Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film) was born out of Elkunchwar’s reflexive response to encounters with famous people who were all talk and little action. It remains a hard-hitting work in some ways, its central theme still very relevant, but one can see why he thought it was facile in its judgements. It might be said that one characteristic of good satire is that rather than taking the easy way out by deriding individuals, it allows us to see the conditions and systems that can make well-intentioned people pathetic or loathsome. And so, to two of my favourite political satires that achieve this.

To say that Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a novelised treatment of the final days of Pakistan’s Zia ul Haq would be to convey little of its skill and comic richness. The dictator’s story – told in the third person – alternates with the voice of a junior officer named Ali Shigri, which, in its irreverence and blithe disregard for the supposed dignity of the Army, resembles that emblematic modern satire, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. But the most engaging sections of Hanif’s book are the ones that deal with Zia’s growing paranoia and childlike dependence on his inner circle. Though placed at the centre of some lowbrow comedy, Zia is also, in a strange way, humanised: there is something poignant about his desperate need for attention and his speculating that he might be ruling a ghost country. It would be a stretch to say that he becomes a sympathetic figure, but there is some ambivalence in our response to him.

If Hanif’s book is political satire with elements of magic realism, the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1936 novel War with the Newts belongs partly to the still-nascent genre of science fiction (Capek coined the term “robot”). This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways. Secret temples for worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches bathe in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work – this in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; and there are references to the political and social realities of the time, such as Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

This funny, far-reaching novel of ideas is a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others and the whimsical, often ludicrous ways in which our civilisation has been organised. Čapek doesn’t single out any system for attack (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for instance), but his book is a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become. It carries within it a view of the very long picture, vindicating the idea that no other genre does clear-sightedness in quite the way that satire does.

[Two earlier Forbes columns: true crime and popular science]

Spring thunder - Lal Singh Dil ki ajeeb dastaan

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

Contained in the 165 pages of Poet of the Revolution – a translation of the memoirs of a celebrated Punjabi poet, one-time Naxalite and a man of many idiosyncrasies – are different perspectives on a single life, so that siphoning out the “real” Lal Singh Dil can seem an exercise in pointlessness. There is, naturally, the main text of the autobiography itself (originally published as Dastaan in 1998, nearly a decade before Dil’s death): a lucid, episodic account of a story that began in a chamar family near the town of Samrala in 1943, its contours defined by social discrimination and injustice. There is also the original Foreword by the editor-publisher Prem Prakash, who describes one of Dil’s letters as brilliantly conveying the feelings of “a militant poet losing his mental balance”, and observes that though editing was done on this manuscript, “the incoherence remains, manifested in a feverish intensity that we wanted to retain”. And there is the elaborate, thoughtful Introduction by the memoir’s translator, the journalist-poet Nirupama Dutt, who was Dil’s long-time friend and shared with him what she describes – channelling the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz – as a “dard ka rishta” (bond of pain).

It is Dutt who really puts Dil’s life and times in context, especially for the reader who does not know much about him beforehand. She supplies a few incidental details, comments on the frequently contradictory aspects of his personality and describes his unfailing gallantry towards her. (This is interestingly supplemented by Amarjit Chandan’s account of the poet’s “platonic attention to women”.) Describing a tranquil moment in Dil’s house, she observes, “No matter how harsh life might have been, there was still room in it for a few green leaves, a flower or two, a child’s smile and some sweetness.” And in a reminder of how ephemeral even the most intense revolutions can be, she presents an affecting view of a man who had once been in a maelstrom, but who went on to lead an unassuming life as the world around him moved on: “The comrades of his revolutionary days were now editors, executives, professors, businessmen or expatriates. The spring thunder was over and everyone had returned to the comfort zone of their class structures.”

Moving past these preludes to the memoir, the first thing one notices is how quiet it is – almost anticlimactic, if you’re expecting a radical, angst-ridden treatise. It begins on a lyrical note, as Dil recalls “following a Brahmin who resembled Tagore” into a bathing area for upper-caste boys (he was thrashed for the transgression), but there is a banality to some of the early episodes. “My childhood was full of dangers”, he says, before recounting incidents that might have happened in any little boy’s life. Reflecting on the violence of his play with his friends, he asks “Were we fighting each other or was it our anger at being children of a lesser God?” There are small moments of frisson (he is picked to play the part of Lord Krishna in a play, until then “someone whispered something” and he was dropped), but on the whole these are homely, not particularly revealing anecdotes.

