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BOOKS
Sad
Max
The tacky
absurdity of everyday life
By
Shalini Gupta
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THE
BURNT FOREHEAD OF MAX SAUL
By Indrajit Hazra
Ravi Dayal
Price: Rs 125
Pages: 152 |
In
Indrajit Hazra's strange, first novel, "existence precedes essence".
The Burnt Forehead of Max Saul gives off whiffs of Sarte in its
existential absurdity. Caught in situations where "I realised that
nothing was really worthwhile", Hazra's hero realises that he doesn't
belong. The amorphousness of the city he lives in, and the wraith-like
appearance of the people he encounters, are like the ghosts of Sarte's
play Les Jeux Sont Faits. The line dividing reality and unreality
is paper-thin, with phantasmagoric shapes and figures colliding grotesquely
in a danse macabre.
Looking
for a girl whose identity is left vague, Max Saul encounters instead many
other strangers along the way, who do not amount to "organised crime".
He returns to his wife and home at the end, learning of his father's death
several years earlier, and the fact that the girl never existed. Hazra
is an artiste who recognises his own and his hero's identity - A paragraph
on page 124 reads: "The wood of the door facing me made me nervous.
It was the depressing feeling I had when waiting outside the piano room
to be called in for my lessons. The girl who had her class before would
nearly make the waiting worthwhile. But after going through finger exercises
and sighs and the faked anger of the teacher each time I strained to play
a bar of music, I realised that nothing was really worthwhile." The
image of the grand piano is central to the novel: "the harmony of
the spheres" is shattered by the cacophony of "noises off".
The piano celebrates art and order, while the trafficking at the police
station signifies life and chaos. Saul, caught in the vortex of other
peoples' lives, is like a man thrown off a moving tram. His lack of focus
is in keeping with the faceless homeless crowd of a vast city. Hell, he
realises, is other people.
Place names
and time are left deliberately vague - this could be any city in the West.
Nor are the people easily identifiable. Saul committing a murder, caught
shoplifting, looking for love, being the cynosure of all eyes at a revolutionary
gathering, waiting for the army to be called in, making love to his wife,
realising his father's death and the illusoriness of the woman he has
been seeking is a "stranger". "In a universe deprived of
illusions and of light, man finds himself a stranger." The novel
dispels all illusions of everyday life. Saul's "burnt forehead"
illustrates the tacky nature of human reality. This is a "fantasia
of the unconscious".
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In
India, youth is marked by impetuosity and prevented from getting ahead.
Elsewhere, of course, the young rule the world, says INDIA TODAY Deputy
Editor Swapan Dasgupta in 
