The narrator of this novel is writer Arjun Kumar. Based in Delhi, he receives an unexpected call from his past. It is his ex-girlfriend, Anasuya, abandoned by him many years ago because he did not have the courage to breach caste lines and face up to his family in order to marry her. She is desperate for help: her husband has disappeared and the local police are refusing to register an FIR. Encouraged by his wife, Arjun catches a flight to the small town where Anasuya lives now.
This brings him to Noma on the U.P.-Bihar border, a mofussil town where the road crossing the border is more run down on one side — the side carrying smuggled goods from Bihar to U.P. It also lands Arjun into matters far beyond his imagining because, as he discovers on his way to the place, Anasuya’s ‘missing’ husband is called Rafique Neel. Arjun realises later in the novel that words like “missing, lost, disappeared” are inappropriate, perhaps even monstrous: “These cold words used to describe objects sound grotesque when used for human beings.” This is just one of the many realisations that dawn upon Arjun and the reader, as the narrative traces, in Amitava Kumar’s words on the cover, “how truth goes missing in our land.”
Facing the ‘system’
Rafique, a contract teacher in a local college, is not the only person who has gone missing. A young woman, Janaki, has also disappeared. She was Rafique’s student and an active member of his theatre group. Inevitably, rumours of ‘love jihad’ start floating, as do insinuations that Arjun has come to town just to meet his ex-girlfriend.
Arjun’s first encounter with the local ‘system’ in the shape of three brutish policemen is not encouraging, and it could have gotten
worse but for his editor in Delhi pulling a few political strings. Suddenly, the ‘system’ — in the shape of the culturally suave and politically savvy ‘circle officer’ — shows its charming face and its appreciation of a ‘great writer’ from the metropolis. Arjun is involved in ceremonies and felicitations, even as another member of the theatre group disappears. Subtle pressure is brought to bear upon him. The truth, despite an FIR being duly lodged, remains elusive. Attempts are made to foist ‘love jihad’ as an explanation on him.
Celebrating the human spirit
The blurbs on the covers of this novel, a competent translation of Chandan Pandey’s bestselling Hindi novel, Vaidhanik Galp , list many of its strengths: it is a gripping political thriller that stares unflinchingly into the eye of hate that has mesmerised so many Indians and still manages to speak the truth. It is a celebration of both the human spirit and literature, and an indictment of so many aspects of society.
But for me, one of its greatest strengths is its intricate portrait of small-town India today. The small taluk or mofussil town has seldom been accessed in Indian English writing after R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi, and Malgudi belongs to its age. That age has passed.
Noma is a town with a ‘Bigger’ Bazaar and traffic jams. It is a town of savvy officers and suave educator-businessmen politicians. Noisy, sanctimonious and crowded, it is also a town with an undercurrent of crime, violence and silence. Its public functions contain ‘leading citizens’ who live in the U.K. or the U.S. but come back every year for some annual events to display their untarnished ‘cultural’ worth. Its leading citizens do not drink in public, or do so, ah well, only to accompany an honoured guest like Arjun. At the same time, it is a town with a teacher who assigns Mayakovsky to his students, a theatre group that reads Jon Fosse’s TheGirl on the Sofa .
Dipped in irony
These contradictions of the mofussil town usually stay un-narrated in metropolitan Anglophone fiction and, when narrated, stay unremarked by global ‘postcolonial’ criticism. Not only are these powerfully etched in this Hindi novel, but they are also used to good effect. For instance, when Arjun encounters some notes towards a proposed play in the papers of the missing Rafique and deciphers the title of the play as Bachane Wala Hai Bhagwan (‘The One Who Saves is God’), he is thoroughly disappointed.
He had expected, he goes on to say, plays like Melancholia , The Girl on the Sofa , Charandas Chor , but Bachane Wala Hai Bhagwan ? The irony of this remark, which exposes the limitations of even an empathetic metropolitan observer like Arjun, needs no further commentary.
Towards the end, Arjun, through an honourable Sikh policeman, now suspended, gets an idea of the truth behind the disappearances — though that, of course, need not imply justice or accountability. The reader is left to choose.
I strongly urge everyone to buy this novel which, despite a typesetting error on page 135 (subsequently removed, I am informed), is worth every naya paisa.
Legal Fiction; Chandan Pandey, trs Bharatbhooshan Tiwari, Harper Perennial India, ₹299
The writer is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.
COMMents
SHARE