The story becomes tauter when he begins associating with Leftists and Marxists and discovers that caste prejudice (or something akin to caste prejudice) can exist even in these groups. Or when he describes Russian literature as “waste paper [sold] to Indian buyers”, or reflects on the changes in his own personality over the years. The more dramatic passages concern his participation in an attack on a police station with his associates, and there is much self-presentation in his account of this time: he likens himself to a wounded tiger, describes bantering fearlessly with the police after his arrest. While being tortured, he is conscious that he should cry out “bravely”, not like a coward. “When I heard my first cry, I was not disappointed. It was like a bull’s angry bellow. Anyone would have recognised it as the cry of a warrior.”

Reading all this, one can’t help wondering if some of it is embellished – a question that must inevitably be asked about Dil, given that he once claimed that Chairman Mao had regretfully announced his arrest on Radio Beijing! But perhaps it is a mistake to search too deeply for literal truths in a self-conscious memoir like this. Dil was, after all, best known for his poetry, and it is in the book’s final segment – around 30 pages of his verses – that one gets a more immediate look into his mind. The poems are sparse and it is possible that some of the raw cadences of the original Punjabi have been lost in English translation - but even so one feels the pain when reading, for instance, a piece that begins on a sweet, idyllic note, with young girls picking berries, and eventually transforms into a cry of horror for what their lives will become; a cry of indignation directed at humanity itself.

This is not a book to be read for an in-depth understanding of the Naxal movements or the larger political and social contexts surrounding them (for that, I recommend Rahul Pandita’s excellent Hello Bastar). The view of Naxalbari one finds in Poet of the Revolution is a worm’s eye one, experienced by people who aren’t steeped in far-reaching ideologies – who are, in fact, often confused and wavering in their beliefs – but need to find ways of dealing with personal injustice. One sees a trace of this in Dil’s intriguing decision to convert to Islam, a religion in which he finds greater tolerance of “low-caste” people (but also greater certainty and sense of purpose – “the Muslims considered it a virtue to teach their religion, unlike the Hindus who did not do so”) and which he somewhat bizarrely likens to communism. More than the story of a man immersed in a specific movement or creed, Poet of the Revolution is the story of an itinerant in constant search for himself. A popular song from Dil’s favourite Hindi movie Dil Apna aur Preet Parai went “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” – the words can describe his own life, but this book also lets us see how they can apply to the life of any sensitive, marginalised person, attempting to engage with the world and to understand his place in it.

A "new" Pamuk from 30 years ago: The Silent House

This may be a strange thing to say about a Nobel laureate who is also among the world’s highest-profile writers (the two things don’t always go together), but Orhan Pamuk’s career is still – for the English-language reader, at least – a jigsaw with missing pieces. Pamuk became internationally famous when the English translation of his brilliant My Name is Red, a metaphysical murder mystery set in the Ottoman Empire, was published in 2001 – a year when the Anglophone world had special reason to become interested in literature about the differences between Eastern and Western thought, written by someone from a city situated on the cusp of Europe and Asia. In the decade since, there has been a line of celebrated works including the great tragi-comic novel Snow, the lovely but rambling The Museum of Innocence and the plaintive memoir-travelogue Istanbul, as well as reappraisals of older books such as The White Castle. Yet, as the appearance of The Silent House reminds us, much still remains to be discovered about Pamuk’s early work.

Published in 1983, Sessiz Ev was among his most popular novels in his own country, but it has taken three decades for its first English translation (by the lecturer and diplomat Robert Finn) to reach us. This would have made The Silent House an important event almost independent of its literary merits; happily, no such concessions are needed because this is a powerful, multifaceted book with many pointers to what lay ahead for its author.

Set in a small seaside town not far from Istanbul, it employs the multi-narrator technique that Pamuk would later famously use in My Name is Red, though the structure is more straightforward: voice is not, for instance, given to a corpse (which Pamuk might have chosen to do, since one significant death takes place here), much less to coins or to trees. The story is propelled by the alternating narratives of five principal characters, notably a 90-year-old woman named Fatma and her housekeeper Recep, a middle-aged dwarf, and it centres on a visit by Fatma’s three grandchildren Faruk, Nilgun and Metin; watching the family from the sidelines is a young man named Hasan, who is attracted to Nilgun.

Though the main plot progresses in a neat, chronological way, the five narratives artfully link into each other so that bits of information are withheld from each character in turn (even if it is something as apparently trivial as the proprietorship of an Elvis Presley record), and this creates a web of misinterpretations. Much of the book’s power comes from its gradual revelation of character-defining details: how we come to learn the secrets of the jewellery box that Fatma is so paranoid about, for example, or about her unhappy relationship with her long-deceased husband and her treatment of his illegitimate children. Or how, immediately after an emotionally intense passage involving a visit to a cemetery, we get someone else’s detached, comical perspective on the same thing.

