Haunting Bombay isn’t just about mangoes, sandalwood and henna. You also get the wet sari, the dancing around trees, the curse by a blind gypsy*, the magic spell which makes animals howl, the dark menstrual powers and the bodice ripping. And that’s just the first few pages.
Paisa vasool!
Written before The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s story collection Between the Assassinations was launched in the U.S. Tuesday. It’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed, though didn’t entirely love. Assassinations is easily as powerful as Tiger, but more varied in content (obviously) and less evenly written. Where Tiger moves like a spare Elmore Leonard tale, Assassinations luxuriates in a welter of sociographic detail about a city based on hMangalore.
Set in the interregnum between the untimely ends of Indira and Rajiv, Assassinations is about India before Manmohan Singh waved the wand of liberalization. Once again Adiga’s characters rage against indignities of class-conscious India, as thoroughly trapped in casteism, corruption and government dysfunction as perhaps an Egyptian citizen would be today.
Like Tiger, Assassinations is a book more about ideas than delicately-shaded characterization. Adiga’s subjects are extruded in bas-relief, often vehicles for political treatises in the guise of stories. The book pulses with observational absurdism about life in fictional Kittur. The first two stories are flat political parables about the poverty-terrorism connection and the Chai Pani Raj. But the stories run deeper and more complex as you get further in.
I have a soft spot for the hero of the third tale. In ‘Lighthouse Hill,’ a book pirate sticks up for Salman Rushdie during the Valentine’s Day fatwa. It’s typical of Adiga’s perverse sense of humor that our hero Xerox’ principled defense of free expression comes through selling knockoff versions of that Jahilian tale. And what a lovely shout-out to a seminal author:
… someone called the station and said that Xerox was selling copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses… Ramesh slapped him. ‘Don’t you know the book is banned, you son-of-a-bald-woman? You think you are going to start a riot among the Muslims?’ … D’Souza, the booksellers’ lawyer, a small man with black oily hair and a neat moustache, heard what had happened… ‘That fucking untouchable’s son, thinking he’s going to photocopy The Satanic Verses. What balls’…
Xerox turned on his crutches and walked out of the station. They headed for Lighthouse Hill…. The book was banned throughout the Republic of India and it was the only thing that Xerox intended to sell that day.
Adman and blogger Arun Krishnan released his opus The Loudest Firecracker earlier this year and kindly sent me a copy. The novel is a deceptively simple coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in Pune during the rise of Hindutva. On the home front, Siddharth’s art filmmaker father toils away on his masterpiece after storming off a Bollywood set for refusing to compromise his artistic vision. At school, the boy is slowly drawn into a right-wing circle of friends, one who’s enthralled by the local anti-Muslim idealogue and a thuggish companion who’s more muscle than brain. After Siddharth loses his mother young, the wingnuts adopt his cause despite his dawning awareness of the evils of communalism.
Firecracker shares much with Kiran Nagarkar’s most excellent Ravan & Eddie. Both are tales of growing up in urban Maharashtra during the rise of the eject-Muslims parties. While Krishnan’s work is a quick, enjoyable read and meaty in the themes it tackles, it suffers in telling everything through the eyes of a young boy. Krishnan rarely resorts to the third-person voice, and so the prose and perception is simplified by necessity. I found myself yearning for a richer, more sophisticated narrative.
Siddharth is also a bit too black-and-white of a character; as the author’s voice, he’s never tempted by the blind rage of the wingnuts, always moderating the sentiment and injecting a strain of political correctness. When the villains are guffawing over cruelties, Siddharth’s moral clarity is comforting. But at other times, he seems a goody two-shoes like early Clark Kent, more a representation of a moral view than a real, flawed human being.
Drenched in the textures of Pune and Bombay, the book has its moments:
[Jajasaheb Baapre's] voice was so powerful that it lent most of the stature to the man, who was just of an average build and carried a thick black crop of hair resting on top of a gaunt, angular face.
–The Muslims must go back to Pakistan, Jajasaheb thundered… Do you know… that they are allowed to marry four women? And we are not! Not that anybody would want to marry four women. God knows, one is a handful…
My buddy Amit Varma’s new novel My Friend Sancho pursues the market uncovered by the success of Chetan Bhagat, readers who are members of the English-speaking Indian middle class. Numerous others are chasing the same market; Keep Off the Grass seems to have baldly copied the formula, changing IITs to IIMs, while Bhagat himself rehashed it with call centers in his second book.
An Amitav Ghosh reader won’t read Chetan Bhagat; and vice versa. I’d like my work to appeal to both kinds of readers…. writers like Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa are both critically acclaimed as well as wildly popular. There aren’t any writers like that in India writing in English… [FAQ]
The good news is that Sancho, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Asian prize, is a quick, engaging read. It tackles the same market as Bhagat without descending to his writing level. It’s never unintelligent; it touches upon class, communalism, corruption, encounter shootings and the role of the press while staying at its core a love story. Like many post-liberalization books and movies, it brandishes certain totems of New India: broadband, Subway sandwiches, fancy malls, Café Coffee Day.
Unlike much South Asian lit packaged for the West, the references are determinedly Indian. Actors are name-checked with domestic precision, and there’s no mango-mehndi-koyal exoticization. There’s just a straightforward story: Abir the journalist, Muneeza the girl he’s fallen in love with, and the multiple sides of an encounter killing in Bombay.
(Quick impression of the first few pages, not a review.)
Here’s an excerpt from Marsha Mehran’s Rosewater and Soda Bread, an Iranian-Irish novel not nearly as interesting as it could have been. It begins with yet another exotic-female-meets-white-guy-at-her-ethnic-restaurant cliché like The Mistress of Spices, Chocolat, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and so on. An Irish character is stereotyped just as baldly, and the Farsi is relegated to italics.
But Hindi speakers will recognize the vocab, and the folk wisdom around haldi may sound familiar:
Bahar had always had an unpredictable mixture of garm (hot) and sard (cold) coursing through her veins… [Marjan decided] she’d stick to the gormeh sabzi she had made today…
But another garm dish was needed… something like like stuffed eggplants with turmeric-encrusted lamb. A poor man’s saffron to some, turmeric… The spice, when cooked with dark meats, tended to unseen inflammations in the body which, if left untreated, could mark the beginnings of disease…
‘Somehow I can’t imagine Paddy’s offering chelow with their Guinness.’