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BOOKS
August
Returns
The author
of English, August comes out with an equally enchanting sequel
that blasts the vagaries of the welfare state
By
S. Prasannarajan
The
last time we saw him, Agastya Sen was reading Marcus Aurelius in a train
moving out of Madna: "Today I have got myself out of all my perplexities;
or rather, I have got the perplexities out of myself-for they were not
without, but within; they lay in my outlook." Have you really, Mr
Sen, you liar? More than 10 years on, here you are, August redux, English
as usual, floating, dope-induced, in a million perplexities, as chronicler
and co-artist of a freak show called the welfare state. Comeback kid,
the lesser lord of situations, the prince of power comedy, the serial
charmer of Indian fiction ... ah! you like it here, here in this wild,
weird world inhabited by mutants and monsters, perverts and poseurs, all
of them "milking dry the boobs of the welfare state", and you,
once an accidental intruder, are the wicked poet of perplexities, and
your smirking sanity still works, despite the dope, despite the plague,
despite bad sex, despite the semi-cult status of the prequel, English,
August.
Welcome to
All Over Again August.
And he hasn't
come a long way. The decade-long absence from the pages has only added
new adjectives to his existence, new lines to his wit; it's enlarged the
text as well as the context. The Mammaries of the Welfare State (Viking;
Rs 395; pages 432), Upamanyu Chatterjee's new novel, the sequel to English,
August, is a searing, savage, high-velocity passage through the bureaucratic
India, the welfare state, the welfare of which is managed by a political
dynasty, and serviced by a sovereign state-within-the-state of civil servants.
Agastya,
in spite of being one of them, is the outsider whose lightness of attitude
is a cultivated mockery of the heaviness of his own conscience: "But
I like it here! And quit and go where? The more years one spends in the
civil service, the more competent one becomes to remain in it." The
IAS trainee in English, August, raw and romantic, has been matured in
the steel frame. He is here to stay, not merely as the myth-slayer of
the welfare state or as the first citizen of Madna, not a faraway province
from Malgudi or Macondo in the geography of fiction, but also as an enduring
enchanter in the Indian imagination in English.
"Agastya's
story is unfinished," says Chatterjee, sipping Darjeeling tea in
the sixth-floor bar of the India Habitat Centre, Delhi. Please note: Chatterjee
doesn't drink, he doesn't take dope. What he has in common with Agastya
is the profession-and the wit, that Joycean sense of the joke: "There
is nothing that he holds sacred, except the right to laugh." There
is nothing sacred in the welfare state either, except the right to rip
off, and Chatterjee's portrayal of it makes The Mammaries a book
of laughter and disgust, a four-letter rejoinder to the grotesquery of
governance.
"I'm
fed up," says the novelist, whose daytime job is director, education,
Ministry of Human Resources Development. Agastya would have used another,
more suitable f-word, in tune with the sacred pursuit of power as practised
in the welfare state. Or, to take a stark specimen from the novel, as
practised by a senior sensualist of the civil service, Bhupen Raghupati.
When he is not administrating, he is having oral sex with the massage
boy in his puja room: "Naked, spanking his thigh with the buff envelope,
liking the sound, arms flung around his masseur's shoulders, Raghupati
strutted off to the adjoining puja room. Ten-by-six, windowless, red night
light, shivlings and Ganeshas all over the place, flowers from his front
lawn, mattresses on the floor, freezing air-conditioning, Mutesh's whine
from the tape recorder. 'Here, before you start, just shave my armpits
and my crotch.'" Or, he, the permanently priapic servant of the state,
is imagining a rejoinder to one of the victims of his sensualism: "My
Magnificent Miss Natesan, I was intensively moved that evening last month
at the sight-or should I say vision?-of a greyish-brown shadow in the
crevice of your green-georgetted hips. I went mad trying to figure out
what it could be. As you know, I do not put on my spectacles in front
of ladies..." Oh, there are many of them, easily identifiable, one-dimensional
beneficiaries of welfare mammaries.
The Message
is Darkly Political: Like Rajani Suroor, a well-connected parasite
of the welfare state, whose theatre troupe, aptly called Vyatha, handsomely
funded by the Ministry of Culture, Heritage and Education, is for the
"promotion and diffusion of demotic and indigenous drama and other
such forms of self-expression". So Karam Chand, an employee of the
welfare state who has gouged out the eye of a blind girl, is versified
thus in the imagination of Vyatha: "... he slithered away to buy
a caste certificate from a bird in the tehsildar's office. And from there,
with strife in his heart, he moved on elsewhere, to a new life."
Certainly, his art will take him closer to martyrdom, and you're unlikely
to miss him if you've ever been to one of those protest performances outside
Mandi House in Delhi, though Delhi is just the capital-Lutyens' city-in
the novel, as the city of Bhayankar can be nothing but Mumbai. And Madna,
of course, is the other action centre of this novel in which the comic
is only the method, the message is darkly political.
The politicians
and civil servants and other members of the welfare establishment who
colonise Chatterjee's pages are not the parodies of the real. So prime
minister Bhuvan Aflatoon, the currently ruling member of the Aflatoon
dynasty, politicians like Bhanwar Virbhim and his trigger-happy son Makhmal
Bagai, are the exaggerated versions of the existing-here, in our own welfare
state. So are the management of the plague in Madna and the file-eating
monkeys and sandalwood-smuggling, elusive-to-the-state bandit of the welfare
state. The miniature Madna story of English, August has grown into an
expanded testament of dissent, switching from the Orwellian to the Kafkaesque
without any narrational warning-what with welfare programmes like boobz
(Budget Organisation on Base Zero) and administrative buildings-tribunals
without K?-with names like tfin (The Future Is Now). Though Chatterjee
says it's more Swift-like, even if Agastya is not exactly Gulliver. This
"hazaar f****d" existentialist has nothing to fall back on except
the "middle-aged bomb" of a girlfriend for whom sex is unilateral
and is followed by cross-legged meditation-and dope and an upperclass
sense of humour.
"Is
Agastya Chatterjee in disguise?"
"He's
an oddball, and he's close enough to be comfortable with."
"Then
you must be an outsider in Shastri Bhavan."
May be different,
if the difference can be found in: "I read Joyce. I jog in Lodhi
Garden. I read French. I never learned Bengali but I religiously read
Bengali ... and I've started learning Sanskrit."
"Not
yet disillusioned?"
Looks like
he is, otherwise how can he admit with such candour that "everything
in this novel is based on the real, characters as well as situations"?
Resemblances are not coincidental here, nothing unintentional. And for
Indian fiction, this disillusion is richly rewarding. Even in his much
misunderstood second novel, The Last Burden, (everyone wanted another
August book, not another shock, like the shock created by Kazuo Ishiguro
when he came out with The Unconsoled after The Remains of the Day.)
Now wait
for Agastya's third coming, may be as his last appearance. "Before
that I want to write a novel of pornography."
Haven't
you already written one, Mr Sen, sorry, Mr Chatterjee?
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