The period depicted here is a very specific, politically charged time in modern Turkish history, which would culminate in the military coup of September 1980. Though these politics are not explicitly addressed, they cast a shadow over the characters, especially the young people – divided between bored kids who fantasise about going to America, revolutionary manqués who denounce money even as they continue to lead relatively privileged lives, and right-wing nationalists who use the threat of violence. And an important subtext here is that the imperatives of youth - the headiness, the hormonal urges - can both work with and clash against ideology; this emerges, most disturbingly, in Hasan’s feelings about Nilgun, whom he idealises but also comes to fear and hate when he discovers she may have Communist leanings. More than once, I was reminded of other conflicted young people in Pamuk’s work, such as the boys in Snow who begin weeping when they suspect they might really be atheists.

The many possible futures of these youngsters are set against the long life of a woman who has barely lived at all: Fatma, who left Istanbul 70 years earlier and eventually retreated into herself – into the womb of her silent house, haunted by the memory of her doctor husband Selahattin who voiced “blasphemous” thoughts and futilely tried to acquaint her with a larger, more modern world. Like Robinson Crusoe (whose story is alluded to here), she lives as if on a private island, with Recep as a faithful Friday who understands her well enough to know that she “frowned to show her disgust, and her face stayed that way out of habit; the face of an old person who had forgotten why she was annoyed but determined never to forget that she was obliged to be”.

The chapters in her voice are the book’s highlights – a narrative tour de force that builds in intensity as it cuts between her own musings and her grandchildren’s attempts to small-talk with her. Here one also sees an early glimpse of Pamuk the stylistic experimenter: there is stream of consciousness and there are traces of the meta-fictional duality that he would later bring to more abstract novels such as The New Life. At one point one of the grandchildren asks “What did it used to be like around here?” and Fatma’s narrative continues: “I’m lost in my own thoughts and sorrows and I don’t hear what you’re saying, so how can I tell you that this used to be one garden after another, what beautiful gardens, where are they now...”. She is both absent and present; hearing and not hearing; participating in the current moment and obsessively reliving her past. Here and elsewhere, The Silent House is – like much of Pamuk’s other work – a self-reflective examination of the nature of storytelling, its possibilities and limitations; an account of the writer’s compulsion to create narratives even as he questions their usefulness. The theme recurs constantly, whether in Faruk’s scuppered attempts to seek order in history (“The passion for listening to stories leads us astray every time, dragging us off to a world of fantasy even as we continue to live in one of flesh and blood”) or in Selahattin’s ultimately tragic conceit that his 48-volume encyclopaedia might bring Western “enlightenment” to the antiquated Eastern world. (“I’ll fill that unbelievable gulf in thought in one fell swoop [...] There are millions of poor Muslims chained in the dungeons of darkness, millions of poor benighted slaves waiting for the light of my book!”)

****

In an essay published in the anthology Other Colours, Pamuk admitted that My Name is Red “was a huge labour, designed as a classic that would speak to the whole country ... I wanted the whole country to read it and each to find himself reflected in it; I wanted to evoke the cruelty of history and the beauty of a world now lost.” Was he less self-conscious when he wrote The Silent House, and is it possible to suggest that this is to its advantage? I think so. This book has thematic complexity, raw skill and verve; it achieves many of the things he sought to do in his more mature work, while also working at the level of an episodic story. Despite the particularity of its setting and its period (Pamuk himself had hardly been out of his city at that point in his life), it is possible to make universal claims for it.

Among other things, it is a book about aging – one that should appeal to different readers in different ways, depending on the life-stage they are in – and one of the most impressive things about it is that the 30-year-old Pamuk so adeptly caught the inner states of three generations of people, all in their own traps. The thing to wait for now is a translation of a book written when he was even younger – his first published novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons – so that our fascinatingly anachronistic process of discovery can continue.

[Did this review for The Hindu]

Thugs, terrorists, survivors: two novels about violence and its echoes

[Did this composite review for The Sunday Guardian]

Discussions about contemporary Indian fiction in English often touch on the lack of truly startling work that aligns stylistic experimentation with political engagement. Meanwhile, those who read more widely point out that these qualities are still to be found in the literatures of other Indian tongues. Such generalisations can be misleading, but two of the most provocative books I have recently come across are just-published English translations of a Hindi and a Malayalam novel. Coincidentally both works are, in different ways, about destruction and its effects – on perpetrators, victims and survivors – and about violence that transcends boundaries.

