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BOOKS
Midnight's Grandchild
Here is a first novel that
is a master performance in memorial service
By
S. Prasannarajan
The neo-Naipaulian spring in Indian novel was
a hoax, despite the breathless superlatives from discover-India-anew panegyrists
in New York and London. The dry documentation of aspiring romantics, spartan
poetry of New-Age existentialists, undergraduate sociology of apprentice
conscience keepers-well, it's such a small, beautiful, comprehensible
universe where the idea is always without an adjective, the passage is
always without a detour and the words are as poignant as they are in Lonely
Planet. Where the world you inhabit is an idyll. This beauty has not saved
the world, no, dear old Dostoevsky, it has only saved the time of the
jacket-copy writer.
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THE LAST JET-ENGINE
LAUGH
By Ruchir Joshi
HarperCollins
Pages: 394
Price: Rs 395
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That's why this jet-engine intrusion is such
a break-such a blast, really. Ruchir Joshi as a time-traveller between
generations and continents, between history and memory, between the laughter
of yesterday and the sorrow of tomorrow, is a first novelist who has the
words and means to defy and define the world he has inherited. No matter
where he is, in a cockpit in the sky or behind a viewfinder on earth,
in the mind of the dead or in the dream of the living, Joshi succeeds
in making sense-sometimes intentionally nonsense-of one hundred years
of attitude. For the traveller in time, it's no small success, for, in
the narrational space of this novel, time would "reinvent itself,
reappear like some clown Dracula, rise out of its coffin with bits of
dhokla, shrikhand and human flesh hanging from its fangs. The blood of
vampired empires smearing its cheeks, burping nations and lovers, it would
come out again, time, with the hunger for more polishing its eyes into
a deadly shine".
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JOSHI: Rushdie's true legatee
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Time and space, and they are never abstract in
this novel, certainly not for the man who occupies centrestage in Joshi's
imagination-Paresh, a photographer whose best pictures will remain undeveloped
in the dark room of memory. Though the story is set in India 2030, it's
not some kind of postmodern Orwell in Indian fancy dress; rather, Apocalypse
Tomorrow is the logical conclusion of an evolutionary tale, stretching
from a romance in the Ahmedabad of British India to another deadly romance
high above the superpower India at war. Paresh, as son and father, as
artist and witness, semaphores this long march of time from the observatory
of remembrance. Though, "everything is, somewhere, still ordinary,
still recognisable. Everything has a parent of memory and there is not
too much mental orphaning..."
Though he himself is an orphan of history, which
is immediate and intimate in Joshi's novel-or Paresh's world. And it's
as recognisable as the red circle above the solar plexus of his father.
An imprint of love and pain he acquired the day he met Paresh's mother
in a demonstration against the Raj. Or, history as invisible-nevertheless
real-as the mission of his daughter, Para, a fighter pilot in the service
of an India that is at war with the Pakistan-Saudi Arabia alliance: "An
airplane's own two engines stalking it, sucking out the air from any language
you've put together to explain your life to yourself. F**k language, f**k
explanations that depend on language, f**k all explanations, what do you
want to do before you go? The Orbituary doesn't matter..." Oh yes,
it does matter, and language is a whirling arena in Joshi's text, and
it's where he, or Paresh, plays out the script of existence, and with
what brio.
The script makes Joshi the legitimate midnight
grandchild of India Imagined in English. For, his imagination aspires
to translate every sign and sound and sigh of his inheritance in a language
of exaggeration and astonishment. It is memorial service as celebration.
Paresh is a child, the only child, born out of innocence and idealism.
And he will always be a refugee from aloneness, the chronicler of a world
he has never come to terms with. And a few set pieces, which has no equals
in the pages of Joshi's contemporaries, alone make that world a superpower
in post-Rushdie Indian novel. Like the first meeting of Paresh's parents
in a bloody, anti-Raj demonstration. Like Paresh's father's first arrival
in Calcutta to a dead-fish welcome. Like Subhas Chandra Bose's last, senile
days in the gulag. Like Para's virtual war wizardry when she is a child.
Like the fearsome water-tank tableau in a wintry Delhi night. Like Para
preparing her own "orbituary" in the final, supersonic assault...
And Joshi refuses to leave out anything from
his heritage: from the Raj to the Bangladesh war to the Naxal movement
to the Emergency (the "Ma Thug" tyranny and the son who "tried
to sterilise the nation's soul") to the Bhopal gas tragedy to Ayodhya
to the age of PV (not Narasimha Rao but guess who). He remembers by punning
and parodying, by miming the farce and follies of a merciless history,
often with a kind of punkish bravado. The only thing archaic about this
master performer is his left-liberal angst. That apart, the performance
of Ruchir Joshi is the brand new experience after Rushdie: a megashow,
almost Russian in size and Indian in soul, staged on the quaking province
of memory.
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E
X C E R P T
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A fumbling of four gloves, Kalidas behind
(Subhas Chandra) Bose, no time to be embarrassed, his arms around
the old man, holding him up with the side of his arms while the
gloves did what they needed to do. Kalidas felt the old man's thin
shoulder jamming into his chest, realised that the old man needed
to urinate immediately and that he couldn't, not without help. His
arms around Bose, Kalidas realised that he was holding the old man's
shrivelled little penis on the tips of his gloved fingers. Bose's
hands clutched Kalidas's arms for support.
'These-' Kalidas could feel the old man's
body struggling to eject the urine.
'Those I called, these...' Bose's voice
subsided into a sigh.
As the urine finally began to spurt out
Bose leaned back into Kalidas, his voice now orating.
'Those that I called, these ghosts, I
cannot now get rid of...'
Bose's penis jetted out the urine and
it froze before it reached the ground, falling on the snow in small
curved icicles, making a sound like branches cracking. The final
curve was a long one and it froze in an arc which began between
Kalidas's fingers and ended in the snow about three feet away.
Kalidas stared in amazement at the fragile
bridge of frozen urine. It sparkled in the sunlight like a glassblower's
mistake, a shard from a rainbow, stopping Kalidas from realising
for a few moments that he was propping up a dead man.
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