Geetanjali Shree’s The Empty Space (original Hindi title Khali Jagah; translated by Nivedita Menon) begins with a bomb exploding in a college cafe, reshaping human beings, inanimate objects and victuals. Body parts mix grotesquely with food items from around the country; this is a truly egalitarian act of slaughter. As the narrator puts it, “Ashes, fire, flesh. Fans, gulab-jamun, pav-bhaji, idli, vada, all whirling in the air, like an argument gone astray in the cosmos. You know how cafes are these days. You get everything everywhere now. Idli-vada in the North, pav-bhaji in the East. As for bombs – anywhere, at any time.”

An echo of these words can be found in P Sachidanandan’s The Book of Destruction (original Malayalam title Samharathinthe Pusthakam; translated by Chetana Sachidanandan). Reading a long letter written by a man named Seshadri, whom he briefly knew 45 years earlier, the nameless narrator comes across this formulation: “All those who respect the philosophy of destruction become brothers irrespective of their caste, religion, ideology and profession.” The destructive impulse, in other words, binds the human race.

Despite a shared emphasis on nihilistic violence, the contexts of the two stories are different. The blast in Shree’s novel is something the modern world is all too familiar with: a terrorist attack. But Sachidanandan’s book – written under his pen name Anand – deals with a more ritualistic mode of killing. Seshadri belongs to the ancient cult of Thuggee, which practises murder as “an act of sadhana”, and he is baffled by terrorism, which seems to acknowledge the "purity" of destruction but also deviates from old customs (while thugs respectfully dig graves for their victims, suicide bombers crassly join them in their final resting places, he observes). Perhaps the difference reflects changing times and attitudes. “Does this mean that mankind has finally begun to see clearly and accepted the fundamental and basic role destruction plays in life – to the extent that secrecy has become superfluous?”

Both The Empty Space and The Book of Destruction are formally inventive works with abstract, often elusive, narratives; though their prose is uncomplicated, you need reserves of concentration and patience to read them. The former appears at first to be driven by a conventional plot: an anonymous three-year-old boy (also the book’s narrator) is the sole survivor of the cafe blast and is taken home by a family who lost their 18-year-old son in the tragedy. But the story – characterised by staccato sentences and very short chapters – soon takes on a fragmented, dreamlike quality. Like Oskar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum – stunted at a similar age – this boy refuses to speak to those around him, but his narrative creates for us a world of pain, resentment and a macabre merging of identities. Though the book’s title ostensibly refers to the space in which he was found amidst the post-blast carnage, it also denotes the physical space formerly occupied by someone who no longer exists. The picture of the murdered son on the wall, his phantom voice on the phone answering machine, the unreachable grief of the parents who celebrate their adopted son’s birthday on the birthday of the dead boy...these are among the constituent elements of this harrowing tale.

Compared to this claustrophobia-inducing premise, Anand’s novel has a larger canvas and is more overtly a book of ideas. Its narrator, having just come to terms with Seshadri’s musings on thug practices, finds himself in a series of surreal situations involving the bombing of a hotel discotheque, a mysterious stranger whom he regularly meets during train journeys, and the possibility that the artistic process is itself an act of destruction wherein an artist is colonised by his creations. The prose is breathless and searching; there are hardly any detailed descriptions of people or settings (“The darkening Bengal countryside stretched in all directions…one side of the dirt road bordered the fields and the other, mango orchards” is about as far as it goes) and one surmises that Anand is more interested in inner lives and in theory than in external details. But by the time the story reaches its third act, where a tailor is cannibalised by the people whose personalities have been shaped by the clothes he stitched, it becomes clear that this meditative book is not for all tastes. Though admirable for its directness and ambition, it is also a little laboured and repetitive in its critique of social conformity.

It can be said that The Book of Destruction presents a way of looking at violence as something that is hard-wired into us, the symptom of a large appetite for cruelty and savagery. (Implicit here is the idea that destructiveness doesn’t have to take a form as extreme as murder or terrorism; it can be manifest in the everyday threads of human relationships, and even "respectable" people from all walks of life participate in it.) The Empty Space, on the other hand, gives us the consequences of that destructive impulse, in the form of a family who live in permanent stasis and a young boy who can never be a person in his own right. If literature holds up mirrors to what we inherently are and what we are capable of becoming, these two books, read together, provide a fascinating look at the shadowy places in the human mind.